Oracle to customers: 'Sun? Sun who?'
Oracle had better get a grip on support for Sun products before Sun customers jump ship en masse
Follow @pveneziaPlenty of people have been cautiously optimistic about Oracle's acquisition of Sun. Many, like myself, have resigned ourselves to the idea -- and have been hoping against hope that the fallout wouldn't be that bad.
Well, guess what? It's that bad.
[ Just a rough transition? Or have our worst fears for Sun been realized? If you're feeling nostalgic for the former darling of the Valley, check out InfoWorld's memorial Sun slideshow. ]
Head over to Sun.com. You'd expect to find a nice Sun-centric site to help all the Sun folks make the transition. Nope -- in fact, Sun.com redirects to the Oracle.com home page. Look closely; if you have good eyes, you'll see a little column of links to Sun products. Now click the Support link. It's Oracle support -- and my age-old Sun logins don't work there. The process of signing up for a new account was fraught with disaster, with the registration app wildly throwing out 500 application errors and redirections to nowhere.
All I wanted was a support link for some Sun hardware. It took me the better part of 30 minutes to find what I was looking for -- via carefully crafted Google queries. (There's a Sun link on the main support page now, but that didn't exist a few weeks ago when I was poking around.)
When I finally located the information I needed, it turned out that I needed to call support anyhow. After another 30 minutes of holding, transferring, and waiting in various queues, I got a support ticket -- and was told I'd have to wait eight business hours for a callback from a support tech. The call never came.
The problem was abysmal NFS write performance on a brand-new Sun storage box. Lacking a dedicated ZIL (ZFS Intention Log) device, I was expecting lower performance than if I did have the ZIL, but I didn't think NFS write performance would be on par with a USB flash drive -- yet that's what I saw. After the first-tier support request, I submitted a diagnostic bundle from the device and waited for my callback.
