We were putting together a large fileserver, so we ordered some hardware from Big Blue. Here's what they delivered.
The coffee mug is for scale. All in all not too shabby. But then we started opening the boxes.
Every hard drive was packed in its own box (the one in the back). As you can see, there was quite a lot of empty space, probably so that the poor disk does not become claustrophobic during transit.
Let's take a closer look at the manual below the drive.
The manual consists of some 20+ pages of legalese. The single page technical update tells you how to install the disk.
Did I mention that both of these documents came with every single drive?
Here's a SAS cable. Each one came in its own huge box. A nice touch is that they added bubble wrap as well, because, you know, SAS cables in cardboard boxes are so terribly fragile.
Below the cable? Yep, another 20 page manual.
Regular companies would stop here, but IBM decided to go the extra 1.6 kilometers.
Thankfully the manual for a power cord has only 18 pages. But if you read the cover, you'll note that it does not tell you how to actually use it.
Here is the combined documentation, over 300 pages of it. We estimate that removing all duplicated information would cut the page count to around 30.
The documents recommend that they should be stored for future reference. We are very much tempted to just put them all in a binder and pass it on to the client.