3PAR OS Upgrade + Black site + 3PAR-SPS team refusal to do analyze

[mkomac]

Dear all,

I have really interesting situation regarding 3PAR OS upgrade,

I have goverment customer have couple of 3PAR 7x00, 8x00 (with active support) here in Slovenia, and my company is a HPE Gold Partner, with qualified and certified engineers (2x Master ASE) is supporting them.

Customer have their 3PARs on Black sites, and they dont allow any external connections of 3PAR to HPE (or any external notebook, workstation to be connected on their network for security reasons).

So they have bought upgrade for 3PARs, and we need now to do firmware upgrade before adding of additional enclosures on 3PAR located in prilmary location.

By HPE procedure (I think it is started from end 2013, begining of 2014, before that HPE local engineers have done that instead of them) I have contacted 3PAR-SPS team and asked them to do analyze of requirements for fw upgrade and also asked for needed procedures before, during and after upgrade. (till now I have done a losts of that upgrades alone, when I have been working at HPE as a CE / MCHS, and with 3PAR-SPS team using remote room, from 2014 till now).

So I have quite expirience but I want to be on safe side (and by the book), as I know that some versions of FW can cause strange problems, if some procedure / script is not implemented before or after fw upgrade. So I dont want to be in situation to lose any customer data on that 3PARs, because I did not have info during what it was needed to be done.

Response from 3PAR-SPS team was:

»Please be informed that all HP 3PAR arrays with Active Software Support Contract are entitled to HP remote support performing remote upgrade or via virtual room only .

it is against the HPE policy to share the upgrade document or details plan /scripts outside HPE, Hence let us know if we can schedule the remote upgrade .« ??????

So that sentence is blowing my mind as it is nonsence. At first during upgrade via remote virtual room I can see all what it is typing, so that part of not sharing detail plan / sciprts is nosence!?

So by my knowledge, as HPE partner, we are justified to receive needed procedures to be able to do our job on site in case of Black site.

We cannot provide them virtual room connection as that is against customer security policy.

We can give them maybe a live video feed on site where we can share on that way screen, in that case we can be hands and eyes on field.

I have also checked with some of my old colleagues from HPE, and some HPE instructors, and all of them are telling me that it is not true that statement from 3PAR-SPS team and that HPE partner needs to have all needed info before upgrade of 3PAR OS on black site (or any other site). So question is who to belive ? Is there was some change in procedure ?

Any similar expirience or any advice how to proceed with this situation. 

Tnx!

[Torsten.]

AFAIK the team will still share all needed instructions to authorized (!) onsite support folks in case of "dark sites".

Question is, who is "authorized" enough?

You should talk to your responsilble account manager or whatever the responsible HPE person is called.

[Cali]

»Please be informed that all HP 3PAR arrays with Active Software Support Contract are entitled to HP remote support performing remote upgrade or via virtual room only .»

First, tell them, HP is no longer responsible for 3PARs.

(Welcome to HPE)

This shows, that this is a Dino team that is totally disconnected from the real world.

Even if Customer use InfoSight they ask about Firmware and Configuration.

Even if Customer enable SP Remote Support, Support and SPS don't use it.

If you need the SPS you have to go 3 Stages: Pre-Planing, Shedule and SE.

Every Customer say that the first 2 are very bad but at the end the SE are gold.

You hang at the 1st, good luck.