We had another unfortunate incident with HP support this morning. We found some critical infrastructure had quietly expired from warranty, so was not covered. How it is supposed to work is that when things near expiration we add them to a separate Support Contract we have with HP to cover stuff not on warranty.
One of the biggest problems we have is that HP Support verification requires two factor authentication. You need both the serial number of the device (and for multi-device systems like blade racks or SAN racks it isn't always clear which S/N you need) and the model number of the device (ditto, with multi-device systems). The brand new servers we've received have a handy tag on the front with both numbers, but devices older than about a year do NOT.
Having a single S/N key to support is not hard to do. Dell has been doing this for YEARS (the 'express service code'), so it can be done. It also makes the support verification problem a lot easier.
HP also used to inform us when major things were coming off of support. As my boss just pointed out, doing so is a revenue thing for them, as they were always able to talk us into paying them money to keep things supported. A couple years ago they stopped doing that, and since then we've had several instances of key machines quietly going unsupported.
My experiences with HP support:
It hasn't quite gotten to the point where I'll CALL them before trying to find things myself, but it is getting close. Their web-site is THAT BAD.
One of the biggest problems we have is that HP Support verification requires two factor authentication. You need both the serial number of the device (and for multi-device systems like blade racks or SAN racks it isn't always clear which S/N you need) and the model number of the device (ditto, with multi-device systems). The brand new servers we've received have a handy tag on the front with both numbers, but devices older than about a year do NOT.
Having a single S/N key to support is not hard to do. Dell has been doing this for YEARS (the 'express service code'), so it can be done. It also makes the support verification problem a lot easier.
HP also used to inform us when major things were coming off of support. As my boss just pointed out, doing so is a revenue thing for them, as they were always able to talk us into paying them money to keep things supported. A couple years ago they stopped doing that, and since then we've had several instances of key machines quietly going unsupported.
My experiences with HP support:
| General Web Support | Very bad. Hard to find information. Even HP techs have trouble |
| On-site Support | Very good |
| Phone Support | Pretty good |
| Downloading Drivers | Bad. Its on the web-site, so hard to find exactly what you're looking for. |
| Finding Documentation | Mixed. For some things like servers it is OK. For Storage things it is very bad. |