Rack equipment vendor/thoughts on Dell?

[markw at mohawksoft.com (markw at mohawksoft.com)]

> Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2006 08:30:53 -0500
> From: "Steve S." <blu_discuss at seremeth.com>
> Subject: Rack equipment vendor/thoughts on Dell?
> To: Boston Linux & Unix User Group <discuss at blu.org>
> Message-ID: <43D8CF0D.2020709 at seremeth.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> Hello,
>
> I'm working for a startup and we are about to buy a lot of rackmount
> gear -- a little bit for our internal development, and a lot (15-20
> servers to start) to go into a local colo facility for
> staging/production type use.  We've been going back and forth on the
> different vendors.  I personally like HP, and have had decent luck with
> their DL series equipment - mostly 1-2U Intel based servers.  Dell seems
> to be a little less expensive and I can see a few minor reasons why
> there are plusses and minuses to purchasing their gear (example: Dell
> makes you pay extra for a PCI card that handles remote management where
> HP puts a port on the motherboard for that; dell includes a CD-ROM and
> HP makes you pay over $100 extra for one!).  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).
>
> Any thoughts on vendors you like, don't like, reasons why?  I know this
> is a bit of an age-old-question, but I'm interested to here recent
> successes/failures.  All of this equipment will likely be running Linux
> (Perhaps CentOS, perhaps RedHat Enterprise, perhaps some flavor of
> vmware).
>
> We'd rather have one vendor and try to keep the hardware as similar to
> each other as possible.

I'm not sure what your budget is, but it sounds like you are going to be
installing the OS yourself. If you install your own OS, I see little, if
any, value with going with a Dell or HP.

The best bang for your buck comes from small mom/pop shops (I say mom/pop,
but I mean "the little guy").

In my last couple data centers, I've gone with top-shelf hardware
assembled by little companies. Name brand drives, motherboards, and RAID
controllers assmebled by something like Joe's computers who burns them in
and manages returns if nessisary.

When you install your own OS, none of the vendors will support you very
well. They usually insist on their own "qualified" version of the OS and
drivers.

No matter who supplies your hardware, sudden hardware death happens, and
you will have to fix it. As a rule of thumb, I buy the equivilent of one
or two extra machines for spare parts. Reasonably skilled IT people can
swap a machine, hard disk, ram DIMMS, quickly. Bring them back to the
shop, test to classify the failure and get an RMA from the vendor (if the
time spent testing is cheaper than a new part.)

That's just my take. I've dealt with Dell and found them infuriatingly
inflexible. One time I had a machine onto which I installed Linux over the
Windows which came with it. The hard drive died. I called tech support to
get an RMA on the drive. The guy said he had to walk me through the
diagnostics procedure to verify the failure, he said start the dell
diagnostics program. I told him the system was running Linux. He said I
had to put Windows on the system before I could get an RMA. I said, I
can't because the drive is dead. He said I can't help you if you don't run
the Dell diagnostics. Doh!

The next time I dealt with Dell I was ordering 24 computers for a Beowulf
cluster. (I had to deal with Dell because the company had a "relationship"
with them.) I asked them to ship them with Linux. (save upwards of $2400
in Windows license fees.) They wanted a couple hundred dollars MORE for
the Linux machines than Windows machines. I asked why they were more
expensive, no one I talked too knew (Linux is free, right?). I then said,
forget it, just ship them with nothing on them. They wouldn't do that. So,
I had to get them with Windows.

I just don't like dealing with Dell. Unless you are a huge company, they
won't do a thing for you.