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HP To Charge For Service Packs and Firmware For Out-of-Warranty Customers
New submitter josh itnc writes "In a move that is sure to put a wedge between HP and their customers, today, HP has issued an email informing all existing Enterprise Server customers that they would no longer be able to access or download service packs, firmware patches and bug-fixes for their server hardware without a valid support agreement in place. They said, 'HP has made significant investments in its intellectual capital to provide the best value and experience for our customers. We continue to offer a differentiated customer experience with our comprehensive support portfolio. ... Only HP customers and authorized channel partners may download and use support materials. In line with this commitment, starting in February 2014, Hewlett-Packard Company will change the way firmware updates and Service Pack for ProLiant (SPP) on HP ProLiant server products are accessed. Select server firmware and SPP on these products will only be accessed through the HP Support Center to customers with an active support agreement, HP CarePack, or warranty linked to their HP Support Center User ID and for the specific products being updated.' If a manufacturer ships hardware with exploitable defects and takes more than three years to identify them, should the consumer have to pay for the vendor to fix the these defects?"
... they sure as hell will now.
I'm not an IT person, but weren't there a few companies that tried this crap wwaayy back when? I seem to remember them all failing miserably.
One more reason to avoid buying or recommending HP to would be buyers. The last thing I'd want to deal with is not being able to get a copy of a firmware update for someone's out of warranty system, server or not because I'm not "HP certified support" or whatever. In 2014, there is no fucking reason whatsoever to not have all issued patches available as direct downloads. This is especially true for legacy hardware.
does not qualify as news
I cannot believe they would do something like this. Is there something that I do not understand about this? Is it really that much of a burden to provide access to updates?
Hewlett and Packard were something special.
Now it's just a bunch of MBAs trying to massage their stock price.
It shouldn't be a legal mandate either. Keeping already released patches available should be a courtesy that all vendors willingly do. The good will encourages repeat buys. Eventually, vendor support will be so expensive and so unappealing that people will just run a free unix on commodity hardware because they get better help from internet forums than they do from vendors.
Ladies and gentleman, this is it.
This is the end of Hewlett Packard.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Aren't service packs and firmware updates fixes to defective computers/software? Why are they trying to charge for fixing something that is not supposed to be broken in the first place?
Remember when one of their pilot-ey guys in engineering wasn't put on their new microcomputer division?
If a manufacturer ships hardware with exploitable defects and takes more than three years to identify them, should the consumer have to pay for the vendor to fix the these defects?"
If it took longer than the warranty period (remember, you still get free access as long as the warranty is valid) - why not?
Look at this the other way. Lets say you sell something you warrant to work for three years. Some four years later, there's some kind of security flaw - why should the company not need some extra funds to develop a fix? To my mind this change is something that will lead to better support for older products, because you can keep on paying and demanding fixes for your payments...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
... but in this case I won't fault anyone if they have to download the essential patches from pirate sites.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Wow! What a great reason to avoid buying new server hardware from HP! It is a massive disincentive to purchase. I cannot help but think this is supremely short sighted and a decision made by somebody up high who is not technically inclined.
Its happened twice this year that I've tried to find drivers on the HP website for notebooks aged 3-5 years, and found they're not on the HP website. After phoning HP I'm told that warranty isn't valid and for this kind of support I must pay an hourly fee. Only after threats of a lawsuit and an hour of my time occupied, the rep has been able to e-mail the drivers to me, instead of actually listing them on their website for the other owners of the same models.
HP is not the same company it was before the Compaq merger, but I see this as an improvement over some of their recent past underhanded tactics. One example that comes to mind is the time that I had to pay >$1k for a "refurbished" tape drive (rather than forking out over twice that for a new one) after a firmware "upgrade" caused the drive to self destruct by adding a useless and stressing servo limit test at power up.
HP isn't the best at anything anymore, but they certainly still rake in the profits (largely from ink jet refill cartridges).
Save yourself some money and a future headache by buying a Xerox printer, a Fujitsu scanner, or a Dell computer.
That's interesting, my experience was the exact opposite. I was recycling my HP desktop for a colleague to use and realised that I hadn't created recovery media after sticking Linux on it. I called HP expecting to be charged for the media (it was 18 months out if warranty) and the bloke just sent it out free of charge. It turns out I now have two copies - I found the original media when clearing out a cupboard a month later.
Maybe the difference was consumer grade laptop vs business grade desktop, even if it that were the case, there'll probably be no difference between the two now.
Did HP hire Ballmer?
It shouldn't be a legal mandate either. Keeping already released patches available should be a courtesy that all vendors willingly do. The good will encourages repeat buys. Eventually, vendor support will be so expensive and so unappealing that people will just run a free unix on commodity hardware because they get better help from internet forums than they do from vendors.
I won't touch Cisco gear with a 10 ft pole, and this is exactly why.
We are a small shop and we are running 3 VMs on a single HP Proliant G7 Server. It has enough memory and resources that it could probably run an additional 7 VMs if we wanted to. HP is having to face the reality that the people are buying less hardware because realistically the ratio of VMs to servers is high as 10:1. HP is trying to gouge customers on the warranty because they can't make it up in server sales. Our Proliant DL380 G7 hit the 3 year mark a few months ago and is now out of warranty. The additional cost of the most basic warranty (4 hours/day phone, no onsite) for a single Proliant server is approximately $3000 for three years. That is easily half the cost of the server. And that's the cheapest warranty option. Don't even ask about the 24/7 onsite warranty. This change effectively kills the secondary market for HP hardware. Denying access to firmware means that it will be next to impossible to install or update your OS. I've had to run the HP SPP firmware upate several times to address issues that would otherwise have rendered our Proliant server useless. In fact I have an unresolved issue with our server where it refuses to reboot to the OS, unless I boot from the HP SPP tool first. If I need a critical firmware update in the future, the only option may be the Piratebay. Ugh If HP doesn't reverse this decision, our next server will most likely be a Dell. Unless Dell decides to follow HP into the dark side as well.
Now it's just a bunch of MBAs trying to massage their stock price.
You got that right.
Algorithm:
- Get hired for a big salary and a LOT of stock options.
- Make the company appear more profitable by cutting off investments in the future to reduce costs now.
- Declare victory and what a great guy you are.
- Cash in the stock options and move on to a bigger company where you can repeat the process for even more money and reputation points. PROFIT!
- Your successor inherits the house of cards and takes the blame when it collapses a few years later.
The Harvard Business School has a reputation for graduates who use this algorithm.
Interestingly, boards of directors keep falling for this. (You'd think they'd look at what happens to companies candidates had "turned around" in the several years AFTER they left when evaluating CEO, COO, and CFO candidates. But apparently they usually don't.)
