Back in January, I was tossed into a fire regarding an environment from your absolute worst nightmare.  Yes, that bad.  It's been called a "technology showcase", "how to do everything wrong", "what happens when you have no plan" and so on -- a real top notch problem suited for those who are stupid enough given the opportunity to fix something so terrible, I didn't really know where to start.

When I got my mind around this environment and some of the terrible things within it, I found something rather surprising -- lack of support and willingness to assist by vendors of hardware and low-level software -- that were under warranty.  Some of which when contacted return an email saying "we don't recognize your email address, go away", others go into a black hole.  Then came one whoop-ass exception - Nexsan.

For those who've never heard of them, Nexsan makes Storage Area Network devices and other storage centric solutions (archiving, compliance) for various industries such as Financial, Health care, etc.  I was unfamiliar with Nexsan before this, but now, I'm a big fan for a bunch of reasons.

First off, finding a contact.  I was AMAZED at how hard it was to get a simple "support@" or "contact@" addresses from some other site, but Nexsan does it right -- "support@nexsan.com" what a concept!  Simple, easy.  Sooo how's the response?  Well, you get the auto-reply as confirmation and normally you get a reply within an hour or so.  That's more than reasonable.  I typically expect 4 business hours give or take.

Second, willingness to help.  This is where Nexsan "gets it".  Most companies I've found give you a not-so-greatly-trained person that is probably looking though a book to find your problem and are more than happy to push you off to the next person.  This never happened, not once.  My first contact person, Darrell Snipes asked that I give him a call and discuss our situation.  After a short talk, he emailed me some recommendations for performance, a best practice document, a new firmware version, when our current support was going to run out and how to send him back the logs so he could take a deeper look ... and he followed up.  What else could you want from a device you know nothing about?  I couldn't think of one!

Third, following though and going beyond.  At where I work, we push for exceeding client's expectations all the time -- someone must have told them the same thing.  Our support ran out and, of course, we ran into a problem.  With no more contract, nothing, I expected the rightfully-so "too bad, so sad".  I contacted them asking if we could open up a pay-per-incident ticket and this is the response I got ...

Jesse,
If your unit is out of warranty/support as a industry leading company we don’t mind providing you with a help Monday to Friday 7AM to 5 PM PST.
However we will not be able to issue any RMA for damaged parts or anything similar.
Please let me know if you need any additional help,

It isn't a failure and wow, how great is that.  I sent a reply asking them about a problem and again, totally reasonable, expecting the stated 7am to 5pm PST -- I sent my reply around 7:45pm fully NOT expecting a reply until the next day.  At 11:42pm EST Chad Steele responded to my question, saying it was very fixable (firmware, we're WAY out of date) and to boot, 11:42pm is not within the 5pm PST time frame.  Define : Awesomeness. 

I have a short list of companies on my "list".  Companies I do not hesitate recommending or sending anyone to -- Nexsan is definitely on that list.  I highly recommend them.