Rack equipment vendor/thoughts on Dell?

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

One reason is that Dell does not have the AMD chips in their servers, and 
the AMD chips today are a bit more powerful than the Intel chips for the 
next several months and maybe further.
While HP, Dell and IBM do support Linux, both HP and IBM have been committed 
to Linux for a long time (HP since 1994), and both HP and IBM provide Linux 
support directly for their servers. Here is a Linux link to HP: 
http://www.hp.com/go/linux
Another vendor you might also want to investigate is CPU sales in Waltham. 
(http://cpusales.com/). They have been good to both the BLU and 
BostonUserGroups, although pcs4everyone has also been around for a while 
and has a good reputation. 

One additional thing is that we (BUG and BLU) bought 2 Dell Poweredge 
servers a couple of years ago. The BLU server is running Fedora Core 2, and 
the system tends to lock up every so often, and it is not a software issue. 
The other BLU server is an older Compaq (HP) Proliant that runs like the 
Everready rabbit. 

The bottom line for me is that both HP and IBM make some very good servers 
on both the low end as well as the high end, and both fully support Linux. 
You can go to their websites and check the support matrix for the various 
servers. 

On Thursday 26 January 2006 8:30 am, Steve S. wrote:
> Does anyone have any good reason we should NOT buy Dell gear?  
> I have priced out the equivalent 
> machines with HP, Dell, Sun, along with local vendors like
> pcs4everyone.  All the equipment is in the same general ballpark per
> server class, but on high-end machines where cost is less of an issue
> than getting the fastest chips, the small vendors generally don't have
> access to the very latest technologies (example: pcsforeveryone doesn't
> have any dual-core Xeon chips in its line yet).


-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
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