[Today’s run: 4 miles]
I’m having a little one-man feud with Big Blue, formally known as International Business Machines – IBM.
At work we bought a pair of nice little disk arrays in 2008. They came with some management software that will let me monitor the health of the system and make configuration changes. We don’t make many changes but we do like to have the ability, and we do monitor the thing.
Our warranty ended in 2011. But the company we bought them from is a reseller of some sort and they put the arrays on our hardware support contract with some other stuff. We tend to roll things on and off their support as they are come off warranty or are replaced by new equipment.
IBM had a download site on the internet that we could use to download the management software and new firmware for our array. That’s the same kind of thing you can do with your Dell PC, get new drivers, etc.
But in August 2013 IBM went to a new policy of only allowing people with an IBM support agreement to get to the download site. That didn’t really cause us a problem because we already had the software we needed.
We’ve had something of a system configuration change recently and I needed to get the software transferred from one linux box to another. I went to the download site, and I couldn’t get it anymore. I was able to resurrect it from the old linux server it had been running on and I transferred it over to the new linux server. So I am once again up and running.
But I also sent a nasty-gram to IBM, telling them that I was not going to be buying any more of their equipment until they let me have access to the software that I paid for when I bought the box.
A nice man from IBM actually called me on the phone. He said they were doing this because all the other vendors were doing it too. And that they had an investment in software development which they needed to protect by implementing this new policy. He volunteered to send me a quote for official IBM support.
And today I did get the quote for official IBM support. And I wrote back to tell him that I’m going to do my best to avoid buying another disk array from IBM unless the policy is changed.
We are aiming to replace those disk arrays in 2015, they are now 6 years old. So I will be doing my shopping this fall and I will be on the lookout for this issue with all the vendors I talk to.
I am also not completely thrilled with the support vendor we bought the arrays from. When I asked them to get me the software they said they could not. So in some ways they left me hanging. I’m not giving up on them completely yet.