Re: Support on the blade vs a "real" i

On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 21:30, Pete Helgren <Pete@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Anybody on a blade have a different (positive) experience? Â Have you
always gone to the i group first? ÂThis 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.

Well, the biggest question would be what kind of service you've
purchased for that blade.

By default, the blades are not sold with a service contract, just a
"service pack", which is a one time fee to upgrade the warranty. That
has completely different response objectives than some service
contracts available for the traditional servers.

The most common 7x24 3Y service pack has a 4 hour response objective
(a technician calls back in 4 hours - no guarantee for fix time or
anything).

Now, for the traditional servers most have contracts with much better
conditions, like an 8 hour "committed recovery" or something like
that.

I don't have a JSxx blade, only HSxx blades, and we never had any
issues with IBM not meeting their response objectives. We never had an
issue like you described on a blade, though.

In general, the assumption in the x/blade world is that you would
never run anything critical without redundancy (like a cluster), which
is why the response objectives are usually a lot more lax, making the
service cheaper.