The IBRIX Customer Support Experience

By Deni Connor, principal analyst
Bill Robbins, research manager

Providing quality customer support is one of the thorniest issues vendors face. Getting systems up and running, making operating system and other software upgrades, resolving problems with misbehaving software, or fixing equipment failures is easy for some vendors and increasingly hard for others.

IBRIX, a vendor of clustered storage software, has customers in the media/entertainment, Internet, financial services, life sciences, telecommunications, oil and gas and manufacturing industries – companies that require scalable storage capacity to support high volume growth of unstructured data and/or businesses that have data-intensive applications that rely on fast and scalable access to the data

IBRIX asked Storage Strategies NOW (SSG-NOW) to survey and report on a handful of its customers about their customer service experience.  Here is what we found:

What IBRIX offers

IBRIX provides 24 hour by seven days a week technical support to customers via a toll-free telephone number, e-mail or a customer support portal 365 days a year. They do not provide dedicated customer support representatives, tiers of customer support or customized support plans. Every IBRIX customer receives the same customer support regardless of their size. Even the smallest implementations are promised prompt and knowledgeable customer support, with response in an hour or less.

Access to customer support starts after IBRIX’s Professional Services organization installs and implements IBRIX’s Scalable File System across commodity x86-based servers. Installation and implementation is included as an option with the company’s integrated support experience.

When a customer calls IBRIX’s toll-free number, e-mails IBRIX or logs into the customer support portal for help with their system, the request is logged and a trouble ticket is initiated. Trouble requests are not routed to entry-level technical support representatives, nor are they escalated to more experienced technical support representatives.  Support calls at IBRIX are handled by the first person that answers the phone or e-mail, says those customers surveyed, and resolved in a timely, often expedient, manner. If a problem occurs that IBRIX is not immediately able to resolve, the company works with the customer to fix the problem, install new versions of the Linux operating system or train the customer on avoiding the problem in the future.

Many of the requests IBRIX receives for help don’t involve IBRIX software, but the hardware running it.  While IBRIX could pass these requests to the hardware vendor, because of its good relationships with many of the distributors of its software, the company’s customer support organization either solves the problem themselves or coordinates a resolution with the other party – there is no finger-pointing.  With IBRIX the buck stops with them.

Telephone, E-mail and Customer Portal support

IBRIX provides 24 by seven by 365 days a year telephone support to customers. While telephone support is a primary means of contacting IBRIX, the company also provides a customer support portal and e-mail support for problem resolution.

“IBRIX’s customer support is great,” says a systems engineer for a large global entertainment company. “Any little glitch or hiccup we run into, IBRIX has been able to fix immediately. We call them up and say ‘Hey, what we are seeing is a little weird — would you mind logging in and taking a look?” and IBRIX was always right there and ready to do it.”

Another customer, RealNetworks^® of Seattle, reports the same experience. Willis Fu, lead systems engineer for RealNetworks, a digital entertainment vendor in Seattle, uses both telephone and e-mail support.

“Most of the time I do both e-mail and telephone,” says Fu. “The reason I do both is because IBRIX sometimes wants me to send detailed information about the problem — I do that over e-mail. But, then I want to talk to them to confirm that they understand the problem.”

IBRIX Responsiveness

In contrast to many other software vendors in which you pay for response within a specified period of time, IBRIX’s customer support is responsive and qualified and offered as a standard operating procedure.

“IBRIX is consistently superior as a vendor in being responsive,” says John Collier, principal engineer for Ball Aerospace & Technologies, a manufacturer of aerospace systems in Boulder, Colorado. “Often, I call in and get things resolved in the same day — usually on the same phone call.”

IBRIX return calls in as little as one-half hour after requests to its toll-free telephone number. “I just call their 800 number,” says Jonas Helgren, lead systems engineer for Salt Lake City-based Mediaport^® Entertainment. “IBRIX has a phone service that forwards my call to the right customer support representative. I’ve had a turnaround of no more than 20 minutes on non-critical issues. On a critical issue, I got a call back in less than five minutes.”

Knowledge and Expertise

There are vendors that assign a dedicated customer support representative to a customer or that escalate calls to more knowledgeable representatives when the ‘first responder’ tactic doesn’t work. With IBRIX, users get knowledgeable customer support representatives from the ‘get go,’ without paying more for the call and without affecting experience.

Customer requests for problem resolution are met by a team of support representatives with an average of 15+ years experience in storage and file systems.

