Support on the blade vs a "real" i

I am just passing this on in case any of you early adopters on blades end up with a similar situation:

My JS12 had a few intermittent episodes where it would just stop responding. The blade itself would continue to run but VIOS and i5/OS would no longer respond. The Blade Center itself has an error log and errors would show up there. However, I never got a call from IBM letting me know it had phoned home. Not big deal, bouncing the blade seemed to take care if it.

Only, it didn't. The problem continued and last weekend after the blade crashed again, I finally figured out that the i5/OS ECS line wasn't working, and despite my best efforts, couldn't get it to configure and phone home a test problem (that is another story). However, I got the Blade Center configured to phone home and I lit up the blade again, sending a test problem. All was well. Until last Monday morning when I discovered the blade was DOA again. This time IBM did call but I was working with the Blade Center group who seemed to think that there was a part that needed replacing wholly unconcerned that the system was down. The sent me the part and it was replaced, two days later.

That didn't take care of the problem and now the blade is really down and these folks seem not to be as "responsive" and the "real" system i folks have been in the past. They know that there is an issue with the Media Tray causing a system to crash because other customers have reported the same issue but they haven't come up with a patch/workaround to the problem. This is a development machine so it isn't like the business can't run, but I am a little surprised by the lack of urgency in trying to quickly resolve the problem. There is of course much correspondence and more to the story that I can give here, but this is a bit disconcerting. Even on my development machines in the past IBM would dispatch someone pretty quickly.

Anybody on a blade have a different (positive) experience? Have you always gone to the i group first? This is definitely a hardware/firmware issue but I think I should go through the IBM i group next, rather than wait on these blade folks to figure it out.

Thoughts?

Pete Helgren