The pithy ruminations from Luke S Crawford <[email protected]> on "Re:
[lopsa-tech] Server Recommendations" were:
[SNIP!]
=>
=> Anyhow, from what I've seen, there's not all that much difference
=> in the /product quality/ between dell and supermicro, it's more
=> about how it's sold.
And how it's supported.
At $WORK, I've got a lot of Dell equipment and some Supermicro (from Silicon
Mechanics, actually). Overall, the performance, build quality, and cost (with
the $LARGE.EDU discount) are very comparable. There are some noticeable
differences, which I think have to do with scale. The following are anecdotes,
meant to be representative, rather than any kind of formal data.
One of the SM boxes (with an Nvidia GPU) has vents on the top & bottom of the
case, as well as at the rear. This led me to the conclusion that the box needed
free space in the rack above & below for cooling. I brought this up w. SM tech
support...and after several calls/email and days of delays, was told that this
was unnecessary. My experience with the Dell world suggests that this kind of
cooling requirement would be documented much more clearly, and that the answer
would have been delivered more quickly.
=>
=> For someone who likes grubbing around inside computers, who has been
=> doing so for the last fifteen years, the support offered by dell
=> and hp has negative value. If it's something obvious, sure, dell
Hmmm...I like grubbing around inside computers (and have been for, oh, about 28
years). I'd much rather deal with the inside of a Dell server than most of the
smaller companies' products. For example, the Dell cases don't have screws (or
they are captive), and the rack slide mechanisms are much nicer. Within the
case, things that must be removed (fan shrouds or cables, for example) usually
are tool-less and have color-coded latches. Small points, but when you've got
to open 50+ servers in sequence to upgrade RAM, it becomes important, and it's
a real convenience when you've got several generations of boxes to know that
you just look for the blue plastic for an indication of where different parts
are secured.
=> or hp can come out and fix it for you. But you've got to sit on hold,
=> take the guy through troubleshooting, etc... and in that time, I
=> could have just swapped the goddamn power supply myself. it's easy.
Huh?
=>
=> Now, if I didn't have that experience, sure, it'd be different, talking
=> to dell, I'm sure, would be easier than doing it myself and getting
=> dust all over my nice suit.
=>
=> Now, when you get a /hard/ problem; something where you are not
=> entirely sure if it's hardware or software, for me, the value of
=> support swings massively to the negative.
=>
=> Do you know how hard it is to get dell to replace a maybe flaky
=> motherboard? it takes a hell of a lot more than $250 worth of
=> effort, even when it's only a $100 motherboard.
=>
That's almost completely the opposite of my experience, and may depend largely
on the level of service contract and the size of your organization.
Our 'critical' equipment has enterprise class contracts (24x7, 4hr parts &
technician dispatch, etc), and $WORKPLACE is a small dept in a large
university. My calls with Dell often go something like:
Me: I'm running Linux and getting IPMI errors on DIMM 3A. It's a 4GB
DIMM. I know that you
want me to swap that DIMM with another one in the same machine
to see if the problem
is with the DIMM or the memory riser, but I want to limit the
downtime on this production
machine. Please send me a new DIMM and when it arrives, I'll
swap them, run memory
diagnostics, and send back the failed DIMM instead of having
downtime now and
again when the replacement arrives.
Dell: OK. We've got XYZ as your shipping address. The part will be
there by 9AM tomorrow. Please
follow-up with me when you swap the memory and I'll keep the
ticket open in case that
doesn't solve the issue.
Certainly, having the presence of a large organization behind my support
request call helps a lot, but once you learn to manage the vendor's
troubleshooting process, it's not that bad.
=> It's worse for most peripherals. When a drive fails a SMART test,
=> I return it to western digital. They send me a refurb. everyone
=> is happy, and minimal effort is expended. When a drive fails
=> a SMART test but still appears to work in a dell? I have to
=> explain to three different idiots what "SMART" is and why that
=> means the drive should be replaced.
See above for my experience with RAM...
As a side note, I've got very mixed feelings about 'returning' bad drives to
the vendor/manufacturer. I don't return 'failing' drives unless:
the vendor will send written certification of secure deletion (physical
destruction or an
acceptable method of overwriting data)
the drive was part of a large striped array (personally, if the drive
fails and was
one disk in a large RAID-5 or -6 stripe, I think that data recovery
possibilities are very,
very low)
I can securely erase the drive in advance (in which case it's probably
functioning just fine)
Depending on what was stored on the drive, sometimes we'll simply eat the cost
of a replacement even if
the warranty is in effect. One option is to purchase the vendor's "you keep the
drive" warranty (offered by Dell, I don't know about others), so that we get
the replacement and keep the failed disk.
=>
=> On top of that, dell shortens the warranty on both disks and ram,
=> the parts most likely, in my experience, to go bad.
=>
I realize that this message makes me sound like a Dell fanboy...I'm not, but
overall, I'm surprised that I like their stuff as much as I do...there are
plenty of things about them not to like, and there are some product lines that
I won't buy from them at all. I think that a lot of my satisfaction comes from
their behavior based on my department's (and university's) purchase volume.
They treat me well because there's significant money at stake. If I was
purchasing 10 servers/year, I probably wouldn't have the same experience. I
think that the same could be said of almost any vendor.
Mark
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