Is there another way of saying you don't care?

I am sure we have all had horrible things go wrong and then we look forward to an apology of sorts from the vendor.  I have been known to get a bit annoyed when something goes pear shaped but at least its good to get some sort of "I'm sorry, I will do a full investigation...etc.. etc.."

I did something bad once on a Sun 15k where I managed to pull a system board and a bolt inside sort of broke.. It was stupid and I learnt never talk to anyone when doing something very serious.

So we all make mistakes and have to own up to it...... Well that seems to exclude dealing with IBM.  This goes back to at least 1992.  I tend to think that every IBM'er has a random saying flip card dispenser on their desk.  When you say something important, a seemingly stupid response is given.  This goes for products such as SNA, AIX, Tivoli and DS4800's all of which I know a lot about. 

On Monday, a DS4800 went down in a screaming heap thanks to firmware/software/hardware/humanware.  Something like 30 servers and 40 TB were affected and its amazing how important dev and/or pre prod servers are.   So I put in a call and it took me 30 minutes to get some sort of action taken on it and I was to receive a call back within 30 minutes.  Thats still not happened but the local IBM service guy jumped onto the case which is terrific.  It seemed to have been a known issue so we were back up running after about 5 hours. 

I had a meeting with some service delivery manager this afternoon and I feel worse than I did on Monday.  Basically, have a coffee and give me a call if you ever feel like it.  No reason why the DS4800 went down and why it took 30 minutes to ineffectively raise a Sev 1 call with IBM.  If it was a known issue, then why not tell me so I could avoid a major outage.  To compound this, the DS4800 had its firmware upgraded 6 weeks ago and it has completely reset itself 12 times since then.  Again, IBM did nothing other than say they needed to get a wiring diagram??????  I was waiting for the typical statement of upgrade the firmware to stop it resetting but I have the latest.  This time they told me to downrev the latest firmware.  I suggested that controller A might be at fault due to the constant resets but they refused to accept that even though it was very obvious in the logs.  Tonight they are going to replace the controller.  I have had three complete outages during business hours and still nothing concrete to say what the issue is.

Mind you if we had a DS8000 series, then I might have felt better or so he suggested.  I had the distinct feeling that he was there to not say IBM made a mistake/error and it was somehow my fault for not buying a bigger box.  I once put in a complaint about a SNA problem and I was told I was the only person in the world with this issue and it must have been something I did.  That took two years to fix. 

HDS do a good job of making you feel better when something goes wrong and I have had a couple of issues that no one thought could happen.  So much for buying another DS4800.  I wonder if EMC makes medium sized storage as they have more chance of selling me something than IBM ever will and that includes SVC.  IBM could not even give me another array.  Yes, I am angry and this is not unusual.

Stephen