“IBRIX’s support staff has always been top notch,” says Collier. “They have really deep knowledge of technical Linux information.”

Since IBRIX’s software is based on the Linux platform and requires Linux experience to use it, there are several customers for whom Linux understanding is a short-coming.

“We’re a small company with 35 people and my Linux skills when we installed IBRIX were fairly limited,” says Helgren. “IBRIX customer support was very patient and understanding in helping me out with Linux command line utilities, etc.”

Remote Login

When IBRIX customer service wants to troubleshoot a customer’s system, they can perform a secure, remote login to the IBRIX system.

Mediaport’s Helgren says, “We had a failed Serial Attached SCSI [SAS] adapter in one of our segment servers. When we got the adapter up and running, we gave IBRIX technical support access to our IBRIX system over a VPN connection and they did a Linux remote login. They got the rest of the system running for us,” says Helgren.

“A couple months down the road, we actually had another hardware failure in one of our servers and called IBRIX because it looked like it was an IBRIX problem,” says Helgren. “The IBRIX system was actually functioning partially. Once again, they did a remote login and helped us out immensely. It turned out to be a bad RAID controller in one of the servers.”

Problem Resolution

Sometimes the answer a customer receives from customer support is not something they want to hear. Nor, is not being able to resolve a customer problem something IBRIX’ customer service wants to offer. IBRIX’s customer support works with the customer to solve any incompatibility between their systems and software – resolution or not.

Take Ball Aerospace for example. Collier says that his company wanted to use Windows^® XP 64-bit instead of Windows XP, a version of software IBRIX did not support. “Windows XP 64-bit was critical to our company and critical to our mission – we needed to have it,” he says. “IBRIX said not only would they support it, but they would support it fast. And, they bought exactly the same box we had to make sure it worked in their development environment.”

“There have been a few things that have happened and things have taken longer than anticipated but overall IBRIX is very responsive,” says Collier. “And even though they might not have the answer I’d like, they are forthcoming and will state what they support and will not support.”

Product Upgrades

As for performing and supporting product upgrades, IBRIX receives high marks from its customers.

“We contacted the support people and told them we were planning a software upgrade and asked what they thought we should do,” says the system engineer from the large entertainment company.

“They put together an upgrade plan and sent it to us and we were able to upgrade without any problems. Throughout the entire process, engineers were available via instant messaging or phone calls during our Sunday 6:00 p.m. down time.”

Comparison to Other Vendors

When looking for a vendor, customers must often evaluate their technical support in contrast to what they would receive from other software and hardware vendors. IBRIX, a relatively small company in comparison to its larger distribution partners, receives accolades from its customers for its toll-free support.

“There is no comparison to other vendors,” says Collier. “IBRIX has far and away the best people I can deal with. There are a couple of other products out there that have pretty good support, but most of the vendors out there are honestly dismal — the way I usually have to get good support from others is to go to the sales rep and push down. I haven’t had to do that with IBRIX.”

“Other vendors use a tier-based model for support, starting with Level 1 and work their way up,” says RealNetwork’s Fu. “Chances are that you’d never actually talk with their Level 4 support. IBRIX is not as large as that and their skill levels are much higher even during the initial phase. I would probably rate their support as an 8 or 9 on a 10 point scale overall.”

SSG-NOW Assessment

IBRIX receives the best of marks on its customer support according to its customers. Their customer support is not only responsive, but knowledgeable. While IBRIX is not able to solve every problem its customers have, it does diligently work with them to resolve issues. The company’s simple customer support – no tiers, no dedicated support representatives, and no lengthy waits – bodes well for the company.

Software problems are a constant with solution providers, especially given the multiple variables that can be added to any environment. But when IBRIX customers encounter problems or experience performance lags, they are quickly forgiving once they experience the forthright, easily accessible and accountable performance of the company’s service and support teams. In many ways, one customer says, their service keeps them in the game.

Note: The information and recommendations made by Storage Strategies NOW are based upon public information and sources and may also include personal opinions both of Storage Strategies NOW and others, all of which we believe to be accurate and reliable. As market conditions change however, and not within our control, the information and recommendations are made without warranty of any kind. All product names used and mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners. Storage Strategies NOW, Inc. assumes no responsibility or liability for any damages whatsoever (including incidental, consequential or otherwise), caused by your use of, or reliance upon, the information and recommendations presented herein, nor for any inadvertent errors which may appear in this document.