Dell complaints

[HellResident]

I'm starting to feel like meatloaf. All I need is the harley davidson moorcycle and the bad sideburns.
Ok so it's now been 10 months since I last had to take a call for Hell Technical support. Of course here in ottawa every time I went for a job I was up against 1100 of my peers. I'm interviewing and every interviewer says "It's just been a constant string of Hell people" . I took the easy way out in the end and just before my blood pressure hit the roof and I walked in with a machine gun to work one day took leave instead and then leveraged that into a nice package when they closed up shop in june, all preplanned of course I saw the end long before anyone else, before they even started building the new building that was never occupied I could tell you it never would open. I have those kind of instincts after 15 years in IT.
So it was I interviewed for a little IT firm that mostly does web development here and lo and behold I got the job. They called on wednesday and told me they were going to offer and asked me yesterday for a final interview. I start tomorrow as their IT person....and they really need it. They are growing, managing more and more of their customers systems and have a rats nest of cabling and architecture I'll need to manage into some kind of organized structure.
So it was yesterday I found myself in the companies server room going over the details of my new job. I look in the racks..I should have known it beforehand....the signs were all there I'd seen some Dell workstations after all....The rack is full of Dell Poweredge servers. UGH! I've been promoted to "Dell Customer" !!!! ( Runs screaming for the hills).
So Comes the inevitable discussion with the owner.
"I see alot of poweredge servers in that rack"
"Ya...what do you think about that? " Now to be fair the owner of the company doesnt understand as much on systems and is looking for an opinion. I talk to him about the cost of doing it yourself with clones, versus the convenience of not having to.And that Dell is not the same company service wise it was 10 years ago. He says
"But they do have that NExt Business Day Service"
"Ya , there's some fine print you should read there"
He then gives me the inevitable horror story where one of their main servers crapped a power supply hard drive and motherboard and just refused to boot up one day. The kind of story we all heard EVERY DAY on the phones. We ended that part of the conversation with "We'll have a look at that once I've evaluated the systems and what we have.He's amenable..In the meantime I've got a whole bunch of Hell's to babysit which we'll phase out in time but I'm not really sure which vendor we'll end up with. Eventually I'm certain I can convince the owner to abandon the evil empire. Which means looking at vendors. And proper rack mount servers in the rack.

There is life after Hell. you just get upgraded to soon to be Ex-customer.


HellResident
( who brushing up on his bastard operator manuals and sharpening his cattleprod)

[Rocke_T_Sinetist]

I envy your employment, but not your position. It's one thing to be an anonymous phone voice trying to fix Dells, shielded by Dell's penchant for stiffarming customers by policy. It's quite another to be the field guy expected to keep them working, knowing there's nothing standing behind you.

I was the field guy for Ampex, at a TV station, in the late 80s as they were cutting back support. I had to anticipate needs, as they were no longer reliably available 'next business day', and there's much less redundancy in a TV station than there is in a server farm.

BTW, after 2 decades of cutting back, Ampex filed for chapter 11 in March of this year. They'd long-since abandoned support of prior products entirely. TV stations would give away their Ampex products to anyone with a truck big enough to carry them. And the original sale price of their products was in the range of $100,000-250,000.

Conveniently, Dell products will readily fit in an industrial dumpster.
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Rocke T Sinetist
as in, 'it doesn't take a...'

[HellResident]

Well I think a much better policy is to retire the damn things as their warranties run out. Then replace them with a better machine not manufactured by foxcon to the *COUGH* exacting chinese manufacturing standards.He's already had issues.Now they are my issues. Convincing the owner to depreciate a machine when it's support runs out shouldnt be difficult and I've no idea how many of these damn things he's got out on client sites yet.

HellResident

[Rocke_T_Sinetist]

They were cheap to start with, that's what sold them. Once the owner finds out that their post-warranty support cost approaches the purchase price, it should be an easy matter to point him toward another vendor.

The published record of a server-farm operator abandoning Dell said they were looking at HP. But I have no data on HP reliability. It can't be worse than Dell. Can it?
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Rocke T Sinetist
as in, 'it doesn't take a...'