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From: forrest@blia.BLI.COM (Jon Forrest)
Newsgroups: comp.os.vms
Subject: Re: System Industries disks
Message-ID: <3078@blia.BLI.COM>
Date: Thu, 13-Aug-87 12:22:24 EDT
Article-I.D.: blia.3078
Posted: Thu Aug 13 12:22:24 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 15-Aug-87 10:32:01 EDT
References: <8708130017.AA00764@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Distribution: world
Organization: Britton Lee, Berkeley, CA
Lines: 71

I'd like to relate my experiences with SI since they seem to
be similar to Ruth Milner's.

At my previous job one of the Vax's I managed had ONLY SI disks
and tapes. In other words, NO DEC stuff. Needless to say, this
made me a little nervous but this was the configuration when
I took the job. Fortunateley, the system disk was a 9766 which
is the same as a DEC RM05 so I could run the standard DEC
DRDRIVER without patches and also use standalone backup without
patches to recover any crashed system disks.

Anyway, the SI salespeople were just the opposite as the DEC
salespeople. The SI people would call you every week and tell
you how much they miss you and how you're doing such a great
job and if there's anything you need to just give them a call.
The DEC people rarely returned calls and were generally all but
impossible to reach. I guess that is what being on commission
does to your sales force.

Well, things were going pretty well at my site but at another
site which I didn't manage they had a major disaster, loosing
4 9766's packs and heads. The repairperson thought he had fixed them
only to find that he had screwed up and that the packs were being
trashed again. As luck would have it, some of the packs had only
been backed up to other packs so there was some risk that further
disasters would destroy unrecoverable data. Needless to say,
SI management was called and told that the repairperson would
no longer be allowed at the site. Due to this disaster, and to the
fact that SI was trying very hard to do a good job in this developing
geographical area, the guy never showed up again. For a while they
had a service manager person do the work. He was OK but it was clear
that he couldn't do the work forever.

So, the had to hire someone else. Here's where things got interesting.
The guy they hired looked like a reject from the local Hell's Angel
chapter. I'm not kidding. If you didn't know this guy you
would not have let him into your site. The funny thing was that
this guy could fix ANYTHING. I guess that there much be a similarity
between disk/tape drives and Harley Davidsons. I never failed to
be amazed when this guy would take the knife out of his boot to
open envelopes. Or, when waiting for disks to format, he
would break out the latest issue of Easy Rider magazine. Or, sometimes
he would tell me about some of the biker bars he's been thrown out
of. The point is none of this mattered because he fixed stuff.
And it didn't break again. This, compared to the 3 piece bozo that
had caused the disaster, was refreshing.

I left this job about a year and a half ago but I've heard this guy
is still there and everyone is happy with him. SI has given up
trying to get this guy to wear a suit because he'd probably quit
and then everyone would be pissed off at SI again.

The moral of this story is that your success with SI will depend
to a large extent on the quality of your repairperson. Of course,
there may be inherent problems in the hardware or software
you buy but that doesn't happen that often and, in the case of
hardware, it probably isn't SI's fault since they don't make
their own hardware. I did get tired patching DEC drivers and
have since decided never to buy hardware from anybody that requires
patching drivers.

I might buy from SI again but I would check all their local references
to see what they think of the local repair people. Also, if the quality
of the repair people goes down I wouldn't be bashfull in letting
management know about it.

Jon Forrest

forrest@blia.BLI.COM
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