Looking for opinions: AppleCare worth to pay for it ?

Question

Within the next three weeks we have to decide whether or not investing around 1.000 Euro ($1.200 USD) into three year AppleCare support for our company's XServe.
At this time I had made only (more or less) bad experiences with the 90-days-support Apple provides (I can only talk about the German support, not sure regarding others):
Most questions became answered by refering me to knowledgebase articles not related in any way to my original issue. Also I heard often that this is a known problem, but cannot be supported since it requires command line access not under the support terms or that they will call me back (I had to call back each single time). One time I even got the advise to visit this forum
And during my last phone calls I also had the special pleasure to talk with a professional speaking some kind of "Gerglish" (German and English mixed). It was quite hard to get even an idea about what he is speaking, so after explaining my issue three times, I gave up. By the way, he also promised to send me knowledgebase articles - I never received them.
Only very few support calls were handled professionally. So I had a really hard time on getting anything set up, configured and worked around the bugs Apple ships with the servers. Many thanks to this forum, Apple should charge for using it and I would be the first paying for - hope that they don't read this and take it for serious The people here at this place are much more helpful as all German support representatives together.
But back to topic. I would like to hear some user experiences made with the three years extended support, especially from Germany-based people (hope that there are some users around). Good as well as bad ones.
So hopefully I get a better overview whether or not it is worth spending money or better diving into OS X Server by educating myself.

Answer 1

First, realize that the three-year maintenance agreement is only a hardware maintenance agreement. It is not for assisting you in setting up your server or working around Apple's bugs. Also realize that your experience in Germany may be different from my experience in the U.S.
That said, for us it has been worth it. We have had four incidents with our Xserve G5, and, in each case, I have been impressed with the telephone support we have received from the Enterprise Server Support Group in Austin, Texas. The first case was an apparent manufacturing error - rather than the 250 GB ADM drive that had been ordered, invoiced, and paid for, the server arrived with an 80 GB drive. Replacement drive overnighted, arrived next day. In the second case, our Apple Hardware RAID card had its firmware settings become corrupted in an odd manner where it still functioned perfectly as two RAID 5 LUNs, but the Xserve would not boot from it. This happened during replacement of the BTO Apple SCSI card (really a rebranded LSI Logic 22320) in the adjacent slot that never worked right with our backup software, replaced by an ATTO UL4D that has never had problems. Because no firmware file was available for re-flashing the card (even though I believed and still believe that the card itself was OK), a replacement Apple Hardware RAID card was overnighted, received next day, and solved the problem with the RAID card. The third instance was when the ribbon cable between the Apple Hardware RAID and the drives was suspected as being intermittent and, no questions asked, a replacement was sent. The fourth instance was when we got intermittent ECC errors. Austin support had us interchange two DIMMs to see whether it was the motherboard that they should send (if the errors did not follow the DIMM) or a replacement DIMM (which they should send if the errors followed the DIMM). Turned out to be the DIMM, and a replacement was sent.
I still have an open case on the Apple Hardware RAID card that has been open for over a year, now. The card has a bug in that it does not fully flush its write cache on graceful power down. Only workaround is to turn the write caches off, which is what we have done. Because the Xserve G5 (and its Apple Hardware RAID card) is EOL, I doubt that this bug will ever be fixed. But the hardware is broken (unless you think it is normal for a disk controller card not to flush its write cache on graceful power down before disconnecting from the drives).
My only complaint is with the local on-site subcontractor. There are not many Xserves in our city. When the Apple Hardware RAID card failed, we had to make numerous follow-ups to get the local service person to contact us following the initial incident report with Austin, even though the server would not boot from the Apple Hardware RAID (we kept the server up by booting to an external firewire drive). When the local on-site repair person finally contacted us, I was not impressed by his total lack of knowledge about the Xserve, and I do not believe that he had ever seen an Xserve, much less ever having been trained on the product. I told him that I did not want him touching our server, relayed that information to Apple's support group in Austin, and they just overnighted the replacement Apple Hardware RAID card to me for replacement by me.
So, if you are expecting setup assistance or assistance working around bugs in the software, you aren't going to get it. It's strictly hardware repair. If you are looking for bug reporting or workarounds, the best route there is to get an Apple Developer membership (they are free if you get the entry level that doesn't provide prerelease software) and to file bug reports via RADAR.
Hope this helps,
Russ
Xserve G5 2.0 GHz 2 GB RAM   Mac OS X (10.4.8)   Apple Hardware RAID, ATTO UL4D, Exabyte VXA-2 1x10 1u