Recently in Editorial Category

I just finished Jonathan's latest blog with great interest. The blog is titled "Free Grows Revenue - Just Ask Your Carrier". What I really picked up on was Jonathan's willingness to share his home phone number with one of his customers. I have never dealt with a software/hardware vendor, over the last 20 years, which has provided a higher level of support than Sun Microsystems.

The following stories provide support for this statement:

Several years ago, we were having trouble with our 3510 storage arrays. We were down for about 90 hours. During the whole process, we had two Sun engineers that would take turns being on-site and would trade-off every 24 hours. During this whole event there was a full team of experts on a conference call. Several days prior to the event occurring, we had sent a note off to Scott McNealy CEO requesting escalation because of some anomalies we were seeing. We received a note back from him within two hours assuring us that we would be taken care of. We were! After the event had passed and a fix was in place, a quality assurance engineer and manufacturing engineer were sent on-site to see if they could reproduce the issue. They could. They went back, reproduced the issue in the lab, wrote a fix and sent us the update. We have had no issues with the 3510's since then.

More recently we were having issues with Communication Express a web-based e-mail client. Support had been unable to help us resolve the issues we were seeing. Travis, WOU assistant IT director, sent a note to Jonathan, President and COO, with some background information and a request for help. Within two hours Travis received a note back from Jonathan affirming that he would get help for us. Within several days Travis received calls from our regional support manager and the product line manager. Two days after the product line manager called, support called with a fix for the issue we were having. Thanks!

System downtimes are unavoidable. After all, a computer system is comprised of a multitude of electrical parts that can fail. The risk of failure and the recovery time from failure could be reduced significantly if the following recommendations were put in place.

1. Increase support contract from 16x6 to 24x7. If 24x7 is overly costly, then have a standing purchase order in place with the service provider for after hour support that includes payment for time and material.
2. Replace existing system with an enterprise class system that does not include any single points of failure. An example would be redundant disk controllers, redundant I/O boats, redundant CPU/memory modules, etc. Redundancy doesn’t necessary mean 100% uptime, but if a module goes down the system can be failed over to the remaining module until a replacement arrives.
3. Power to the system would include commercial and locally generated power including enterprise class UPS.
4. Redundant network connection to NERO/OWEN.
5. During downtimes, NEVER GIVE UP. Work the issues until the system is up in production again.