= = = =
Similarly, if a high company official starts enthusing about the book "Crossing the Chasm" and you're an early hire, cash any vested stock options and get out, before you and the other early hires are laid off. (Interestingly, they usually fire them too soon, when they're still key to the company's success, and the company usually falls INTO the chasm rather than crossing it.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I used to buy HP servers all the time but this move will not land them any deal whatsoever in the future. I rarely use their downloads except for an occasional d/l of a bios/firmware update, and 100% of the time because of some bug that made something not work.
I am annoyed as hell with their premium charging for disks, especially SSD disks that they markup really big. 600$ for an 100GB SSD SATA MLC disk?
Wringing money out of your customers at the same time as cloud computing is taking off is not a smart move. A desperate attempt at getting the last money out of your market before it collapses perhaps, but not smart.
HTTP/1.1 400
Last year -- I downloaded all the Compaq (now HP) SP's from their FTP site -- don't quite know what to do with them. I downloaded all of the SP's in case HP stopped supporting 'older' Compaq's (There are several of the old systems that I like for nostalgia)
.. is this policy going to follow through with other HP equipment? I've got a HP color laser jet printer: Will I experience the same issue with that? I've got three HP scanners -- will I need to put them in the garbage? (No one will want them if they can't get even basic driver support).
Now for the big problem: HP or Dell. Dell is firing 15,000 of it's employees --- and HP's new support policy sucks (REALLY sucks).
My question is
I do know this much: If I need to "throw away" otherwise perfectly good equipment as HP will not provide basic user accessible support for it -- I will not replace the equipment from the same manufacturer with the same BAD policy. I have three 'old' Proliant (580, 585 & 360) servers in use now. If (when) they fail -- the equipment will not be replaced with modern equipment from HP (assuming this policy remains in place).
Dev: Well, we've found a rather nasty exploit in Product X. ...
Sales: Great! We've got 50 mil in support contracts ending in two weeks. Sit on it until then.
Dev:
Now for the big problem: HP or Dell.
There's always Oracle hardware.... OK this is self-confessed flamebate!
I suspect they will only try this in some countries. They would be in breach of consumer laws in countries like New Zealand to charge to fix defects.
Regardless, other have said, it will weight in favour of other suppliers for new purchases.
The announcement affects all Proliant equipment.
From a search on equipment that I own:
Important note: HP ProLiant Server firmware access
Starting February 2014, an active warranty or contract is required to access HP ProLiant Server firmware updates. View your existing contracts & warranties or get help linking contracts or warranties to your HP Support Center user profile. To obtain additional support coverage, please contact your local HP office, HP representative, or visit Contact HP. Click here for more information.
someone should edit the top post... "...beginning September 2013, Hewlett-Packard Company will change the way firmware updates on HP Integrity and HP 9000 products are accessed..."
Sun hardware has this - nasty. HP going for the lock-in, Ellison style - but I presume Meg wont miss her keynote while chasing Americas Cup yachts!
The notice is about HP 9000 (read PA-RISC and HP-UX) and HP Integrity (read Itanium and HP-UX). HP 9000 was end-of-saled years ago and you know Itanium. The products are a dying remnant that some companies may be trying to stick to. Honestly, sometimes just people need to let go.
So if you're yelling loudly about your network or PC stuff not getting BIOS-upgrades, go back to fix your comments.
(What a coincidence, the captcha word is "extort")
No, it's just that the link went to the email received by a customer who is using HP9000 stuff. The change DOES also apply to the usual stuff like HP Proliant DL380 etc. For example, the mail I received today (as a Proliant user) was:
"Update: HP ProLiant Servers: Access to Firmware Updates & Service Pack for ProLiant
You are receiving this communication because you have been identified as a customer using HP ProLiant Servers and HP Services.
HP has made significant investments in its intellectual capital to provide the best value and experience for our customers. We continue to offer a differentiated customer experience with our comprehensive support portfolio. HP, as an industry leader, is well positioned to provide reliable support services across the globe with proprietary tools, HP trained engineers, and genuine certified HP parts. Only HP customers and authorized channel partners may download and use support materials.
In line with this commitment, starting in February 2014, Hewlett-Packard Company will change the way firmware updates and Service Pack for ProLiant (SPP) on HP ProLiant server products are accessed. Select server firmware and SPP on these products will only be accessed through the HP Support Center http://customer.hp.com/r?2.1.3... to customers with an active support agreement, HP CarePack, or warranty linked to their HP Support Center User ID and for the specific products being updated. We encourage you to review your current support coverage to ensure you have the appropriate coverage to maintain uninterrupted access to firmware updates and SPP for these products. "
No one needs to use their products. This puts them at a competitive disadvantage.
Indifferent to anything else, this is a stupid business decision. Who is management at this company and why are they incompetent?
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
A few years from now, HP will no longer sell hardware.
The change DOES also apply to the usual stuff like HP Proliant DL380 etc.
Yup, we got the same mail today. We have a bunch of ageing Proliants, and are currently engaged in a procurement round for a new generation of servers (we buy them by the ton, almost). Guess which company just ruled themselves out of the process?
Doesn't Cisco do this too? Its a royal piss off.
I saw this too now.. thats idiotic.
I just recommended a laserjet multifunction printer to my dad (he was burning through ink in am inkjet and his scanner was getting flakey under OS X).
What should I recommend people in the future? Particularly the Linux/OS X crowd? Or am I just jumping a little too early?
(I'm a little nervous as the installation process for my Laserjet m1217 on Linux Mint involves downloading a proprietary blob from HP.)
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Like to see them get around that, even if your goods are out of warranty or service you still have statutory rights that last much longer. http://sogahub.tradingstandard... If a critics bug l but was found in firmware that was there from day 1 or introduced by them while fixing other problems then they would have to fix it or be in breach of the sales of goods act and technically no time limit that only starts when a fault is discovered. If you wanted new or added features then they would not have to provide them under SOGA. Loads of info here http://sogahub.tradingstandard...
someone should edit the top post...
"...beginning September 2013, Hewlett-Packard Company will change the way firmware updates on HP Integrity and HP 9000 products are accessed..."
No. It's also standard Proliant servers. Read the mails quoted in other posts here. The summary just links to a mail received by somebody owning HP9000 stuff, that's why it only mentions HP9000 products.
Yes Cisco does. I have seen it a couple times with other enterprise products. It is evil. The product basically becomes a paperweight after the planned life cycle.
Interestingly, boards of directors keep falling for this. (You'd think they'd look at what happens to companies candidates had "turned around" in the several years AFTER they left when evaluating CEO, COO, and CFO candidates. But apparently they usually don't.)
