Simon’s Blog

There are two types of companies: those that care about their customers; and those that don’t. Recently I’ve written quite a lot about Sun Microsystems - a company that really seems to care about its customers, and goes the extra mile to do a good job, even if things don’t always go perfectly smoothly. Not all companies are so great though. As an example, I’d thought I’d share some recent experiences about a company that really doesn’t seem to care about its customers at all. It’s called Sonnet ( http://www.sonnettech.com/ ). They make storage products…

Because of our work with large volumes of high-definition digital video, we’re in the market for purchasing multiple terabytes of fast storage. And, the great thing is, with modern technology, storage really doesn’t need to be expensive. So, at the beginning of 2007, we wanted to purchase around 15TB of high-performance storage. This was to be directly attached to six computers. Specifically, we were looking for 6 2.5TB arrays, with eSATA being the obvious choice of low-cost technology to use for attaching the arrays to the computers. After some looking around, we decided on products from Sonnet - their strapline is “Simply Fast”. That’s pretty ironic, as you’ll see later. Specifically, we decided on their E4P eSATA cards, and Sonnet Fusion 500P drive cages… and a bunch of Seagate SATA drives.

Of course, whenever you’re putting together a system like this, you can never tell if it will work as advertised. So, we purchased a system to test performance with. We went with a small re-seller called Rent A Raid. We got the quote from them on 24 January. And a few days later, we had placed the order, and the kit arrived on site. Perfect.

That was when things started to go wrong. Far from being “simply fast”, the array was about as slow as it was possible to be - writing data at a rate of only 5MB/sec. We were expecting something rather more than 100MB/sec in the configuration we were using. We observed the slow write speed when using a particular method of writing data to disk which we need to use. Other methods of writing data gave the expected fast performance.

So began a series of tests to try to identify what the problem was: different values of different parameters for drive formatting; different RAID (and non-RAID) configurations of the drives. We spent hours reconfiguring and reformatting the system, in response to helpful suggestions from Rent A Raid, to see if we could narrow down the cause.  Rent A Raid were helpful and responsive throughout in trying to help us resolve the issue. Nothing we tried made any difference to the performance, however, so it was time to see if Sonnet could reproduce the problem in their labs.

We wrote a tiny test application that reproduced the problem, and on the 22 February it was sent over to Sonnet for test. It’s easy to use: just run it, a GUI pops up, type in a couple of numbers, and look at the results. But Sonnet never bothered to run the application. Whenever I chased things up, back came the, frankly lame, excuses:

1) I was told that the CEO of Sonnet, Robert Farnsworth, apparently banned their engineers from looking at the problem - they had much more important things to do. I didn’t buy it - it only takes about a minute to run the app. But fair enough, what could we do? We waited. And waited.

2) Then, we chased again, but rather than running the application, they looked at the source code instead, and wanted an irrelevant change made before they would run it. We made the change, turning around their request the same day. We waited again. And waited.

But they never ran the application and fed back the results to us. The last I heard from Sonnet was the 26 March. We have no idea if the slow write speed performance problem reproduces in their hands or not.

The only reasonable conclusion to draw from all this is that Sonnet simply doesn’t care about its customers, and they don’t care about repeat business either. They may, or may not, make really low-quality storage products too. I don’t know - they won’t do the trivial test that would let us find out. It’s a really, really strange way for a company to behave…