Someone else posted off-list to tell me that his experience was similar to
Patrick's... the board was power cycled and failed again 4 days later, then they
replaced the board. As far as the CE's expertise, his comments were that it's
been a while since he worked on MPE (which is a testimony in itself) and I had
to walk him through the procedure of using PSCONFIG.PRED to see if anything was
being posted to the predictive report. He had to look in his book to see how to
replace our board. The level of expertise of the HP CE's for MPE has been
declining. The last time I needed hardware support at another location, the CE
had zero MPE experience.  So no, I am not entirely comfortable with the level of
expertise or advise that they provide me. Maybe even a few years ago their
expertise was good, but not today, with certain exceptions to those CE's who
have been around a while.

One problem I'm sure many of us are confronted with is devoting time to a
recovery plan on a system that never dies... so you put it off and put it off
until one day you actually DO have a hardware failure. I can't even remember the
last time we had a power cycle on this system, let alone a simple reset.

>>> "HOFMEISTER,JAMES (HP-USA,ex1)" <[log in to unmask]> 07/02 11:21 AM >>>
Hello Folks @ 3000-l,

Re: faulty processor

Not a hardware guy, but just another perspective...

Processor was running fine for years...  and then took a system abort...
suspect possible power fluctuation... system restart fails and problem
diagnosed as bad CPU... CE comes on-site, replaces CPU and system will
not restart.  re-installed original CPU, booted and system runs... We
agreed to an action plan to monitor while another CPU was send to the
site as a precaution...  The S/48 ran fine for years until it was
decommissioned/replaced with out another CPU related failure.

Question? Is the "NEW" board in the CE kit going to be more reliable
than the burned in board existing in your machine now ?  The HP H/W
CE's have a pretty good feel for this and in a past life as a customer
of HP's, I was quite successful in relying on their expertise.

A few points here:

It is important to keep in mind when you introduce a new board into a
system that you have implemented change.  If a failure is going to be
seen it is most likely to be seen following some type of change and in
general as time goes by the failure rate will decrease significantly.

Question? Do you have the expertise in H/W to override a H/W CE
engineer's recommendation ?  Or would it be better to establish a
collaborative relationship where an action plan is developed to
maximize uptime, minimize change and reduce time to recover if
necessary.  Another question ? Do you have an established recovery
plan which meets the criteria of supporting your critical business
needs ?

The feed back in general from the folks on the 3000-L and from
customer surveys is the HP e3000 hardware is the most reliable in the
industry and that is one thing we all can appreciate!

Regards,

James Hofmeister
Hewlett Packard
Worldwide Technology Network Expert Center
P.S. My Ideals are my own, not necessarily my employers.

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