MDS resellers and my disappointment

[stephen2615]

Greetings,

Perhaps this is not the right place to bring this up but I am getting a bit fed up with Cisco using resellers to supply the SAN switches. The reseller support for the most basic issues is pathetic. I am not able to get a CCO login and there is no way to create a TAC issue directly.

Whenever I see Cisco at work in deep discussion with our networking group, I feel like I am missing out somehow. Perhaps I need to take Storage out of SAN and that way I can say I belong to Networking so Cisco will talk to me.

To make things worse, one particular IT global heavyweight is more interested in selling Brocade switches than Cisco. As part of a major system installation, I had to insist that they provide Cisco switches as that is our standard. After much discussion they gave in and thats about the most they have done for us.

All I can say is that the MDS and SAN-OS are such good products that I rarely have to get any support of a major nature.

Does anyone else have a problem with the reseller model?

Regards

Stephen (perhaps my last post).

[jasondwarner]

You can ask your reseller for direct Cisco TAC support. They should be able to provide it to you. Based on your experience you might want to try another reseller to get a better experience.

[stephen2615]

I have asked both (huge global IT) resellers to be able to obtain direct TAC support but both refuse stating that all first and second level support must go through them. One vendor (who I used to work for) sort of felt sorry for me but still refused to let me do it. It seems that they cant (perhaps wont) associate me with the account. To make things particularly bad in my point of view is that one vendor sold me the core switches and the other vendor sold me the edge switches. I imagine what would happen if something like a port channel had major issues as two different vendors could be involved with support before anyone calls Cisco into this.

I would just love to be able to login to the CCO to search for bugs relating to something.

All I can say is this forum is fantastic because I can get some help here that would take days to get through my resellers.

I have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the MDS equipment and expect to spend just as much more with an improved DR ability including optical equipment. I wonder who will sell that and how that would mesh in if something bad goes wrong.

Stephen