Summary, Unreleased parts.

From: John A. Johnston (johnj@welchlab.welch.jhu.edu)
Date: Wed Sep 12 1990 - 22:13:11 CDT


On 8/23 I posted an article about encountering "Unreleased parts" with
regard to a 4/280 --> 4/490 upgrade. (part #UG4/280-64X-R64).

Shortly after that posting (well, 8/24) I had all 13 email responses
and phone contact from Sun corporate HQ to my posting.

My *primary* objective in getting the hardware was in order to be
invoiced for the part because due to a characteristic of the budget the
$ came from, the invoice must have been processed by 8/31 or the $
disappeared leaving me with a bunch of stuff for a 4/490 & no CPU,
which would quickly build to a serious headache.

A pseudo summary of responses:

- Several people were interested in the outcome due to similar
  orders and future plans. One noted a confirmed (real?) shipping date
  for a similar order.

- Two responses from competition of Sun. (Looks like more than just
  Sun folks read this list!).

- Multiple mentions of regular 4+ months of waiting for Sun
  Stuff (one manager in the federal gov seemed to be particularly
  abused by long waits for Sun stuff).

- One po'd because of ordering early (read, still waiting for the 490
  upgrade) because now a cd drive comes with a 4/490, (as does
  SparcServer Manager & the db Excelorator products, guess I miss
  all of these too ...)

- Two mails for my number and address from someone at sun, no further
  reply from that person.

- A person from Sun posted a mail that cleared the air some by
  explaining a re-release of the upgrade for IPI support only, until an
  SMD support problem was addressed, and another sun-manager provided a
  survey of experiences with the problem. Several others mentioned the
  SMD/IPI/490 problem as a cause for the delay.

The outcome has been mostly positive. During the call from SunCorp, I
informed them of the real reason (above) for moaning about the upgrade
($) and that I had also ordered IPI technology with the upgrade (5
disks 2 contollers) which should remove most of the concern of SMD
non-functionality.

I later (Still 8/24!) got a call from an unnecessarily paniced
sales-dude (well, the part was in the book) who then talked to corp &
billing etc. gave me a real ship date for the part, which came this
Monday 9/10.

All in all a happy ending. My thanks to the sun-managers for
responding quickly and completely!

-johnj



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