Why would they bother? Most board members are on the board of multiple companies, it's entirely likely that a member sits on both boards that appointed a CEO.
Look at this shit.
Conflict of Interests? Never met him!
Oracle are the biggest offenders in this field, but no one expects Oracle to be anything but asshats, so that doesn't particularly way against them by now. HP on the other hand will now start with this in the minus account when I take offers for equipment, while before they where usually on pretty even foot with Dell.
Have a nice little brick here. Supposed to be a procurve switch, but no power, and hp refuses to honour any and all support requests. They're supposed to have lifetime warranty, but evidently not. Not so surprising the support for the rest is going to pot too.
If the switch is dead then obviously it's "lifetime" support has expired...
- Jesper
My security clearance is so high I have to kill myself if I remember I have it...
I won't touch Cisco gear with a 10 ft pole, and this is exactly why.
On the other hand...
When working in a Fortune 500 company there were some mighty expensive premium contracts with Cisco. Among them was an agreement I learned about when we had an outage late in the afternoon that affected about 15 people. We have hardware that could have affected hundreds of people, but in this case the outage only affected a few.
Cisco found the closest duplicate replacement part in another state, chartered a flight to a nearby airport, had a taxi driver on standby when the plane arrived, and delivered it to our door within about four hours of reporting the fairly minor problem.
I understand the contract is in place because we had hardware that affects hundreds of thousands of people. The Cisco crew was adamant that the contract had a clause that required a six-hour turnaround on any of that class of hardware. If it had been a major device at a major data center those same four hours could have felt like an eternity, so for those people where an outage can cost thousands of dollars every second in lost productivity and sales I can certainly understand the need for the contract with the devil.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Car manufacturers have a legal requirement to make sure parts are available for a certain number of years after the last one rolls off the production line. If you buy something expensive like a car or high end server that seems like a reasonable consumer protection.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
You'd think they'd look at what happens to companies candidates had "turned around" in the several years AFTER they left when evaluating CEO, COO, and CFO candidates. But apparently they usually don't.
No, that is part of the scam. The MBA applying for the new job points out how everything went to shit after they left, so clearly their genuius is worth paying big bucks for and any other merely qualified applicant will surely fail in such a high pressure, highly skilled role.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
OTOH, if you bought HP, you are already stuffed.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Or really just like desktops. Most server workloads in most places haven't grown fast enough to make 3 year old hardware unusable and this has been true for a while, which is why you have seen virtualization grow so much. Now not only can you put multiple VMs on a box, the CPU is 'good enough' for past the old 3 year benchmark, too.
The other (and often more urgent) need to replace systems was outstripping internal storage. Now that storage is externalized onto SANs in even smaller organizations, mostly thanks to virtualization, that reason is gone too -- you expand your SAN storage instead of the whole server.
I can see why from a money standpoint HP wants to do this, but I wonder how much they will really benefit. I don't see a ton of BIOS issues with VMware on 3-5 year old HP servers.
Recalls commonly happen on consumer goods. For commercial goods, it is pretty common for the buyer to bear the burden of even safety defects post-warranty. The closest example is aviation. After the pretty-short warranty on the plane, any defects, even in design, found later must be repaired by the purchaser, at their cost. This even applies to Airworthiness Directives which, if not fixed by a certain deadline, ground the plane.
And if software manufacturers can (and do) charge for ongoing patches, why can't HP do the same thing for the software that runs on their hardware?
When Oracle started doing this, they lost a massive load of goodwill.
Now HP has decided to emulate Oracle.
They've gone from making the world's shittiest PCs to making the world's shittiest decisions.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So what HP are telling me is that they have no confidence in their products so they are not prepared to take the risks of maintaing their products. Instead they are telling us that there are so many defects in their products that they want to shift the burden of maintenance on to their customers, in doing so they no longer have to worry about the poor quality of their products costing them money. It is great for me as I now know that the next server I buy will not be HP. Stand behind your products or take a hike is what I say.
I'm not an IT person, but weren't there a few companies that tried this crap wwaayy back when? I seem to remember them all failing miserably.
If you were a reader of slashdot you'd know that Oracle is suing companies for providing patch access to customers without a support contract right now. And people are finding ways not to be an Oracle customer (right now) as a result. Naturally HP thought it would be a good idea, as they have too many customers.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I would demand a refund for any defect found in firmware/etc.
This is only going to lead to court cases where the defect report was filed during the warranty, but the fix comes out after warranty expiration.
We are the 198 proof..
Maybe the difference was consumer grade laptop vs business grade desktop, even if it that were the case, there'll probably be no difference between the two now.
Sure, HP support is great. I even got a defective Elitebook replaced. It was one of those ones with the Quadro die bonding problem. After spending a total of 24 hours or more on the phone with HP and forming a personal relationship with one of their case managers, I was able to get the machine (which was defective the day it arrived, and HP knew they were defective before it was shipped) replaced.
Wait, that's a horrible story. I guess HP is actually pure fucking evil, and you just got astoundingly lucky.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So... back when Compaq bought Compaq... ?
Log in or piss off.
ever priced updating the firmware in your car outside of the warranty period?
Don't nickel and dime customers after they bought the product. You already paid for the "life time" updates when you bought the equipment years ago. Now they want you to pay *again*? Sorry, you may want to do that for new purchases and announce it 6 months ahead. People already budgeted and bought stuff and now all of a sudden you're messing with their budget after the money is spent?
If it's one thing I hate it is a vendor on which I can't rely after I made a commitment to them. HP sold this equipment with "free" downloadable supportpacks and firmware upgrades. That deal has been made in the past and now they're coming back on it? Sorry, you just made my blacklist HP, I'd rather buy Lenovo or Dell if you don't come back on this decision really fast.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
We had a 48port netgear switch that didn't pass ipv6 traffic, and netgear supported wanted to charge us for the firmware update, we didn't get it.
HP wrote: “This type of support provider may appeal to budget-conscious procurement managers, but the support doesn’t match the breadth and depth of HP’s support expertise or global parts supply chain nor does it give our sales reps and partners the added loyalty that comes from an ongoing relationship built over time between HP and the customer, an attribute which often goes unrecognized.”
So among other reasons, they want to squeeze out or get a cut from the non-partnered support providers who are freeloading off of HP HW patches and making money from their own customers. Customers without any support contract at all are getting caught in the cross-fire. Another issue is that customers who don't _need_ a full-service support deal, but do want access to patches and parts don't have that type of option available from HP.
All in all a pretty dumb move: Not much immediate financial gain, and loads of customer ill-will.
We are the 198 proof..
Yes, good old Oracle. I have a few pieces of SUN gear at my home and cant download newer firmware as i don't have an "oracle enterprise" account. Nothing says "customer friendly" like charging your customers for fixes for your product which was costly as well.
