"Enterprise" support

Post Reply
Storever
Starting out
Posts: 15
Joined: Fri Mar 15, 2019 9:22 pm

"Enterprise" support

Post by Storever »

We've been struggling to operate two ES1686dc units for 18 months. Between controllers completely dead upon arrival, failed power supplies, failed fans, failed SATA cards, missing documentation and software issues we've barely managed to get them stood up. Performance issues are currently preventing us from using them for the intended purpose.

One of the biggest issues we've had is support. While a paid support contract is not available in the US (we naively tried to purchase that when we had been told by sales that it was available), you get 5 years of "warranty" coverage. This includes support but it's absolutely horrendous. The only way to interact with support is via the web portal. Phone and email are not available. Even the ticketing system from the portal can't interact with email. Every interaction with support personal takes minimum 24 hours. In other words, 24 hours after you submit a ticket you can expect a follow up reply asking a question. Even if you answer that question within minutes, you'll wait another 24 hours before you receive another response. Unless of course you happen to submit a ticket just before they have time off. In that case you can expect to wait several days before receiving anything back from the tech. Support personnel are not particularly well versed in the product and frequently give the wrong answer.

Occasionally after weeks (or months) of back and forth with support you might be lucky enough to get escalated. The next tier appear to be the engineers in Taiwan responsible for QES. Unfortunately they typically only make themselves available in their local timezone, so if you live in the US you'll enjoy staying up all night to talk to them. Of the 4 support engagements I've had so far, they were late on all of them sometimes by more than an hour. They require you to set up TeamViewer (yeesh) for remote support. They are unwilling to talk on the telephone or use TeamViewer voice chat, instead preferring to use the built in chat feature (mostly, more on that at the end). Because of this they're either unwilling or unable to explain what they're doing, and frequently go quiet for long stretches of time while you wonder what's going on. They don't read the ticket contents before getting on, so typically you'll have to explain the entire situation to them again.

On one particular occasion, and I wish I were making this up, the support tech was on a mobile device, instead of a computer. As a result they couldn't (or wouldn't??) use the chat feature in TeamViewer and instead opened a notepad.exe window in order to type to me. Due to excessive delays in their typing we would frequently begin typing over each other while trying to communicate.

I have other anecdotes and frustrations that I plan to share - hopefully this information can help anyone considering purchasing one of these devices.
Post Reply

Return to “QES Operating System (QNAP Enterprise Storage OS)”