From: treadway@llnl.gov (Thomas Treadway)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp
Subject: Re: Future of HP 9000/300 series?, and the 9000/834, or How to screw a customer?,
Date: 22 Jan 93 02:44:59 GMT
Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.1 PL6]

David Chrin (davidc@mcs.kent.edu) wrote:
> Sorry folks, I have to get this off my chest (and I hope Thomas sees this):
> 
> In article <1993Jan13.180150.3999@hpcvusn.cv.hp.com>, tomg@PROBLEM_WITH_INEWS_GATEWAY_FILE (Thomas J. Gilg) writes:
> |> Michael Bryan (michael@resonex.com) wrote:
> |> > With more and more people using and switching to the 700 series systems,
> |> > does anybody know anything about HP's future plans for the 300 series?
> |> 
> |> Announcements will be made in the next few months detailing support
> |> and future efforts for HP-UX on s300/s400 and Domain/OS on s400/DNseries
> |> machines.
> |> 
> |> Thomas Gilg
> |> tomg@cv.hp.com
> 
> I'm willing to bet the "announcements" will be much like what HP did to the
> owners of 834's with the graphics displays. (I have 3).
> 
> We issued a PO for only software update service at $4,260 for the 3 systems
> early last fall. After the PO was issued, (but fortunately before we paid),
> I got a letter from the systems support division that said quote:
> 
> 	"This letter is to inform you that the latest version of the HP-UX
> 	 operating system, 9.0, is due for shipment in October. This release
> 	 is not supported on your system."
> 
> So, why the hell did HP issue a software update support contract
> to us, if they had no intention of honoring it by providing updates?
> In my book, this is fraud. Needless to say we did not pay. The
> letter goes on:
.. deleted

Yes, Hewlett-Packard Customer Support has hit an all time low in 
customer satisfaction. I've received letter (P/N 5063-
2909) and brochure (P/N 5961-3455) on what to expect in the 
up coming HP-UX 9.0 software release. To my surprise, my HP 
9000 Model 835 TurboSRX was listed as "unsupported hardware"! 
What gives? About one month before release 9.0 is due HP 
tells me that they are no longer going to support my machine, 
i.e. no 9.0, no X11 Release 5, no Motif 1.2, no Vue 3.0, no 
Vue Lite, no Fortran 90, and no LVM. Why 9.0 may have even 
have fixed the poor performance introduced with the 8.0 
release. This machine is only 3 years old, it seems a little 
early to be obsoleted. When this machine was bought 
(originally as an 825 SRX) HP was selling PA-RISC systems as 
"technical solutions" (replacements for HP1000's and RTE) and 
superworkstations supporting real-time features, like kernel 
preemption and powerfail recovery. These systems were still 
in the books in 1990. In my case its a little late in the 
fiscal year to drop that bomb. Business needs require time 
for budget and strategy planning.

The brochure's only consolation was an "attractive upgrade 
program to upgrade to a high performance Series 700 CPU". 
Granted the 700 systems are screamers, with blazing graphics 
when compared to my 835. However the Series 700 falls short 
of a viable alternative in several ways. The 700's don't 
provide most of the features that you almost take for granted 
on the 800's, such as battery backup memory, powerfail 
recovery, disk partitioning, disk mirroring,
and performance utilities like sar, sa1, timex. 
The hardware limitations of the 700 systems are even more 
severe when compared to my 835, with 7 I/O slots, additional 
8 I/O expander slots, multi-head graphics support for 2 
active and 2 passive graphic subsystems. Why the TurboSRX 
even provides hardware pan and zoom, as well as a 4bit 
overlay plane! All of this is cleanly mounted in 2 full 
height EIA 19S racks. None of my current disk interfaces 
(HP-IB and HP-FL), as well as 1/2" and cartridge tapes are 
supported by the 700's.

Maybe I should have realized that something was amiss when HP 
started calling the 800's Business Servers (what happened to 
the S600?), stopped providing graphics heads on 800's, 
started calling anything with a graphics head a workstation, 
and forgot to include X11 and Vue with my initial HP-UX 8.0 
release. HP has gladly taken my money for hardware and 
software support this last October with not so much as a hint 
that the 835tSRX was not going to be supported at HP-UX 9.0.

I am requesting that the technical support for the 800 
"workstations" (S825, S834, S835, etc.) be continued 
indefinitely and that no further discrimination be made 
between the workstation and multi-user worlds. Also that HP 
make an effort at providing a greater choice in viable HP 
technical solutions.
--
Thomas R. Treadway                              treadway@llnl.GOV
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory          voice: (510) 423-4997
7000 East Avenue, L-573                         FAX:   (510) 422-2237
Livermore, CA 94550-0611                        whois: TRT6
Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp