On occasion, vendors do something which really want you to take them outside and shoot them.
I have a case where a certain vendor’s product which is key to some of my applications caused me some real problems about this time last year. A work-around was produced and we are happily working again. Now we have to increase capacity in some key environments and we need this product to work against the latest and greatest; so in goes the RPQ and back comes the answer; ‘Sorry, product is going to be withdrawn but product ‘Y’ from vendor ‘X’ will do what you need!’
Okay, so you pointed out an alternative but it’s going to cause a huge amount of work; a shed-load of political fallout and general pain all round! It should at least have been accompanied with an offer to work with us to transition to the new product, gratis of course!!!
Rant over!!!
I remember when I was at StorageTek and we had some major problems with a disk product that needed to be replaced in a few accounts. (similar situation to yours, it was stable, but wasn’t going to sustain the customer as time moved forward). I was tasked at building a migration practice to offer as a service to these customers for a fee. Well in the end we decided to do the migration as a customer satisfaction booster for no cost to the customer, wish more vendors were willing to do this when they make a mistake.
Wasn’t migrating people off the Iceberg was it?
Actually the most irritating thing with this situation was that it’s not actually a storage problem but it will become my political problem as I own the relationship. And the fact that the vendor still has not publically announced that the product is EOL and Withdrawn From Market. Hey, such is the life of the end-user!