I use old HP servers for fun, development, and test sandbox work. I get most of them for free (salvaged from customers who replace them) and upgrade them with parts from eBay. So having to pay for firmware updates is certainly something that will annoy me on a personal level.
Having said that however, I don't understand why you would make such an obviously emotional decision. If you really want to ditch HP (and I am not a stockholder so I am not protecting them) you should do an actual TCO calculation to see if the new support arrangement actually has any real consequence for you. If you already buy servers "by the ton" then odds are you already have a support agreement which will provide you with full access to the entire HP repository of updates.
I don't find it problematic that HP want's to charge prices for firmwares. In fact, I wished more companies did so. In reality you already paid for "lifetime updates" when you purchased, say, a G7 server. So let me just mention the possible benefits of a functional post-warranty market for updates:
1.) Over time, paid firmware update will decrease the price of the new server and/or its initial support contract. Rather than paying for "lifetime updates" the initial owner gets to pay only for his/her actual usage of updates.
2.) A functional post-warranty firmware market (with a culture where paying for this service was widely accepted) would mean more vendors would support their hardware for longer. Simply because customers would be willing to pay for updates. I have often wished it was possible to update the firmware for stuff, like network printers, small routers, older laptops, graphics cards, as well as servers. Have you never been in a situation where you wished you could throw 20 bucks at Asus to get a recent formware for ?
3.) Most hardware today is changed because of lack of support - not because of actual failure (or even the prospect of failure). Which is likely why HP seeks to make an actual business out of their post-warranty support. Paid updates could, if prices are reasonable, prolong the lifespan of gear - reducing e-waste and spent man-hours. There is no reason a server witrh the build-quality of a HP G7 or a BL c7000 should last only 3 years. It will easily last 8 if maintained properly, and if support options are available and fair.
Hell, I just fired up an old HP c3000 with 6 servers, 40 Xeon cores and 92 gigs of RAM. It uses a bit more power than new servers - sure - but the hardware was acquired for free, using it means delaying e-waste, and it gets the job done with no problems at all. But I am sure it would all have been a nightmare if updates were not available. New ILO2 firmwares, updated RAID controller firmwares, new version of LightsOut ... I would happily have paid a bit of money for that.
You should stop making decisions when you're emotional about something.
Calculate your TCO, including support and quality. Then decide if you should ditch HP or not.
If HP (and others) jkeep the price for these updates fair, I see no problem with this. In fact I welcome it, hoping it will gain attention from smaller vendors in the consumer space as well.
- Jesper
My security clearance is so high I have to kill myself if I remember I have it...
They charge too much and their hardware is always out of date.
I decided to buy some seriously high-end computing equipment for research, and I compared HP, Dell, and Red Barn. For the same price, Red Barn gave me newer hardware, more hardware, faster turn-around on quotes, better service, faster build times, and faster customer service. http://rbtginc.redbarncomputers.com
Don't worry, they're just finishing the job Carly started. She tried to kill both HP and Compaq and failed, so now they're moving directly to telling customers "fuck you" because they really do not want to keep what market share they still have.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
IBM, Oracle, Red Hat, Cisco... All do it too. Generally, you keep things like this open and free when you want to GROW sales NOW versus cash-in. This move generally means you're confident enough your customers can't jump ship or get their patches elsewhere.
I think as a customer you have to realize a company needs money to "keep the lights on". If you haven't given them money for more than three years, how are YOU keeping their doors open?
Now that I'm no longer an OpenVMS customer, it's kinda fun watching the owner who mistreated it sitting on its own nuts, wondering why it hurts.
Coming Up Next: HP develops unexpected limp after whacking itself in the knee with a ball peen hammer.
- The Kessel run is for nerf herders. I can circumnavigate the entire Central Finite Curve in a lot less than 12 parse
I was an HP-Certified HP-UX admin back in the late 90's, early 00's, running lots of HP-9000s (mostly PA-RISC, but a few early Itanics), all running HP-UX. **Operating system** (including security) patches were only available for machines under service contracts. Patch application/management, at least those not requiring a reboot, basically consumed one day out of each week. Having a patch I applied last week superceded by this week's batch was not at all unusual. As others have mentioned, recieving a big box full of little boxes each holding an individual piece of paper and/or CD, one per machine, was a regular occurance as well.
Bullshit. It's not MY job to keep THEIR lights on. If they want to keep their lights on, give me a reason to buy more products from them. These days, better support and customer service will earn more business than trying to nickel and dime everyone. If HP wanted to increase their sales, they should have improved their support and service instead of decreasing it.
What exactly do you suggest? We used to buy generic servers, but the warranty/support was terrible, so we switched to Dell. We used to run Linux firewalls, but the VPN options were incompatible with iPhones. (Yes, you can use the awful kludge of an essentially adware-laden OpenVPN client now.). So, we went with Cisco.
To be honest, I am most pissed with our multifunction printers now. Ricoh has become very difficult to self-repair and expensive to operate, Minolta worse... Haven't found a good current model yet that can print PDF vector graphics quickly and with good quality, while still being easy to replace the drum or rollers without a technician.
I'm curious how often you had to update firmware on servers that were out of warranty?
I'm going to have to see how this plays out, but it could be a pain in the ass for somebody like me who has to install firmware on *new* servers for customers. *I* don't have a support contract even if the customer does. (Which doesn't mean that there won't be some way around it.)
Anyone else think open hardware is a pretty good idea at this point? Let's help companies like HP stop making bad decisions like this by only using hardware that has openfirmware and drivers in the first place. Remember though : Nvidia is going to be first against the wall when the revolution comes.
Yes, Cisco also does this and the necessity to call them, pleading for an up-to-date firmware when your brand new Cisco unit has a 2 year old ASA bin, ASDM and VPN which won't work with your client's newer Internet Explorer. This is also why it's common amongst IT people to say "screw you Cisco" and share firmware on secret yet publicly hosted HTTP sites made available through one service contract for one device.
You see this a lot of "business" hardware. We got a PBX that only gives firmware updates as long as you have a support contract. The support contract costs almost as much as the hardware itself. And they haven't even added features in the past 10 years. For instance, auto-attendant messages must be in some 8-bit low frequency wav format that's so archaic that it's almost impossible to create with modern audio software.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Outrageously expensive, if available at all. I've had to replace an ECU and pulling from scrap was far cheaper than new. $200 vs $700
you wouldn't need firmware updates.
