Lawsuit charges EMC customers lost data due to crappy parts from supplier

AcBel Polytech, which makes power-supply units for large EMC data-storage units, is suing Fairchild Semiconductor over voltage regulators that failed "at an epidemic rate" in late 2010.

AcBel charges that Fairchild replaced perfectly fine components with poorly designed ones that shorted out due to humidity and that it then compounded the problem by not telling anybody it had made the change - or then changed back to the old design when the problems surfaced, in a suit filed this week in US District Court in Boston.

AcBel, a Taiwanese company with facilities in Hopkinton, says replacing the parts while EMC's "disk array enclosures" sat in warehouses would have been a trivial affair, but that replacing the units after they'd been shipped to customer and began failing cost it at least $30 million - technicians often had to be flown out to customer data centers at great expense to replace the faulty units.

Also, "certain EMC customers lost critical data or could not access their data," AcBel charges.