topic Re: XP users - Service experiences in Disk Enclosures

XP users - Service experiences

Dave Wherry — Fri, 14 Sep 2001 15:16:39 GMT

Hello XP users. I'm curious to hear about any experiences you may have had with service on your arrays. Not necessarily with installations or upgrades. I'm talking about a major failure with the array where it is down, or in bad shape severely affecting your operations. How did HP respond?

Thanks,
Dave

Re: XP users - Service experiences

Paul R. Dittrich — Mon, 17 Sep 2001 01:03:36 GMT

The one and only time our XP was "down" was the time a tech showed up to replace a drive and very quickly (in an "oh-no second") pulled the WRONG disk, crashing the whole mess and costing us almost a full day to recover.

How did HP react? you ask.

With shame, honesty and great speed. Extra technical resources were brought in immediately to help us recover, to do a root cause analysis, to explain to our senior mgmt. and to develop a better process to hopefully ensure that no one else will experience that.
The regional tech mgrs. were brought in and the national ones via phone conference.

Other than the fact that the original screwup should never have been able to happen, I cannot fault HP's reaction to the problem.

And the same CE still does much of our work.

HTH,
Paul

Re: XP users - Service experiences

Unix Systems Admin — Mon, 17 Sep 2001 06:52:44 GMT

We have had quite a bit of fun with our XP 256 arrays. A number of times an ioscan showed that the disks were no longer there. As we run a number of large CRM systems here we found that this loss of service was causing real pain.

This occurred for about 3 months off and on - obviously with HP support around - and many patches etc. were installed on HPUX but the problem was never resolved and it appeared to vanish. I did notice a patch a number of weeks ago, however, which seemed to resolve a bug where fibre-attached disks were producing the same NO_HW problem. ;-)

This was a very trying time for our relationship with HP. We needed/wanted experts on-site but this was refused; all work had to go through the States. I understand a new XP centre has opened in Germany, however.

Things are quiet now and I'm hoping we never see this problem again. I need my sleep!