I know I'm a bit late in the thread but I was thinking Saturday night ( as I was battling a failing LRC and PCI FC interface on a pair of our clustered F740s ) what a s'load of RMA we've had for NetApp.
I've got a 2 years history with NetApps starting with F230's and progressing through the F520's and F740's. I have a large folder for RMA's and our 6 NetApps have had more RMA's than our Unix and NT servers combined.....( that's 65 servers )
Here's a glimpse:
6 Quad Fast Ethernet card replacements 1 LCD replacement ( filer won't boot without it ) 3 Motherboards ( F500's ) 4 9GB SCSI disks ( understandable ) 6 9GB FC disks ( within the first 2 months? ) 1 complete F520 chassis/MB/RAM/Cache 4 Fibre Channel adapters ( 2 were for replacing onboards ) 3 LRC 2 Fan assemblies 1 Cache 2 Shelf environmental units. 1 Tandem board 4 Filer power supplies ( F520's and F740's )
Questions:
1) Are we cursed? Yes, we have clean power, a climate controlled environment, no malicious admins.
2) Has anyone else seen this amount of RMA's? Yes, Sonic was a pain in the but but our Sales guy cleaned everything up.
3) Is anyone else bothered by the fact that the F500 series has pretty much been end of lifed? Have you tried buying replacement disks or parts for one? Renewed your Service contract recently? I was more than mildly surprised to find I can't but new disks for my F520's and can't buy support past October of this year. They're 2 years old...
Granted some of this can be explained by NetApp throwing HW at issues. As an example, our most recent LRC problem was solved with NetApp sending us 2 FC PCI cards, cables, LRC, cable, and disks. Of course the tech goofed on overnighting it so they had to make 'special' provisions to get it here overnight...
Tim
G D Geen wrote:
At one point I was getting many of these phone calls. So much so, that I was keeping explicit logs of all the RMA's. To make matters worse, there are several groups within my company that use NetApp so I would often get phone calls for RMAs that are issued to another group -- point being tracking my own stuff was not enough. At this point I started to use the NOW web page to figure this stuff out. I have not received a phone call in quite some time now though I am still getting the customer surveys. -gdg
Jim Harm wrote:
Has anyone else gotten just a little bit miffed at the frequency, speed, and pointlessness of the calls about NetApp RMAs?
I get called in less than a week. shipped on 1-31, received on 2-1, reminder(actually more of a where is it, ya dead beat?) call on 2-2!, it is scheduled to be installed today and I don't want the broken box in office; it gets shipped when I have time.
sometimes I'll get a call with a list of RMAs from the last 6 months and they expect me to respond with the whereabouts of every RMA when the fact is they have all been shipped back to NetApp.
I have to schedule work to replace parts and it takes sometimes a week or more(usually less) and I don't want to have to deal with some extra middle man company to try to justify what I am doing with the RMA. And I feel guilty if I shine them on.
}}}===============>> LLNL James E. Harm (Jim); jharm@llnl.gov (925) 422-4018 Page: 423-7705x57152
--
G D Geen mailto:geen@ti.com Texas Instruments Phone : (972)480.7896 System Administrator FAX : (972)480.7676
Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans. -J. Lennon
-- Tim McDonough Agouron Pharmaceuticals