Rights/compensation for failed hardware

[titch]

Hi All

 

Hoping for some advice on our rights for failed hardware.

 

I won't name the brand yet as I want to give them the benefit of doubt they may help. We have had our SAN for 3.5 years so a few months out of standard warranty.

 

We have had 4 drives fail at exactly the same time due to some dodgy self destruct firmware we knew nothing about.

 

The brand have offered to try and recover the data which will take over 6 weeks if recoverable at all, or they will send us some new drives and wipe the SAN.

 

On there own none of the options are workable for us without some help. Me and my team have worked our socks off failing over to our DR site and makeing sure the school is still up and running during one of the most stressful and busiest times of our lifes working mega overtime whilst there is so much else going on. The service at school has also been interrupted as we have had to take down non critical servers as we don't have the DR capacity.

 

Becuase of this I have have called upon a local company of specialists who are helping us restore our site to a borrowed SAN so we can make sure all the backups are working before writing back to our own SAN and writing over whatever data may be left recoverable. This is great and I am very appreciative of the help but it will obvouisly come at an expense.

 

The only saving grace is that when we did our server refresh 3.5 years ago we didn't refresh our Backup and DR setup with the same kit as otherwise they would have all died at exactly the same time!

 

So my question is this:

 

The drives are out warranty but come with a ticking timebomb firmware problem which I was never contacted about. I don't feel like the replacement of drives is anywhere near close to compensate for what we've had to deal with.

 

Does anyone know what rights we may have to exercise and what they think is a reasonable response from me bearing in mind this has taken a real toll and me, my team and the school.

 

Cheers in advance and any opinions welcome.

[3s-gtech]

I think that you can only expect goodwill, and nothing more. Even with a fault that is baked in - if you try to go down a route of legal recourse, you’ll find that door closes very quickly. Trying to make any sort of claim outside warranty is always pretty sketchy - I managed it when I had every one of a particular brand’s certain model of projector I’d bought go blurry with heat damage, all at the same time. They were great and sorted it - but they didn’t really have to!

[titch]

I think that you can only expect goodwill, and nothing more. Even with a fault that is baked in - if you try to go down a route of legal recourse, you’ll find that door closes very quickly. Trying to make any sort of claim outside warranty is always pretty sketchy - I managed it when I had every one of a particular brand’s certain model of projector I’d bought go blurry with heat damage, all at the same time. They were great and sorted it - but they didn’t really have to!

Cheers for info. This particular firmware problem renders the drives useless after a set amount of hours.

 

So in essence what you're suggesting is that a vendor could legitimately make it so there hardware self destructs one day after warranty and thats OK?

[titch]

Cheers for info. This particular firmware problem renders the drives useless after a set amount of hours.

 

So in essence what you're suggesting is that a vendor could legitimately make it so there hardware self destructs one day after warranty and thats OK?

Just to add even if I did have warranty it would only be a drive replacement they would offer no kind remittance.

[3s-gtech]

Cheers for info. This particular firmware problem renders the drives useless after a set amount of hours.

 

So in essence what you're suggesting is that a vendor could legitimately make it so there hardware self destructs one day after warranty and thats OK?

 

That’s a very difficult one to prove, though - of course legally they’d be playing a dodgy game but from a consumer standpoint it’d need class action to actually address it (unless this practice was leaked). We don’t often have the comebacks afforded to e.g. car buyers (recalls many years after production, common class action lawsuits) perhaps mainly due to volume and purchasing this kit is B2B.

[kmount]

I really feel for you on this, the bug is a really nasty one.

 

I unfortunately think they will push back and say that you as the customer didn't perform the routine maintenance to update the firmware which would have resolved the issue (in their eyes!) if it's a 2 now 3 letter company they released updates a while back for it and I know that isn't helpful right now it would be their stance. I'd push back on that though to suggest that they should have gone further to contact customers etc.

 

The difficulty I think here is that if a supermarket or toy company recalls something you don't often get a direct notification of it other than a bit of press and a poster in store - whereas a call recall you tend to get it via the post through the rules there.

 

Feel for you I really do, glad you have a DR site and good backups - a lot of places wouldn't have had those.

[HPlum78]

Unfortunately we don't have the ability to bring class actions here in the UK as such (I have some unique insights into this from a dodgy vaccination and knock on side effects that its had).

 

There are a mass of ins and outs to this and the fall out is that you are having to recover, I feel your pain here I got caught in an interesting issue with a SAN that only came to light if the SAN was on a particular version of the firmware and the server had a particular version of the driver installed (ended in a restore from backups!) and the unit was in warranty with additional support but all of this is little help when you have users knocking on your door! The only thing it did bring was some guaranteed replacement hardware on the backup from their support guys who in the end where a useful backup and did help us recover in a timely manner.

 

Good luck.

[titch]

Just thought I'd update the thread.

 

I failed with getting anything back from HPE other than some replacement refurb drives. Several thousand pounds out of pocket, days lost, multiple sleepless nights due to these crappy self destruct drives.

 

I don't think I will be using HP gear again.

[FN-GM]

Just thought I'd update the thread.

 

I failed with getting anything back from HPE other than some replacement refurb drives. Several thousand pounds out of pocket, days lost, multiple sleepless nights due to these crappy self destruct drives.

 

I don't think I will be using HP gear again.

 

I’m confused as to what the expenses was? What did you need to pay for if you had been provided drives?

 

Just out of curiosity, did you keep the SAN and drives firmware up to date?

[titch]

I’m confused as to what the expenses was? What did you need to pay for if you had been provided drives?

 

Just out of curiosity, did you keep the SAN and drives firmware up to date?

Sorry FN-GM. I didn't see your reply. The costs are:

 

1 The cost of new drives we purchased becuase we needed them that day and I wasnt prepared to use the refurbished drives HP were offering us as a replacement in our production system, given the history of the brand new drives that were in there.

 

2 The cost of consultancy/engineer who leant a spare San so we could test backups and also helped us failover / failback / wipe old San. All of which I wanted to have someone hold my hand whilst getting back up together with 4 days before the start of term in September.