How difficult to become Sun's customer - experiences from shopping on sun.com

0 - Why to write this blog - I recently saw an article about "Sun's Six Biggest Mistakes" at http://www.forbes.com/2009/04/06/sun-microsystems-enterprise-technology-enterprise-tech-sun.html, I couldn't agree more with it especially after my recent shopping experiences, and now I think I understand better of the reasons why Sun is losing customers and cann't become profitable, it's just too difficult to become a Sun's customer and Sun has been wasting too much money and losing too many chances just from a very small purchase, there are 73 e-mails exchanged between myself and 7 people in Sun plus 3 group aliases, and about 10 phone calls, within a couple of days, how many resources (time and money) have been wasted?!

1. Reason to become a Sun's customer - After deciding to purchase some servers and storage systems to setup a web site, I thought for a while about where to get the hardware, from Dell, HP, or Sun? The answer is very simple to me, it's Sun, just because of one reason: I have been using Sun's systems since 1990 and I worked at Sun from 1997 to 2009, I can't hate Sun at all although I lost my favorite working place due to Sun's poor performance for such a long time.

2. Have to speak English in order to learn more about the SSE program online - After deciding to shop from Sun, I went to www.sun.com, saw the "Startup" menu immediately because I once heard a SSE (Sun Start-up Essentials) program which provides good discount to start-ups to not miss next google, youtube, facebook, twitter, etc.
But it's not very obvious where to start, after reading for a while, I clicked on a graphical world map which shows "Startups Enjoy Sun Startup Essentials Now expanded to 30 countries Find Your Country!" and arrived at http://www.sun.com/emrkt/startupessentials/index.jsp?intcmp=2709, btw, I was excited for a couple of minutes when I saw 30 countries are list there, I clicked on P.R.China and it did show translated page at http://cn.sun.com/emrkt/startupessentials/, however, later on I had to use the English version because the website on cn.sun.com doesn't allow me to log in and only has some ads, the entire online ordering system is all in English, I really don't know how many startups in China might come to Sun if this program is fully localized into Simplified Chinese, but now people in China would have to talk to some people in Sun (which many people might not like to do in this Web2.0 era, they would just simply leave Sun's website and shop from other companies) before seeing the products and prices like what I can do in the English version, and I had to spend some time to translate and explain to my Chinese Management Team for what I was seeing in the English ordering system on sun.com.

3. Too many people got involved for one customer - it's a little surprise that after I signed up the SSE program, I got two e-mails from two different people, kind of confused, looks like a group of people saw my signup but no clear roles and responsibilities, in order to not waste Sun's efforts, I forwarded my first e-mail reply to the second people, good to see the second people became my contact and I didn't see e-mails from the first people later, but still I had to talk to 5 more people and three more groups later, I have to remember or figure out who is responsible for what when I have to ask for help, what's even worse is I got very different replies when I sent e-mails to three people plus one internal alias. BTW, I often don't need to know whom I speak with when I shop from other companies, just one voice from them, very easy.

4. The online ordering system doesn't tell me what I don't need - After I got some configuration advices from the SSE person I mentioned above, I was told that I had to order the system from online, in fact that's what I preferred from the very beginning, so I went there and started to play with it, there are so many options that I was completely lost at the beginning, I once ordered customized Dell laptop from dell.com, that's a very different experience because you will be told what should for what reasons or shouldn't be chosen because of a conflict, but this system is not intelligent at all, one consequence is I had to return a 4-Port SAS PCI-E Host Bus Adapter and two SAS Disk Drive Cables later because they are not used in my system, the sales person recommended it with two 250GB internal disks but later on I only chosed one HDD and thus the 4-port SAS HBA is not needed.

5. My credit card is not accepted even two duplicated orders were recorded without any confirmation e-mails After I decided what to puchase, I entered my credit card, but got the following error message: The credit card could not be authorized! What? I might have entered wrong credit card info, or the system is not working right now? OK, I did it again, but still got the same error message, so I called my bank to see what's wrong there, but was told that my bank system had already approved the transaction request, anyway, because I saw that error, I decided to try another credit card, oops, same error message. So I had to call a number found on Sun's website, and what surprised me is my order was already done and there are even two duplicated orders with the same credit card, wow, why the system was lying? would it only tell me I have completed my order only after I submitted another couple of times for the same order? And why I didn't get any notifications? Anyway, it's OK as long as my order is done.

6. No order confirmation, no status report, no shipping confirmation, just nothing - I always know very clear what's going on with my order from Apple, Amazon, Dell and many other companies, but Sun didn't give me anything after I confirmed my order on the phone, I had to wait, wait and wait, btw, one way I checked the status is whether my credit card was charged, it's interesting that my credit card was charged two days after I received my system, so I didn't get anything from my credit card history, why Sun doesn't charge customers after shipping or even just after ordering?

