Fabulatech USB over Ethernet Problems

Many of you will know that I’ve been a big proponent of the Fabulatech USB over Ethernet software specifically for use with the Microsoft Hyper-V environments.  I’ve spoken very highly of their product and how we use it in our client environments.  Well I’m sorry to say that has changed.  We are now testing an alternate product to suit this requirement called KernelPro.  So far our tests have shown this product and vendor to be superior in all the ways that the Fabulatech product has failed us.

So how has the Fabulatech product failed us? Where do I start.

How about BSOD on the Hyper-V host?  Install the product, and reboot. The Hyper-V host BSODs and you can’t get out of it.  Your only choice is to go into Last Known Good Configuration and try to remove the product… whats’ that the product says it’s removed but now is still there?  Ok – let’s ask Fabulatech support… yes – we did that… over 2 weeks ago, provided the memory.dmp file.  That was on the 4th Feb – their response was “we don’t have anyone that can analyse that until 8th Feb.”  Ok – not ideal but we wait.  We’ve sent a number of followup emails from them since then and are as at today – 12 days after sending them the memory.dmp still waiting on a response.

How about random lockups of the Hyper-V host?  Again something we’ve seen.  Fabulatech’s response “we’ll fix it eventually…”  They are not taking into account that we’ve purchased their product to solve business problems and those business problems need to be solved now, not “eventually”.

Let’s try their Serial over Ethernet with Serial Fax Modems then… only to find out that it’s not working. The product has gone past the 30 day eval, so we’ve had to pay for it.  Fabulatech has again been involved in investigating the problem… I believe for 3 months now.  So we’ve decided to ask for a refund so that we can at least install another product.  Fabulatech’s response is “We don’t provide refunds, we provide the evaluation period for you to try the product which you have then purchased. We will fix the product eventually”

So the problem for us here, is not just a failure of the product, but a failure of the organisation to understand the business requirements of our customers and respond in an appropriate time.  We have gone through all the correct channels to obtain support and help, but to no avail.  I can therefore only decide to no longer use their product and also to advise others of my decision to change so that they too might not have the same problems.  I’m keen to hear more about your experiences with this product too.

Tags: Business Focus, Hyper-V, Rants

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 at 10:11 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.