On 8/23 I posted an article about encountering "Unreleased parts" with
regard to a 4/280 --> 4/490 upgrade. (part #UG4/280-64X-R64).
Shortly after that posting (well, 8/24) I had all 13 email responses
and phone contact from Sun corporate HQ to my posting.
My *primary* objective in getting the hardware was in order to be
invoiced for the part because due to a characteristic of the budget the
$ came from, the invoice must have been processed by 8/31 or the $
disappeared leaving me with a bunch of stuff for a 4/490 & no CPU,
which would quickly build to a serious headache.
A pseudo summary of responses:
- Several people were interested in the outcome due to similar
orders and future plans. One noted a confirmed (real?) shipping date
for a similar order.
- Two responses from competition of Sun. (Looks like more than just
Sun folks read this list!).
- Multiple mentions of regular 4+ months of waiting for Sun
Stuff (one manager in the federal gov seemed to be particularly
abused by long waits for Sun stuff).
- One po'd because of ordering early (read, still waiting for the 490
upgrade) because now a cd drive comes with a 4/490, (as does
SparcServer Manager & the db Excelorator products, guess I miss
all of these too ...)
- Two mails for my number and address from someone at sun, no further
reply from that person.
- A person from Sun posted a mail that cleared the air some by
explaining a re-release of the upgrade for IPI support only, until an
SMD support problem was addressed, and another sun-manager provided a
survey of experiences with the problem. Several others mentioned the
SMD/IPI/490 problem as a cause for the delay.
The outcome has been mostly positive. During the call from SunCorp, I
informed them of the real reason (above) for moaning about the upgrade
($) and that I had also ordered IPI technology with the upgrade (5
disks 2 contollers) which should remove most of the concern of SMD
non-functionality.
I later (Still 8/24!) got a call from an unnecessarily paniced
sales-dude (well, the part was in the book) who then talked to corp &
billing etc. gave me a real ship date for the part, which came this
Monday 9/10.
All in all a happy ending. My thanks to the sun-managers for
responding quickly and completely!
-johnj
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:05:58 CDT