You may recall that back in June I wrote:

We're having a problem renewing maintenance cover on our F810. I wonder whether anyone else has had a similar experience.

It's being done through a secondary supplier who had better remain nameless for the moment (just in case it's their fault rather than NetApp's...). We originally brought 3 years of cover:

"Next Business Day Parts Delivery" for failed disks (which has
   worked fine, incidentally);

"4 hours onsite service" for the base unit and disk shelf.

Now we are being told that we can't have such a combination: it has to be all NBD Parts or all 4hrs Onsite. This doesn't make any sense to us. Disk failures are non-critical, and only the ... (ahem) very differently abled ... need someone to come and swap a disk for them! OTOH, base unit & shelf failures would be critical for us.

Please tell me that NetApp haven't _really_ made it this difficult to buy the obviously appropriate combination of cover!

which got a number of helpful responses, and I then wrote:

Stephen C Woods scw@seas.ucla.edu wrote

...

Yes they have. We got nailed whwn we renewed our support last November. OUCH!

Michael A Schipp mschipp@asi.com.au wrote:

...

Stephen is correct, Netapp did change it! However if you get you supplier to talk to Netapp they should be able to request a PRV from Netapp to renew the maintenance (Should is up to Netapp to approve - so may or may not happen).

Thanks for this information, and I'll certainly try and get that last suggestion acted on by our supplier.

Well, our secondary suppliers (Majenta Solutions, for the record, and they are totally blameless in all this as far as I can see) did finally manage to get us the following deal

4 hour onsite cover for the base filer Next Busness Day parts delivery for the shelf and disks

(it proved impossible to distinguish the shelf from the disks) for about the mean of the all-4hr and all-NBD quotes. So we went for that.

Or so we thought... We have had two disk failures since then [*] and on each occasion NetApp shipped a replacement disc to the 4-hour schedule. So they must think that is what we paid for. I suppose it ought to be flattering that NetApp think we require a replacement disk that fast, but actually it's a pain in the posterior, as we aren't set up to accept deliveries 7x24.

I suppose next year we'll say To Hell With It, and go for NBD for everything.

[*] an unusually high rate in a 14-disc system, on past experience: one of them was just after a reboot upgrading ONTAP, the other a few hours after a scheduled outage of our Uninterruptible Power Supply ... no, don't ask, you don't want to know :-(