Nah, I've gladly paid more money for HP hardware and support over Dell for the last 10 years, but if HP is actually going to make my life more difficult by putting their crappy website behind a paywall so I can't find the updates I need then I'll take my money elsewhere. I know I'm not alone either because anyone shopping on price alone has been going Dell/Supermicro all along.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
More importantly, by not providing repairs for exploits for (defective) software products they shipped and are still shipping/supporting, it may open them up to law suits if those exploits are used in security (national and personal) breeches. They put a product in the market place with a defects which were not only disclosed to/known by them, but which they intentionally withheld from customers so that the systems could not be properly secured.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
There is a legal mandate: suitability to task. TOS/EULA be damned (or at least finally tried properly in court), they have contractually obligated themselves to provide the necessary materials (hardware/firmware) in making a sale/lease/licensing agreement and, as bugs are exposed and updates required, demonstrated a failure at the "manufacturing" level for which they are liable. It's only going to take one large customer and an otherwise slow news week to resolve this one.
If you support the hardware/software, you are on the hook for the safety involved (think security breeches). If you know of a security/safety defect, come up with a repair for that defect, and then withhold that repair, you may be held accountable for not making it available. This is usually applied in the consumer field (think CPSC recalls on cribs, or NTSB recalls for motor vehicles), but would probably apply in a court to commercial sales as well.
Now, you can "end of life" a product and possibly get around it. MS EOLs operating systems, but for their primary line support goes out many years.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
More importantly, it is THEIR job to provide me with a working product. The warranty covers problems with the device caused in the field. If they sold me a product that has known issues then it is their responsibility to provide the fixes, regardless of whether or not I am in warranty. If I plug my 120v (US) router into a 240V (uk) outlet and let out the magic smoke and am out of warranty* that's fair. But if I'm sold an internet firewall that has a secret admin password that can't be changed, it's the company's responsibility to provide the necessary fix so the firewall works as expected.
This should be no different than how automobile companies are expected to act. If a serious flaw is found in a car, it doesn't matter if it is this year's model or from ten years ago, or whether you are the original owner or have purchased it used; you are entitled to that fix. Why some software vendors have somehow gotten it into their heads that they have the right to sell us lemons and then make us pay for the privilege of fixing their mistakes.
* actually, warranty probably wouldn't cover this sort if user-stupidity either, but you get my point ;-)
I think Dell is the only major vendor left that does left anyone download patches regardless of support status.
And Dell isn't doing too well these days.
For instance, auto-attendant messages must be in some 8-bit low frequency wav format that's so archaic that it's almost impossible to create with modern audio software.
That's what asterisk prefers, too. I believe resampling is handled by a module, and you can feed it fancier audio formats if you like, but then they have to be resampled (or even decoded) on the fly. You can even recode the files in actual codec format so that even that doesn't have to happen. This is handy if you'd like to use a really rinky-dink piece of hardware for your PBX. This is very reasonable if you've got something that's really tried and tested, because you want your PBX to be reliable above all else. It's also useful if you want to use cheap redundant servers; If one fails, you can failover to the next with no penalties other than the loss of all calls in-progress.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What's even more interesting is that interlocking directorates in the same industry are illegal in the US per the Clayton Act, however the article points out that 1 in 8 interlocks are indeed in the same industry. There's simply no enforcement of this. Thanks again, Obama.
Yes! +1 I have a Netgear router at home. I get firmware updates every now and then that fix various issues. It costs Netgear *nothing* but traffic for me to download them. At some point I expect the support to end and have no more patches. That is normal. Making me PAY for patches would ensure I would never ever buy their shit again.
I think as a customer you have to realize a company needs money to "keep the lights on". If you haven't given them money for more than three years, how are YOU keeping their doors open?
Yes, that's a valid question. What's in it for them? The answer is reputation. We're specifically talking here about patches that HP has had to develop anyway, to serve their customers with support contracts. The cost of distributing patches to customers can be low, if you don't have a massively overwrought web infrastructure as does HP. If you simply permit third parties to redistribute patches, it's virtually nothing. HP is hoping to strong-arm customers into giving them money, and no doubt it will work on a few of them. But in the bargain it will engender massive resentment in those customers, who will do their best to seek alternative solutions in the future — to say nothing of the effect it will have on your former customers who are not so tied to your systems and services that they cannot take their custom elsewhere.
Oracle is doing their best to plot their own downfall. HP is only still with us today as it is due to inertia. I, for one, will miss neither. But then, I never had an HP calculator.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Is it really that difficult to be profitable in the hardware game these days? The only viable American option left these days seems to be Dell.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Cisco always has done. As a result, the value of used Cisco kit has tanked since the era of the highly managed switch. Even a cat5k has y2k problems which were never resolved. No point in buying it unless you work someplace with a really great CCO login. Like, say, Cisco. While I worked there I was willing to fiddle with all kinds of old Cisco stuff.
If you want a future-proof router, build one around a PC. Terminal server, likewise. It's cheaper and better. It's only switches (or the most massive of routers) that need more bus bandwidth than you can get in a good one. Even in pure PCI bus machines you could get a machine with multiple high-speed buses.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Such things are covered under the Sale of Goods Act as manufacturing defects, since clearly any bugs would have been there when the car was built. The SOGA says goods must last a "reasonable length of time", which for a car has been generally viewed by the courts as at least 15 years.
Therefore any manufacturing defects discovered in the first 15 years of the car's life are covered by the warranty. The manufacturer can either do the fix for free, offer you a replacement car or refund part of the purchase price proportional to how long you have had the car (so after 10 years you might get 1/3rd of the money back, or whatever the market value of the car is).
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Carly Fiorina is back?
I'm not an IT person, but weren't there a few companies that tried this crap wwaayy back when? I seem to remember them all failing miserably.
What makes this more ironic is that HP recently went the other direction on their ProCurve line, offering full features and upgrades for life. I just deployed a cluster on mid-range HP switches yesterday and they were such a better deal than Juniper, specifically because of their software support policy.
But ... because of Juniper, Cisco, even Netgear to some degree they have to compete there. You'll notice that IBM just sold its server business to China, and Dell just announced 15,000 layoffs, both in the past week. HP is in a "last man standing" position, though they're only king of the Brand-Name Hill, while the Whitebox Mountains dominate the landscape.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
One of the reasons in gong with a major brand is the implied support that comes with the name. Changing the support paradigm has an effect on sales, it is just delayed. 3 years out is about the timing businesses are looking to upgrade their systems. If patching/drivers becomes a serious issue in managements collective "mind", this will influence the buying decision for next time.
A company can get away with this when they have a locked in market and customers with few alternatives. I don't believe this is the case in the desktop/server area.
2) Screw customers around until they're out of warranty
3) Tell them there's a patch that will fix the defect, but they need to pay for a support contract
4) Profit!
