Product Support
Our Product Support (PS) organization supports your data availability needs through its extensive involvement in the following support-related activities throughout the StorHouse product life cycle. All of these activities contribute to superior product performance, reliability, and availability.
New product development - Our Product Support organization is involved in all aspects of the StorHouse product life cycle, from the requirement specifications phase through development, testing, and support. Product Support specialists draw on their experience with maintenance-related issues on existing FileTek products to propose support-related strategies and/or changes to the architecture of new products. Features that minimize system degradation, support automatic recovery, and contribute to superior product performance and availability are logged as requirements for future product releases. The end result is improved system maintainability and data availability.
Failure analysis and investigation - Product Support specialists analyze selected returned parts from the field to determine the cause of premature or unexpected failures. If a visual inspection of the part reveals no obvious defects or reason for failure, specialists install and test the part in FileTek's on-site lab to determine the cause of the malfunction. In cases where a component does not meet the manufacturer's specifications, Product Support returns it to the manufacturer for analysis and logs the issue in the CSS call management database. By requiring manufacturers to produce a written failure analysis, our Product Support organization participates in the improvement of manufacturers' processes and products.
Product interface and liaison - Our Product Support specialists play an important role in the continued evolution of FileTek products following delivery by the Development and Engineering organizations. PS serves as the Engineering interface for both customers and FileTek field support personnel. In this capacity, PS specialists submit problem reports for unusual field problems to the FileTek Development and Engineering organizations and track the status of issues until resolution. Specialists have direct access to software developers and hardware engineers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. PS also interfaces directly with various business partners whose products are used with StorHouse. In this role, PS actively and aggressively participates in the vendor product improvement process. All of these efforts serve to improve system supportability, reliability, and availability.
Technical support - Our Product Support organization provides an additional level of hardware support to FileTek's NSS organization. In addition, PS writes and issues product alerts and technical tips to NSS technicians and field support personnel. Product Support specialists employ a variety of techniques to resolve problems, including remote diagnosis, review of daily system statistics, and analysis of log data. Because proactive and predictive maintenance features are built into the design of FileTek products, specialists can identify and correct potential problems before they occur.
System training for support personnel - Our Product Support specialists provide StorHouse systems training to FileTek-authorized maintenance partners as well as FileTek's National Systems Support (NSS) and Field Operations organizations. Technicians receive extensive training on the repair of optical library devices configured for use by StorHouse. In addition, the PS organization instructs technicians on how to maintain tape library devices and RAID using remote access in conjunction with software analysis and predictive maintenance tools. We recognize that a well-trained support staff is critical to maintaining high data availability.
Maintenance-related tools and utilities - Our Product Support organization identifies and secures special devices, test equipment, and hardware and software tools needed to perform the required predictive, proactive, and remedial maintenance activities in support of FileTek systems anywhere in the world. By using "state of the art" techniques, Product Support specialists maximize system performance and minimize support costs.
We are committed to providing you with unparalleled product support.