QUALITY AWARDS III: NetApp sweeps NAS awards

Ezine

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Technical support
It's not unusual for our survey to reveal mediocre scores for technical support. Relative to the rest of the survey, this was once again true for NAS. This was the only section in which four vendor product lines had sub-6.0 scores, although EMC did so by only a whisker with a 5.99 in the midrange category.

NetApp was the only vendor with above-7.0 scores for any statement in this section. For the statement "This vendor provides support as contractually specified," NetApp's enterprise products scored 7.00, while its midrange products received a 7.06. These scores were substantially higher than any other vendor's on that issue.

"We called them when we migrated up from Windows 2003 to Windows 2008, and they came down and consulted with us for about an hour," says Fishman of his NetApp support. "They're very good."

IBM placed second in both the enterprise and midrange categories in this section, but a 5.44 for "Problems are resolved in a timely manner" and a 5.56 for "The vendor's support personnel are knowledgeable" dragged down its average.

Methodist Healthcare's Baucum could have gone with NetApp for his NAS deployment, but decided to stick with IBM even though it was still NetApp gear. "It kind of reduces the friction if you've got something that's not compatible," he says. With a lot of IBM equipment already installed, he preferred

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to deal with one vendor. "You don't have to have a guessing game of visiting multiple vendors to get to the right versions of code," he explains.


Click here for the Midrange Award finialists (PDF).

This was first published in June 2008

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