Lots of people talk about bad support experiences so i wanted to post about two experiences i had last week
One of our clients has four servers, two HPs and two “other brand” servers (names concealed to protect the guilty!). The HPs are the newest that we installed and the others we inherited when we took on the contract
If we have any hardware issues we deal with HP directly. If there are issues with the other servers we have a contract in place with another company (who also happen to be a distributor of these servers) as we can’t get support directly from the vendor (as far as i am aware!)
Late on wednesday night i got an email from one of the HPs letting me know it was having a problem with one of the disks. That particular disk is part of a RAID 5 array so i knew there was no “immediate” emergency but had to deal with it pretty quickly
So i went to the office on Thursday morning and logged a call with the HP support desk just before 9 am. At the same time i spotted a problem with one of the “other” servers so logged a call for that as well. I had a meeting scheduled to see the client anyway so left shortly after for a 10.30 meeting.
I got a call back from HP on-route to let me know that a new hard disk would be on site by 11am and “would i like an engineer as well?”
I declined an engineer as it was something i was happy to do since i was going to be there
At 10.50 I got a call to say there had be a slight delay and the drive would be there by 11.30 and “we are really really sorry for the delay”
The drive arrived at 11.20 so it promptly went into the server so it could start rebuilding on the new drive.
By about 13:30-14:00-ish i checked the status and it had finished the re-build and was working happily….it was then i realised that no-one had been in touch about the other server
When i did check the status i was told “we’re trying to source the part”
So in short.
HP called me back to let me know what was happening, shipped a drive immediately, called to apologise profusely for it being twenty minutes late and the whole thing had rebuilt by lunch time……in this time i hadn’t even had a call back to give me a status update from the “other” support company,
I’m intentially not mentioning the guiltly parties here as i’d like to give some kudos to HP for a job well done!
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Let us know how the non-HP company performed once they have finished the job Andy! If I get no satisfaction from the vendor after approaching them directly, I tend to “name and shame” in these cases – it helps alert others to shabby experiences so they can make their own mind up whether to deal with the offending companies or not.
Nothing but good experiences with HP here. With smaller clients, I have – at times – found it difficult to justify HP over other vendors… especially when the warranty of a HP looks and feels so much like Dell’s warranty (for instance).
Hi Rich
As i said in the post i wanted to highlight the good support we received but your right naming and shaming normally is the order of the day!
I’ll let you know who the bad guys were when i next speak to you
Thanks for the comment Nick
Good to hear this isn’t just a one off. I’ve had good experiences with HP before but this is the first time with a “major server issue”