Hmm. No question marks in there, must be a bullet proof business model. It's not a new one, though. My parents got a TV from Sears back in the early '70's and apparently it had constant problems that Sears and the manufacturer jerked them around on until it went out of warranty. They tell the story to this day and would refuse to shop at Sears ever since then (For you kids, Sears was like an expensive Wal*Mart that usually lived in shopping malls and sold over-priced hardware to gullable buyers. Kind of like Best Buy.) They also had similar experiences with a couple of car manufacturers and also refuse to buy a couple of brands of cars now. During my customer care training at IBM they told us that an angry customer will tell on average 10 of his friends about his bad experience with your company. A happy customer typically won't tell anyone.
As for my experience with HP, I had to support HPUX as part of a multi-platform driver solution back in the '90's. The environment kind of sucked to work on, but at least it wasn't SCO (Which I also had to support.)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I'm curious as to what is the real impact of this? It is hard to fathom somebody running enterprise servers without support agreements. I'm sure it happens, but what is the percentage of HP's clients that would be impacted by this? If they have to prepare the service packs for, say, 80% of their clients, what is the extra cost involved in letting the others access to them?
If most of their customers have the agreements, then all this announcement does is create bad PR. Unlike Hollywood, the old adage of any PR is good PR does not apply in the tech industry. Just ask Target about how the PR over their credit card fiasco has helped them!
All fair points, but traditionally the bargain has been that you buy your serious gear from the likes of HP or Dell or Cisco, who are going to charge a lot more than you'd pay for commodity equivalents, but in return the big name gear is generally going to work and you can expect a professional level of ongoing support if and when it doesn't.
If these big name companies don't want to offer that level of ongoing support any more, that's their decision, but then there is little reason to pay a substantial premium to buy the big name equipment in the first place. Building commodity servers and workstations, or getting a reputable and reasonably local supplier to do it for you, can already work out much cheaper than buying your boxes from the premium brands. I don't think the networking/infrastructure side is there yet, but over the next few years I expect SDN and virtualization to put increasing pressure on those areas as well.
It seems short-sighted for brands like HP to risk their reputations with transparent cash grabs like this. It might look good at the end of this quarter, and maybe even this financial year, but it will inevitably push customers towards alternative models, probably enough that some will jump ship. With the likely industry trends over the next few years, it will be a lot more expensive to win those customers back, assuming it's even possible at all by then.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Do we expect vendors to provide free upgrades and updates to old hardware and software *forever*? At some point a vendor is going to say, "Sorry, you're SOL." Offering customers the option to *pay* for updates to extend the life of their investment doesn't seem so unreasonable, especially when you're talking about enterprise customers.
Limiting free updates to the warranty period only seems unreasonably because the warranty periods tend to be rather short. Financially speaking, computer systems are customarily depreciated over a 5 year period; that is to say that spanking new computer your company buys will be valued at $0 on the books in five years. So it seems to me that expected lifetime of a computer in an enterprise is five years. That should be the baseline over which we determine what is a reasonable period for free updates. Free updates for *over* five years is expecting way too much of a vendor. Personally I'd be satisfied with three years of free updates with an option to buy updates for another three.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Completely stupid on their part. They are already writing the software, why not make it available and not shoot themselves in the foot? I don't think they're aware they are other vendors out there (Dell). I used to work for a big telco, the shop was almost 100% Compaq, was for years. They messed up somehow, now they are 100% Dell (we're talking about 2500 PCs and lots of servers). That was before they were gobbled up by HP. I don't know how many $$$ for a lease that big, but it's certainly a lot of money. Doesn't take much to lose a contract once the lease is up...
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
If it is out of warranty. Unless I buy the extended warranty? What a rip off! I want my car to be fixed for free forever!
Seriously, what a bunch of whining snivelers are on this site.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Companies typically buy HP for their warrantied support. When I have an HP hardware issue I don't throw out the "commodity" hardware and buy new, I call up my vendor, order a new part and/or a tech to come out and fix the issue. If you don't have paid support for this you are just as likely to have hardware components fail as or more so than having a firmware bug bricking your server. Running expensive commercial servers without support is pretty silly and this news should not come as a big surprise.
There is or can be built a machine that can simulate any physical object. -Church-Turing principle
... they sure as hell will now.
I'm not an IT person, but weren't there a few companies that tried this crap wwaayy back when? I seem to remember them all failing miserably.
Actually and unfortunately, most hardware manufacturing companies do this. Cisco does this, for example. Software companies are less likely to do it, but a lot of them do it as well. When I look at my clients and tick off the list of vendors that are in their environments, only Microsoft and Oracle seem to provide access to updates for free.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
ever priced updating the firmware in your car outside of the warranty period?
Oil changes at my local Volvo dealership are cheaper than the independent shop down the street (and I live in a high rise so I can't exactly change the oil myself). Any time a car comes into the service garage at that dealer they hook it up to the computer which runs a diagnostic scan and then pushes all software updates that are available. Why not - it makes for happy customers and doesn't cost them a dime.
They might be allowing access to updates for the wired networking devices, but I can't download the latest firmware for the MSM466 Wireless Access Point without a contract. I'll be looking for another vendor when it comes time to replace them.
I can't download the latest firmware for the MSM466 Wireless Access Point without a contract
Good to know. I'd have to be dragged kicking and screaming away from OpenWRT myself, and not because of the price.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
For far less money than the Cisco support contract, you could have just bought several spares of each model of Cisco device, and have had the replacement on-hand a quickly as you could walk over and grab it.
That's been my experience with Cisco TAC all-around. Their "support" is so awful that maintaining a testing lab is far more cost-effective, and far less frustrating to your IT department. Hell, I'd count Cisco TAC as less-than-worthless, as they constantly waste large amounts of my time trying to understand the issue, have me gather logs of obviously irrelevant information, and worst of all, always tell me I'm wrong, or that their hardware can't work for non-trivial-job XYZ, leaving me to convince my boss that even though they are representatives of the manufacturer, they're idiots that don't actually know anything, and have zero motivation to help.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
These days, better support and customer service will earn more business than trying to nickel and dime everyone.
I wish that were largely true but there is a fair bit of research indicating that providing great customer support very often doesn't result in improvements to the bottom line. There are exceptions to this of course but in a lot of industries customers are not willing to pay for support. My industry happens to be one of them. At the end of the day if they aren't willing to pay for it then there is no point in offering good support. People don't shop at Walmart because of the great customer service - they go there because the price is cheap and that is at the end of the day what matters to them.
Speaking for my industry (wire harness manufacturing), our customers don't give a damn about support. They only care about price. Period. Product quality, on time delivery and customer service are expected but they won't (knowingly) pay a fraction of a penny extra for them and if someone undercuts us by a penny or two then we lose the business. This isn't hypothetical - I see it every day. Our customers WILL NOT PAY for good customer service. They might appreciate it but it wins us no loyalty whatsoever.
