Excellent Service by Data Robotics

Today I had a near crisis on my hands. We use a Drobo to hold most of our day to day files. It contains roughly a terabyte of data. We have been using for well over a year now, actually probably closer to two.  It has worked great for us thus far with no problems at all.  In fact, we just finished a server migration and the fact that most of the data was stored externally on the Drobo made the transition much easier.

One of the great features of the Drobo is that you can add or upgrade the drives easily.  Well today I finally decided to add a little extra storage to the Drobo.  So I simply took the new drive and inserted it into the empty bay of the Drobo.  It was most of the way in but wouldn’t quite seat completely.  So I just gave it a little push and as soon as I did, I heard a pop and all the lights on the Drobo went blank.  I immediately thought, “Oh Shit, I hope I just didn’t just lose all our data.”  The main idea of a Drobo is to have redundant data in case a drive fails, but I never consideered what would happen if the Drobo failed.  So I tried everything I could think of to get the Drobo to come back up.  It finally got power again but didn’t do anything else.

I finally called support and Wanda was very helpful and walked me through all the normal procedures and eventually came to the conclusion that it was dead.  She also politely reminded me that my Drobo was out of warranty.  So I thought I would just have to bite the bullet and buy a new one.  But then she told me she could sell me an extended warranty for about half the price of a new Drobo.  Then I could use that warranty to get a replacement for no cost.  Sounded great to me.  She said she would talk to her senior support engineers and get back to me.  Within minutes, Steven called me back and told me that they wanted to send me a new Drobo at no charge whatsoever.  I didn’t even have to buy the extended warranty.  All I had to pay for was the overnight shipping, and he even apologized profusely for that.

So tomorrow I should have a new Drobo that I can just pop my existing drives into and power up and be back in business.  Now that is what I call service.