7. No system was shipped, just a lot of small boxes - I ordered one J4200 Storage Array and one SunFire X2200 M2 server with the following components:
Sun Storage J4200 Array:

• 1 XTA4200R00A10DSKSU Sun Storage J4200 Rack-Ready Chassis
• 2 X311L Power Cord Kit, North American/Asian, RoHS Compliant
• 2 XTA-JBOD-6AMS-SU x6 Air Management Sled, RoHS-5 Compliant
• 1 XTA-4200-2URK19USU 2U Universal Rack Rail Kit, RoHS-5 Compliant
• 1 XTA6ST1NJ-500G7KSU 6 Internal 500 GB 7200 rpm SATA Disk Drives
• 1 SG-XPCIE8SAS-E-Z Sun StorageTek PCIe SAS Host Bus Adapter, 8 Port, RoHS-6 Compliant

Sun Fire X2200 M2 Server:

• 1 A85SGZ2H4GB-GA1-SU Sun Fire X2200 M2 Server,2 AMD Opteron Model 2218 dual-core processor,4 GB Memory,1 x 250 GB SATA II Disks,DVD-ROM,1 PSU,Svc Proc,4 x 10/100/1000 Ethernet ports,6 USB 2.0 ports,1 I/O riser card with 2 x8 PCIe slots,RoHS-5 Compliant
• 1 X311L Power Cord Kit, North American/Asian, RoHS Compliant
• 1 SDNAA-1007-T99M-SU Multilanguage Sun Developer Network (SDN) All Access Media Kit
• 1 X5288A-C-SU 4 GB Memory Kit (2 x 2 GB Registered ECC Single Rank DDR2-667), RoHS-6 Compliant
• 1 XRB-ST1CE250G7K-SU 250 GB 7200 rpm SATA Disk Drive with bracket, RoHS-6 Compliant
• 1 X5295A-Z SAS Disk Drive Cable Kit Includes Two Cables
• 1 SG-XPCIE4SAS3-Z 4-Port SAS PCI-E Host Bus Adapter, RoHS-6 Compliant
• 1 X8029A-Z-SU Slide Rail Kit , RoHS-6 Compliant

What I got from Fedex are the following boxes:

1. One large box of the X2200 M2 Server
2. One large box of the Sun Storage J4200 Rack-Ready Chassis
3. One large box with more than 10 small boxes, what's surprised me is the DVD and 250GB HDD that are part of the X2200 M2 Server component were also in two boxes shipped separately, why Sun didn't insert the DVD and HDD into the server? it's very easy, and why Sun did put the additional 4GB memory into the server? and why the 8 Port HBA was not inserted? Really weird.
4. Three medium boxes, one has the 6 500GB HDD for the J4200 array, two other boxes are empty with notes saying they are for HDD replacement, how much money did Sun spend on shipping these two useless boxes?

If I were not so familar with Sun's stuffs, I would most likely return everything right away after seeing so many boxes and small components were shipped to me, even I know a lot about the systems, I still spent a lot of time on the 4 port HBA because I really couldn't figure out why I needed it although it was in the list that the second Sun sales recommended, after exchanging a few e-mails with 4 more people, I was allowed to return the 4 port HBA together with the two cables to Sun, bad thing is Sun wasted some more money on the UPS shipping.

8. Weird way to save cost - When I asked why so many small boxes were shipped to me instead of one pre-installed system? I was told that's the way Sun cut costs, really? To cut cost by not putting thing together but to waste shipping fee and take the risk of losing customers? Maybe it's really expensive for Sun to put those components together? But it's really not so difficult for even not experienced people to put everything together! And why don't charge customer a little more money so that customer can get a ready to run system? I have spent thousands of dollars for the system and why I wouldn't pay one or two hundreds more to get the pre-install or pre-configured system? Do Sun know what customers really want? What's more interesting is I got the following suggestion when I "complained" about the boxes: if you're not familiar with these devices, we can offer "professional services" through one of our local partner. OK, got it, that's another reason why Sun don't provide one runnable system with a little more cost, Sun is so nice that it always thinks about its partners, if Sun provided everything to all customers, how could those partners survive?

