Increased Support Costs

[Scott Smith_7]

Has anyone experienced a tremendos increase in support costs since the HP merger. I just recived a support renewal this week with a totally different picing scheme than we had with Lefthand. We were never notified of the change and no one that I have talked with at HP seems to have any answers. There used to be Basic and Premium support. Now I have a spreadsheet with 50 line items equating to a 4 fold increase. Anyone else experienced this? Not to mention the hold times for support are no less than 40 min...

[teledata]

It is a bit confusing. In particular because it was acquired and not always a native HP product.

In essence whenever you are buying support for the P4000 SAN you are really buying 3 things:

1) Hardware Support

2) Software Technical Support

3) Software Update Service

I think in some cases there are options to buy some of these things a la carte, but I think in the case for MOST of the P4000 series they have to be purchased together.

I agree that HP could make customers (and resellers/distributors) lives easier if they consolidated some of these SKUs together. Are you really likely to buy Support without Software Updates?

[Scott Smith_7]

For companies like ours who were LeftHand customers before the merger have been budgeting based on LeftHand support SLAs and costs. There were 2 levels, Basic and Premium and they were both modestly priced. Now under HP, my renewal quote had 51 line items at 5 times the cost for comparable SLA. Its seems that no one I talk to at HP knows what the LeftHand support SLAs were and their associated costs. To me what would be reasonable is a HP support SLA that provides the same service at close to the same price.

[Damon Rapp]

I have had the same problem plus more.

It took me over a year to get my existing support contracts moved over to HP (I have 2 years left on them). On my new boxes, I have been paying the higher support costs for having it broken out into hardware, software and updates. Normally on my equipment, I pay for at least 3 years of support up front but can only afford to do a year at a time under the new system. Unfortunately while I have paid for the update support every year, they can't seem to enable it in my account, so I get no updates and no one seems to be able to fix it.

Since HP tooks Lefthand over, I have regretted not going Equalogic. I love how the Lefthand stuff works but the support side is a complete nightmare at this point.

[Scott Smith_7]

Yes, I too liked the functionality, (apart from RAID controller firmware bug on SATA nodes) licensing and support costs. Unfortunately, support costs are now through the roof and actual support is horrible right now compared to pre-merger. We had a down system back in May and waited on hold for over an hour before we could talk to anyone! Subsequent calls have been hold times of at least 40 minutes. We have 8 nodes, but due to these unfortunate developments I am meeting with another vendor this afternoon. I wish things were different.