![]() ![]() Nothing has been as bad as that one, though, and we haven't gone more than a day or two at a time without working backups since. ![]() Since then, I think we've had to upgrade the firmware something like four more times to fix both major and minor known issues that were actively causing problems. He fixed the issue by (guess what!) upgrading me to the latest beta fw version, which at least got backups working again, even if we had to do a full re-backup of the entire environment (which took over three days because their backups run very slowly). He made more progress and gave me more reliable information on the issues in the first five minutes of our call than I'd had in over two weeks. He admitted that the firmware they'd put me on wasn't a good one, wasn't recommended for production, and had a ton of issues, although he wasn't sure why four different Tier 1's hadn't known that or been able to help (he suggested that maybe it was because none of the Tier 1 staff had been there for a whole year yet, and only a few for a whole six months). I finally demanded an escalation and was assigned to a Tier 2 rep, who actually knew what he was doing. ![]() Each time I called back and demanded a new ticket owner, they would just say they needed to "try one thing and continue to monitor the backup jobs" and then not call me back or respond in any way until I gave up and called the support line and demanded another new one. We had no successful backups for two weeks, during which time I cycled through three additional Tier 1 support rep ticket owners (I later found out the original, lying support rep had left the company the day after upgrading our firmware, but no new owner was automatically assigned to my ticket), none of whom would return calls/emails or let me know what was actually going on. He upgraded us, and the new firmware, which it turned out was a non-production beta with a ton of known issues, broke all differential/incremental/changed-block-tracking backups, although I do admit that it fixed the issue with DR replication of backups. I confirmed with the tech that the upgrade candidate firmware was production-ready and tested, and he affirmed that it was. Support's recommended fix was to upgrade the firmware. On the first major backup issue we had, back in January, replication between our prod and DR Barracuda appliances just stopped happening for no reason. Support is somewhere between passable-but-unable-to-make-up-for-the-terrible-firmware-coders-and-godawful/nonexistent-QA and lying-to-you-and-making-the-situation-much-worse-after-saying-they-would-fix-the-current-issue. ![]() Every time, the answer to the current intractable issue is to upgrade to the latest version of the firmware, often one that's still in beta, and doing so is inevitably just trading one thing I can't do without for another. Every version of the firmware they've upgraded me to for the last 7 months has had at least one major, functionality-breaking bug. We had one here (and another at our DR site for replication) when I got here, and it's been nothing but problems. (Edit: I changed my mind Symantec Backup Exec 12 was never this bad.) Their firmware engineers introduce as many major bugs as they fix with each new firmware release, and QA seems nonexistent. They aren't quite as bad as Symantec Backup Exec, but they aren't much better, either. Tl dr: Don't buy a Barracuda backup appliance. ![]()
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