9. No documents for how to install hardware components - couldn't find any information from hardcopy docs and also online docs from *.sun.com about how to install the 8 port HBA into the X2200 M2 server, after spending about half an hour on searching info online and from the hard copy materials and looking at the PCI slots in the X2200 box carefully, I figured out that I had to first pull out one card from the server and insert the HBA into that card, then put everything together back to the system, terrible hardware layout design! One note, there are two PCI slots for the HBA, I first tried the bottom one but for some unknown reasons it didn't work because I couldn't find the J4200 from the Sun StorageTek Common Array Manager Software 6.1.1, then I tried again by using the first PCI slot and it worked! Of course I had to pull out two cards together, separate them and re-insert the HBA into the other slot and then put everything back together, good thing is I don't need a screw for this job, a very cool idea, maybe a pending patent? I should take a picture and share it here :-)

10. Garbage in both Solaris OS and Storage Software installation GUI - After putting all of the components together, I started to install OS which is Solaris 10 10/08, btw, why Sun doesn't provide OS to the machines that have DVD and HDD? It won't cost a lot to automatically provision OS, I did see information like machines would be pre-installed with both Linux and Solaris somewhere on sun.com, but I had to do everything myself on my X2200, just because the system I got has some SSE discounts? Anyway, it's not a problem to me at all, I did it hundreds if not thousands of times in the last twenty years, I selected Simplified Chinese language at the very beginning for some very obvious reasons, and selected UTF-8 locale as the installation and also the system default locale because I want to have Chinese Unicode locale by default, but when I reached the partition step, I was surprised that the buttons are all garbage, it's good that I still can remember or guess out all of the buttons, so I could customize the partitions of my internal HDD easily.
After installing Solaris, I logged into the system using the default locale I specified, Simplified Chinese Unicode or zh_CN.UTF-8 locale, and started to install the Sun StorageTek Common Array Manager Software 6.1.1 for my J4200 array, this time I was completely lost because everything was garbage, looks like the Simplified Chinese Localization QA team in Sun's Globalization Engineering group where I worked for many years didn't test this software in Chinese UTF-8 at all! Just for fun, I figured out this installer was localized in French, Japanese and Simplified Chinese for all of the locales of each language, I tried all of the other languages/locales, good to know that only Simplified Chinese UTF-8 locale was not tested, the reason of the garbage might be very simple - the source .po message file was not converted into UTF-8 or has a wrong encoding tag before it was complied into the binary .mo file.

11. No instructions about which Ethernet port is bg0, bg1, ng0 or ng1 - there are four Ethernet ports on the X2200 M2 server, I simply connected the first port to the Internet and assume it's the default one, but I had to manually select which port to configure from bg0, bg1, ng0 and ng1, because I had no idea what's the port I used, and I saw the second port is the "Net Management" so I assumed the first port that I used might be ng0, but it didn't work, I couldn't access Internet after installation, so I had to try all four ports and at the end found the last port is ng0 that I configured, later on I figured out from other places they are two Broadcom ports - bg* and two Navidia ports -ng*, it's really weird that the last port is ng0 instead of ng1, it's more reasonable to me if it's named like port 1 - bg0, port 2 - bg1, port3- ng0, and port 4 - ng1. But this is a small problem anyway, I won't return the system just because I had to try out all of the four ports :-).

12. Credit card is not shared among different ordering systems - I ordered another three servers from a different program but had to talk to different people and provide my credit information again on the phone which I didn't like at all for security reasons, why Sun cannot use the credit card info that I saved in the SSE program when I ordered the X2200 and J4200 oline?

13. Difficult to return - Have to fill in a return form, mail it to a return alias, then call another person in the return team even after everyone I had communicated agreed that I could/should return those two unncessary components. Why Sun can't learn from other companies like Dishnetwork, Amazon or Dell where we can do everything easily online? All of the information manually filled in the form can be found from Sun's ordering system, why don't automate it? Sun still has so many smart people even after so many RIFs.

14. The fans are so noisy, especially those in the J4200 - I know those are servers and storage systems that are usually put into a huge server room where only a few people occasionally visit, but can't it be a little quieter? If Sun does care about startups or small businesses who might not have the luxury to have a separate server room, can you provide some quiet servers and storage systems with some trade offs of capacity, performance or price? Price is not the only thing I care, seriously. Just saw Jonathon's blog on March 18, he said Sun has less than 100,000 customers while there are 10,000,000 MySQL users, does he know how many of those MySQL users would prefer WinTel systems for web/app servers just because of the noises? At least I have started to think about it now.

To summarize what I said in the subject, it's too difficult to become a Sun's customer, I would have left the website or the ordering system, or have canceled the order or returned all the systems to Sun many times if I didn't work at Sun for so long time and was kind of being prepared for so many surprises.

Anyway, I wrote this blog to record what I experienced, whether it's fun or not, I have finally setup everything properly, still waiting UPS people to pick up the 4 port HBA and two cables and waiting for the other three servers, no idea how many boxes I will receive again and how many interesting or weird stuffs I will have to handle with.

Last but not least, thank you very much for reading this very long post!