HPE Maintenance Quote

[Namlehse]

So we're coming up on our third year, which means it's time to renew support. I'm having major issues getting anything from HP and I'm wondering if it's the sales people.

So starting last year when trying to budget for the cost (As most people do?), I was told that HP will NOT give out numbers more than three months out. We ended up working with our vendor to get MSRP as best we could for budgeting, but that turned out to be a nightmare. I inflated the number a bit beyond that as a CYOA, then submitted what I could.

Fast forward into this year, we're now a few months out and I'm getting nothing but dragging feet. I've never worked so hard to pay anyone in my life. When I did get a quote, it was missing over 2/3rds of my drives and shelves! That was over a month ago, I haven't seen anything since. My vendor is frantically trying to figure something out for us, but he's just a middle man. I'm not in direct contact with anyone at HP anymore. I haven't seen our area salesman in several years.

At the beginning of the year, I had an issue buying 96TB of upgrades for our StoreOnce appliance as well, seemed to really not move at all.

I love the HP products and support, but I can't believe how hard they seem to be making it for me to spend money!

Getting back to the point, anyone else heard of this three month rule? Seems like utter BS to me.

[rotorhead1]

Are you trying to go directly through HP? I would suggest trying to go through a reseller.

[Richard Siemers]

I have not heard of this 3 month rule either.

Generally speaking, I have found to get better service and discounts from resellers who are dedicated to selling HP, or at least lead with HP products. You may want to try to "spot check" with another reseller to see if they too have the same issues or if they have an easier time.

You also should be able to call the main HPe sales number and ask who your assigned account executive is, and who your storage sales rep is.

[Namlehse]

I have not heard of this 3 month rule either.

Generally speaking, I have found to get better service and discounts from resellers who are dedicated to selling HP, or at least lead with HP products. You may want to try to "spot check" with another reseller to see if they too have the same issues or if they have an easier time.

You also should be able to call the main HPe sales number and ask who your assigned account executive is, and who your storage sales rep is.

The storage rep is the one that stopped replying to emails and phone calls.

We go through a reseller, though they don't primary 3PAR. They did however put me on the path to 3PAR when we wanted to dump EMC. The local 3PAR reseller is also the one that burned us with EMC, so we've been reluctant to reach out to them. Something about waiting two weeks for a new power supplies and other equally critical parts that just didn't sit well with us.

[sjm]

Shocking.

We have just purchased our 4 x3par

we have 2 x 7400 and they were both on 3 year support.

It was far cheaper to buy and 8200 when one needed replacement and now just purchased and stood up an 8440.

I would suggest you contact EMC and HP and maybe another storage supplier and make it clear your next array purchase is up for grabs.

We did this and got a great price from HP for our 8440 and 3,84 TB disks and ongoing price lock on on when we need to purchase extra disks.

We found this to be best method as all SAN storage suppliers try and guess what you will be happy to pay rather than offering best price.

After getting indicative pricing from HP on our 8440 we said we are going to tender which we did.

we got 50K off the price of SAN and 6k per disk off ongoing purchase of SSD's

Deal with multiple suppliers as we did we found it works far better

[ailean]

We had the 3 month rule too when trying to budget a couple of times, not very handy.
Trying to extend our T800 into year 6 due to delays on the building that it's replacement was going into was a pain, took about 6 months of every senior HP exec and team plus resellers and I ended up having to check the part numbers for every single disk, dimm, card etc plus the support part numbers for the entire system as they seemed unable to do it remotely (about 8-9 pages of parts).
We try to buy all our HP SAN kit with 5 years now but still can get caught with expansions where they were unable to pro-ratter the support till the end of the 5th year.

[Namlehse]

We had the 3 month rule too when trying to budget a couple of times, not very handy.

Glad to hear it's not just me.

As for the go to multiple vendors. The issue we ran into is they only give incentive pricing to a single vendor, the rest get MSRP.

We made out very well on our 7400's. We ended up with two for the price of one in the end (We budgeted for a single storage processor). We got in at the end of the fiscal year for HP.

I was afraid I would have to serial check everything they sent me, we have 16 cages total to tally up which will make the task daunting. We've already been covered once by the "Make it right" program, when they sold us the wrong SSD's for AFC. Instead of replacing the disks we have, they just gave us another 8 SSD's.

[JohnMH]

If the array is dialing home HPE or the partner can create a 100% accurate BOM in a matter of minutes simply from the serial number. Although the pricing may well have to go through multiple rounds of signoff including through the reseller, which is typically the longest part of the whole process.

[ailean]

If the array is dialing home HPE or the partner can create a 100% accurate BOM in a matter of minutes simply from the serial number. Although the pricing may well have to go through multiple rounds of signoff including through the reseller, which is typically the longest part of the whole process.

This is what I expected, even conference calls with head of sale/support/maint renews etc failed to make it happen that way. Maybe linked to that array being pre-HP with bits from multiple vendors.
In the end it was a vendor that we didn't deal with anymore that provided the most accurate info as a starting point.
Everything running now is HP so I'm hoping just keeping track of all the SAIDs related to a unit will be enough for future renews.

[HPEStorageGuy]

@Namlehse Please send me an email and let me know contact details. I'll escalate it with the U.S. sales team.

My email is calvin dot zito at hpe dot com.