So I put it to you, do I spend a lot of money developing great customer service knowing full well that it probably will end up losing me money at the end of the day?
IBM recently put a lot of their stuff behind a pay wall too.
I remember in the late 80s early 90s when a lot of companies suddenly started charging for "support".. Back then there was a pretty big pushback in the circles I knew, with people going so far as demanding refunds and the like once they had proven that the problem was actually the vendor's product. That is probably why shortly after everything started shipping with cards that basically say "Our stuff is shit, it probably won't work, and we aren't responsible when it doesn't, so don't try to sue."
I have steered away from vendors that put their updates behind pay walls for a few years now. CISCO, oracle, and now IBM and HP are on my "avoid" list.
Not that I like the HP DL series machines anyway. I started back in ~2005 or so when they decided that the 3.5 drive form factor was dead and promptly replaced all the models with 3.5 drives with crap capacity 2.5 chassis, and subpar cciss controllers that they wanted to charge through the nose for.
The license fees for the advanced ILO license necessary to get IP virtual consoles was silly too, especially since most of the whitebox machines include it on their IPMI implementations for free. Plus, its actually less expensive to buy an IP KVM with a dozen ports than pay the license fees for a couple machines.
Now IBM have dumped their X86 server busness onto Lenovo it looks like Lenovo might be the the best option for new deployments. At least you can (still) download patches from their website.
Another option would be Huawei, but I don't know what their support is like. At least you can be certain that the spyware on their products is coming from the NSA!
Given the way so many companies run out-of-support systems you would also have to mandate that customers download and install the updates.
Yeah, Cisco shriveled up and died.
Nearly all bugs are going to be found in the first couple of years
Or - like my old laptop - they just don't bother to fix them but instead tell you to buy a newer model/product. Back in the day, my former laptop had an issue where if you actually used both RAM slots, it would cause random freezes or spontaneous reboots. It was actually an issue with the Northbridge.
At first, HP said they were working on a fix and refused to properly RMA my laptop. Later, they said there was no fix, but - oops sorry - you're out of warranty now. After much bitching and threatening I got some extra RAM to use in a single slot, but I hate to think of all the people that were screwed by this issue.
Second issue: HP "tablet" laptops (reversible screen) were one of many types affected by nvidia chips which had heat issues. IIRC, the chips were soldered on the bottom of the board, and over time the heat would cause the solder to loosen until the chip started to come off the board. Many other manufacturers actually replaced bad models with good ones. HP would just replace the laptop with the same model until your warranty was done.
In fact, HP later released laptops with the same design, but a less thermally inefficient video card. The laptops still overheated because the heat dissipation was still *terrible* - oft killing the NIC instead of the video card - but it took a bit longer to do so (usually long enough that you were out-of-warranty once it happened).
For far less money than the Cisco support contract, you could have just bought several spares of each model of Cisco device, and have had the replacement on-hand a quickly as you could walk over and grab it.
Perhaps you missed the first part of my post. Fortune 500 data center.
If you are talking about consumer devices and even common office server room equipment that is quite true. We had lots of commodity stuff lying around. We also kept a bit of less common stuff around, such as spare UPS racks; the $30,000 price tag is low enough cost that we could keep a few of them around when equipment shuffles.
Note that some critical equipment gets mighty expensive. You can find a good deal on low latency, high volume interconnect that can handle ten million concurrent connections for around $250K, but you'll probably want to pay around $350K for the better ones. It would be insane to just keep a few of EVERYTHING lying around, just in case. Far cheaper for the Cisco contract that will get us any replacement we need, quickly.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Generally, this type of enterprise class hardware comes with a support contract good for some period of time. During that time you can expect that the firmware and drivers will stabilize. So, don't buy this sort of hardware used if it doesn't come with a disk containing those files.
What bugs me is the faint possibility that they'll hold back firmware patches until the bulk of contracts for a given model expire. Holding back on a firmware update that enables more RAM to force people into extending their contracts? Sure!
Everything goes end of life sooner or later. But I will not be part of some revenue stream to pay them to fix their products. Even a decade later or more I exepct to see the patches available online, even if active support ended years earlier.
Attack your customers! Make them pay for daring to choose you for a supplier! Make them sorry they ever heard your name!
What's even more interesting is that interlocking directorates in the same industry are illegal in the US per the Clayton Act, however the article points out that 1 in 8 interlocks are indeed in the same industry. There's simply no enforcement of this. Thanks again, Obama.
And the previous four administrations. This didn't happen in just the past 6 years. It started a long long time ago, and the Clayton Act, like the Sherman Act, has been out of favor for decades, because it inconveniences people with money.
Thank you Supreme Court for making sure people with money will always have the best government their money can buy.
Yep, Obama is really the "change we need" or whatever his dumb slogan was. He isn't any different than Bush or any previous administration that turns a blind eye to corporate lawbreaking.
You're getting a Dell
I am not arguing that support contracts are worthless, reality could not be further from the truth. What irks me about Cisco is that they are selling this security critical hardware, but not providing trivial security patches to end users (who have already spent thousands of dollars on Ci$co stuff) that do not have the private jet service. Furthermore, they live the manufacturers wet dream of killing the used market by not providing support (and trivial security fixes) for used hardware.
Another thought is that redundant hardware provides seconds of downtime while even the most expensive service contract is going to result in hours....
Well, I guess I wont be including HP in any of my server bids moving forward. I despise Cisco for crap like this and will only use them when I absolutely must.
Hi,
Purchase Dell products instead. They offer free firmware downloads accessible from FTP without scripts, filters etc... super easy to use, very clean http pages as well.
Yes this is almost a publicity post but this is such a dick move from HP that I have to state the obvious: Dell is cool with his customers on the firmware side.
You can discuss about the quality of Dell products on other subjects or price, but on the firmware/drivers side they are cool and nowadays it need to be said when an IT vendor is cool.
15 people for 4 hours is thousands of dollars. An average white collar worker makes, (with overhead and benefits) around $100 a hours. 15 * $100 * 4 = $6000 wasted. Even a single person unable to work for a few hours will often FAR exceed the value of the hardware involved,
I'm always amazed at how many people in IT fail to grasp this simple fact.
It is one thing to charge for a new feature or enhancement but to charge for fixes for problems that should not be there is really lame. I have used and recommended Dell and HP servers in the past I guess it is time to sell my HP servers and replace them with Dell and stop recommending HP for anything because they just lost all creditability with me. Funny I was just getting ready to buy more HP servers, wonder what Dell has on special. I got an idea why don't all these companies try innovating and creating something NEW everyone "needs" and "wants" instead of re-treading the old stuff and charging people who have already paid once to fix what should not have been broken in the first place. Forcing your customer to pay to fix the mistakes you should not have made in the first place is low and a sign of desperation. Cisco is no better I should not have to pay $450 for a support contract so I can download a patch for something broken in the IOS code in the first place. It is time for customers to tell them thanks but no thanks.
