Advise Your Customers To Stay On Their Toes
Inexperienced Maintainers Can Cause Mayhem
It happened twice last week alone. On Tuesday, TeamKCI fielded a call from a frantic individual working for a hardware dealer turned maintenance provider looking for help on a Brocade® 48000 director. The story we got was that his company has been maintaining the 48K director for several years when one of the Control Processor (CP) cards failed. The hardware dealer turned maintenance provider went directly to its parts source, eBay, and bought a discounted replacement part. The only testing that was done was to check if the green light went on when the part was still in the donor machine. Firmware compatibilities were not considered by the maintenance provider or its parts supplier. Now frantic with no knowledge of the workings of the underlying Brocade® 48K – and the interplay of hardware with software, the wannabe maintenance provider was grasping for a solution – not realizing that the 48K has two CP cards and that the firmware must be compatible on both cards.
On Wednesday, we got a call from a different hardware dealer turned maintenance provider. His company maintains two Brocade® 4500 SAN switches. His client asked that the switches be relocated within the data center and also asked that several zoning changes be performed. These machines were under continuous support with the same provider for over five years, yet the maintenance provider did not have the knowledge to shut down the machines to move them, nor the know-how to change the zoning parameters.
It’s good practice to advise your customers that there is a lot of faux maintenance support out there these days. Quality IMS support from IBM®, the top IT hardware company in the world for the past 100+ years, in partnership with TeamKCI, the top switching experts for the past 37 years, is clearly the best option for any customer looking for economies on Brocade® support without sacrificing reliability and quality.
IMS support comes with deep understanding of Brocade® hardware and how it works, knowledge of compatibility issues and firmware and operational assistance when necessary. Fully tested compatible parts pre-positioned for rapid delivery, and a technical support team that is second to none.
IBM® IMS for Brocade®, the “gold standard” in Third-Party Support.
TeamKCI is an IT Life Cycle Vendor, servicing, selling, deploying and managing computer assets for switching, storage arrays, servers and Ethernet networks. We are the leader in third-party support for Brocade® SAN and Cisco® MDS equipment.
Disclaimer:
KCI, Inc (dba TeamKCI) is the industry leader in premier Third-Party maintenance support. TeamKCI is not an authorized reseller, distributor, partner of nor an affiliate of any Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) or related to any manufacturer’s authorized service center. All offers for maintenance support are from our world-wide award winning support group not the OEM. All trademarks, service marks, logos remain the property of the corresponding company. All rights reserved.
Brocade® is the registered trademark of Broadcom Inc.
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IBM is trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation, registered in many jurisdictions worldwide.