A disk has failed in one of our RAID arrays at work. No big deal - one of our sysadmins has already hot swapped a replacement in. However, IBM need to deliver us a new replacement. This would seem easy, right? No...
IBM have the machine recorded at its physical address. Therefore they will only courier the replacement disk to that address. But that addresss is at the hosting co-lo, rather than our office, so we don't have staff there. The courier will only wait 5 minutes. Therefore IBM will send an engineer to our co-lo, who waits for the courier, accept the disk, and then waits for our sysadmin.
What is the hourly rate of the IBM engineer? What is the hourly rate of the courier? Does this procedure seem illogical to anyone?
In contrast, Netapp has a great system where you can input an alternate delivery address in your service ticket. When the system sees the alternate address, it even asks you if the address change is permanent or if it's just a one time change. It's a nice system that's designed with both the customer and process automation in mind. I wish all our vendors were that easy to deal with.