HP has been on my $hit list since they bought Apollo computers. HP was #3 in workstations, Apollo was #2. HP bought them, then somehow ended up as #3 anyway.
Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of
Sure all my production equipment has current service contracts on them, when a part breaks I need a new part to fix the problem. But when doing a technical refresh the old production equipment typically gets moved to the lab, upgrading the lab. Don't keep a service contract on the lab equipment, why would I? If a part breaks I am not in a hurry to fix it and can typically source it used. Now, HP wants me to keep a service contract on my lab equipment to get drivers and firmware upgrades. That is outrageous and one of the reasons that Cisco is no longer my infrastructure vendor.
Give me the option of a contract that covers downloads only (Think MSDN) and I might do it but not a full-price (22% of hardware cost per year) contract to support my lab. HP can take a hike.
Lovely. This is like car manufacturers charging people to repair recalls. Forcing your customers to pay to fix your shitty product is pretty underhanded. Screw Oracle, screw IBM, screw Cisco, and screw HP.
IBM, Dell, and Cisco already do the same thing.
The key sequence to access my Slashdot bookmark in Firefox is Alt-B-S. I don't believe this is a coincidence.
I can still go to Dell's site and download firmware for really old servers for free. It's one of the bigger reasons why we still buy from them.
I take it you've never used HP in the enterprise? HP ProLiant servers are solid hardware, and even with this move (much as it pisses me off) HP's enterprise support is still some of the best I've dealt with. I'm upset about this change (and have, very vocally, let HP know my feelings on the matter), but truth be told they were one of the very few companies to be offering these kinds of updates for enterprise-level hardware without a support contract in the first place.
Funny, I don't think I ever saw a P800 that lasted beyond the first 6 months or so... the P400 was good, the P410 excellent, but the P800 in our org had a notoriously low MTBF. Never saw the same problems with the P812s though.
We have millions of dollars invested in HP hardware.
We typically only have 3yr support contracts on servers, first and foremost to handle hardware failures.
After that time, servers are cycled out into low important, or non-production tasks. Failures in these roles usually result in wholesale machine replacement.
Maintaining support contracts for all those 3-6 year old machines is not viable, nor are we expecting _new_ problems to be addressed since they are out of contract.
Not being able to download _old_ patches, firmware, etc, to apply when the servers are cycled out of production, however, is bullshit.
That hammering sound you hear?
Yes, that's the sound of the last nail being hammered into HP's coffin.
They just want to figure out how Oracle does this to their customers and gets away with it.
1. Create a company
2. Sell a product people want/need
3. Become a monopoly in your field
4. Profit
HP VP: "Wait. Which step were we on?"
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
"Crossing the Chasm" is about more revenues by making a tech product more mainstream. It has nothing to do with cutting investments.
My objection to "Crossing the Chasm" is about a different issue: Cutting the early hires out of their equity positions by terminating the vesting of their stock options and possibly high salaries, so the company growth rewards go to the founders and the high officials rather than to the talent in the trenches that actually turned the hairbrained scheme into a functioning enterprise.
In the process the company typically dumps them before it is really ready to succeed without them. What they're doing for the company, and what information is in their heads but not well documented, isn't sufficiently visible to the executives - especially the new team that is trying to force the transition.
This zinger is in the last couple paragraphs of one of the chapters near the end of the book. (Unfortunately I don't have my copy handy or I'd give you the page number and quote.)
I've watched this happen at least three times here in Silicon Valley.
- Exec enthuses about the book.
- Couple months later the company lays off the early hires.
- Product development grinds to a near-halt as problems arise and don't get solved. Shipments are missed, or go out with major quality issues. Customer support fails.
- Within about a year the company goes belly-up.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Yeah, they tried to pull the "it's a software/OS issue" card on me, and that there were not any hardware issues. I had to point to their own damn site where there was an issue with this specific laptop before they'd even talk to me.
Then it became, "we're working on an update to fix the issue", which I assumed to mean a BIOS update of some sort.
The update was apparently just a patch so that Photoshop (which wasn't the app I was having issues with) wouldn't run into the issue, as a lot of people were using that particular model for photo-editing (17" screen etc).
So yeah, it took me pulling my records of when I first encountered the issue (within warranty) and then threatening legal action to get them to even support me without paying for the call. After that I was able to wrangle out a 1GB stick of RAM as an alternative to the dual 512MB's it had issues with. The laptop worked fine on a single - larger - stick of RAM.
SuperMicro doesn't have platinum support contracts, but for the price difference, you can buy a lot of spares in case shit breaks down. Plus they don't charge you an arm for disk trays: if you buy a server with room for 24 host swap disks, you get 24 empty disk trays you can fill with whatever you want!
Additionally they have the cleanest remote management interface. No annoying pop ups, no artificial browser requirements, no frames, no mandatory Java applets.
They do the same shit for server remote admin cards. The hardware's in there, but you can't use it until you shell out the $. Premium plus deluxe HP resellers often have a tendency to forget about those, and you find out the hard way when you have to troubleshoot a server on a saturday and nobody's available with the god damn license key.
An 8 bit wav is all you need for telephones. The telephone network is very low bandwidth.
How would the switch know what is inside the ethernet frames?
It costs Netgear something to create the patches.
That's what I loved about the HP/Compaq lines of machines. Everything was available, free and easy. Going all the way back to when you could dial into their BBS and download service packs for BIOS setup disks.
I'd be willing to bet that this will really only effect small shops with a few machines. I'd also be willing to bet that those clients cost HP a lot more in support (per dollar of sales) than your giant enterprise customers. Perhaps this is a conscious effort to unload that sector of the market.
...apparently they're just trying to bankrupt themselves, short-sell their stock, and make a killing.
There are 2 groups of people you can make fun of on the Internet without fear of attack. The illiterate, and the Amish.
By the time you get up to 48 ports, it's probably not a dumb switch. The layer 3 switches do look into them to do routing depending on how they are configured. IPv6 requires multicast support, and while dumb switch will send the packet out all ports, when you get up to 48 ports you only want to send it to the ports that are interested in it, and I've seen some switches that refuse to send any multicast unless there's a system sending out the IGPM query packets, or you specifically login to configure what ports to send it on. LAN switching - Layer 3 switching
--That comes under "the cost of doing business." Patches should be available to anyone who has purchased the product, support contract or no.
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== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
Right, but the poster said it costs nothing to make.