Oracle to customers: ‘Sun? Sun who?’

Plenty of people have been cautiously optimistic about Oracle’s acquisition of Sun. Many, like myself, have resigned ourselves to the idea — and have been hoping against hope that the fallout wouldn’t be that bad.

Well, guess what? It’s that bad.

[ Just a rough transition? Or have our worst fears for Sun been realized? If you’re feeling nostalgic for the former darling of the Valley, check out InfoWorld’s memorial Sun slideshow. ]

Head over to Sun.com. You’d expect to find a nice Sun-centric site to help all the Sun folks make the transition. Nope — in fact, Sun.com redirects to the Oracle.com home page. Look closely; if you have good eyes, you’ll see a little column of links to Sun products. Now click the Support link. It’s Oracle support — and my age-old Sun logins don’t work there. The process of signing up for a new account was fraught with disaster, with the registration app wildly throwing out 500 application errors and redirections to nowhere.

All I wanted was a support link for some Sun hardware. It took me the better part of 30 minutes to find what I was looking for — via carefully crafted Google queries. (There’s a Sun link on the main support page now, but that didn’t exist a few weeks ago when I was poking around.)

When I finally located the information I needed, it turned out that I needed to call support anyhow. After another 30 minutes of holding, transferring, and waiting in various queues, I got a support ticket — and was told I’d have to wait eight business hours for a callback from a support tech. The call never came.

The problem was abysmal NFS write performance on a brand-new Sun storage box. Lacking a dedicated ZIL (ZFS Intention Log) device, I was expecting lower performance than if I did have the ZIL, but I didn’t think NFS write performance would be on par with a USB flash drive — yet that’s what I saw. After the first-tier support request, I submitted a diagnostic bundle from the device and waited for my callback.

Instead, I got an email two days later saying that there were no visible problems in the diagnostic bundle. The tech couldn’t assist further. Several replies to this email have gone completely unanswered. There’s obviously something wrong with the device, but since it’s a closed system, I cannot dig into it any further than the (admittedly gorgeous) UI. Hence, I need to talk to someone at Sun to resolve the issue, or at least identify why I can only push 50 IOps under NFS3 or NFS4 with small file sizes.

It’s very frustrating, to say the least. Oracle apparently thinks of Sun as a redheaded stepchild to be tolerated at best, and ignored whenever possible. Maybe I’m just bitter, shaking my fists at the sky and yelling at no one in particular. I never expected Oracle to just leave Sun alone, but I really hoped that the surgery joining the two companies would not leave horrific scars.

Time may heal all wounds, but that doesn’t help those who need to keep Sun gear running now, or those who are actually implementing new Sun hardware. If tales like this keep popping up, problem solved: no sales equals no support calls and, eventually, no Sun. Then again, maybe that was the idea all along.

This story, “Oracle to customers: ‘Sun? Sun who?’,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Paul Venezia’s Deep End blog and follow the latest developments in Oracle at InfoWorld.com.