HP 'clarifies' firmware/support contract rules

Cue Flood

of Product Liability sueballs for defective firmware in the US.

So do I buy Dell who regularly ship me servers with faults and who have assigned me a rep I can't understand or HP who are not going to fix anything broken after the initial period. I have lost either way in my opinion. I hope Lenovo do what they did for ex IBM desktops to the servers very soon.

Never did like 'em

I always found the HP people arrogant and their tin overpriced. Now they want to charge you for fixing their duff firmware. This announcement is further confirmation.

Buy elsewhere.

I think this is illegal in the UK. They are obliged to support for 6 years from date of purchase for warranty. Since they agree to give security patches, and they are obliged to fix defects present at manufacture there really isn't much left other than feature improvements but then they will need to produce a vast array of firmwares, some with just fixes and some with just features.

"to create great customer experiences with our products" ... not dealing with HP 1st liners in India would create great customer experiences. It's the main reason clients I know often prefer 3rd party support.

Cisco have been doing this for years though? What's the difference between say a switch, or a wireless LAN controller and a server? Where is the uproar against Cisco?

Really people,

So if a hard disk fails, the vendor should replace it - what, indefinitely?

C'mon,

All servers have a minimum form of warranty support, typically in our industry it is 12 months as minimum with additional years for maintenance and support as an option. Obviously that first 12 months as std, is built into the cost. The irony, I can imagine some customers reducing this too if it were optional, haha. The vendor (or optional third party businesses) are giving you the option, you pay for it, or you don't.

It really is simple, and not illegal at all.

HP has possibly changed their pronouncement and will offer "Safety and Security" firmware updates to existing customers. This brings up questions such as "How does HP differentiate between safety and security updates?" "What are the other updates and what is the value proposition" and "Why would anyone expect to be charged to help HP support their products as they promised they would work?"

Switching to another vendor does not solve the problem. The next vendor can make the same claim at any moment. This is a worldwide problem created by multi-national vendors. Don't complain here - complain to your local legislators wherever you live and tell them to require vendors to sell assets that can be repaired, reconfigured, resold, without paying a tithe to the OEM.

To those who don't get why its a problem, lets be clear, no other hardware provider of servers with any significant market share does this, or has ever done this in my 10 years with hardware, and no consumer provider of hardware has done this for as long as I've been using the internet.

I think the EU expects that hardware should function for 5 years, which is how Apple got caught with failing devices or batteries or something after 12 months a few years back.

No company is going to plan to deploy a server for less than 3 years outside of the city, so the 12 month argument is rubbish, and as for disks, before SSD's came out they were all competing to offer a 3 or 5 year warranty.

HP offer 3 years as standard for servers, and even with a 12 month Dell warranty, the EU would protect you from design problems resulting in early failures (within 2 years) and provide reasonable expectation of functional support for its lifetime, which for HP is about three years, but for IBM it is five or more I think.

They have killed the 2nd hand server market for HP servers and effectively alienated every company and hobbyist who wants to get as much value for money as possible...

by running a new server for 5 years or more -with reasonable expectation that it will boot and provide expected performance with a new SSD-Caching RAID card three years down the line, wont overheat because it's running a firmware version HP shipped with a cooling glitch, and won't have anomalies accepting new iLO serials.

All examples of HP firmware failings

What's wrong about that?

"Starting February 2014, an active warranty or contract is required to access HP ProLiant Server firmware updates"

What's wrong about that, the company makes money selling support contracts part of which are firmware updates.

As went IBM so will go Cisco and maybe HP

We know what happened with IBM hardware: I remember a customer back in the 90's with a newer IBM desktop that had those proprietary Microchannel slots in it. He wanted to run an external SCSI drive, and wanted an internal dialup modem (his serial ports were all used up for other applications), so he needed a couple of Microchannel cards. As I'm sure readers will recall, it was cheaper to buy another machine instead of the cards. Ironically, I think we got a Compaq. Same thing with Cisco. In spite of the fact that most Cisco hardware is pretty solid, once you factor what Cisco or a Cisco partner wants for the support and updates on older hardware it's often cheaper to just buy something else new. Perhaps the same will drive people away from HP. Having said all that, I think the price of HP hardware has come down so much over the last 5-ish years (their margins must be pretty tight) maybe picking up one of their "support packs" will be worthwhile. And, to be fair, the Proliant stuff is very reliable. But then, so is Dell - with BIOS updates and drivers available for free.

Funnily enough I've just had a phone call from HP informing me that we've let some of our Carepacks lapse (which we've done deliberately) and trying to put the frighteners on us to renew said Carepacks.

They're not in any way trying to bleed more money out of customers of course! ;)

Bye bye HP! Time to start looking elsewhere for future tin.