Re: Server Grade Hardware Purchase [OT]

On Fri, June 27, 2008 12:04 pm, Josiah Ritchie wrote:
> I haven't purchased server grade hardware in over a year. In my prior
> shop, we would almost always default to Dell. I've heard whispers that
> HP is the way to go. I want a machine that I know runs lots of other

Hey Josiah,

Here are a few of my opinions. Take them for what they are worth.

-HP makes nice hardware, but I will second Bob's opinion of finding
upgrade / add-on parts and forget finding support documentation, drivers,
etc. once the hardware gets any age on it. As a matter of fact, finding
anything on HP's web site is a total bear. They could learn a few things
from support.dell.com. :) HP is fairly notorious for rigging their
equipment to make a piece of otherwise standard hardware proprietary. Case
in point: old LaserJet RAM was simple PC133 RAM with several pins jumpered
to one another. If the printer did not detect the jumpered pins, it would
not recognize the RAM. I did a how-to a few years back about turning
regular RAM into HP printer RAM.

I am in the process of putting two HP 7000 series blade chassis into
production. Thus far, I am impressed, but as I expected, finding
documentation on them is still a little bit hard, even though they are
current. I am not sure how much we will regret buying these when we need
support in a few years.

-Dell has given me no problems whatsoever with various flavors of Linux
(SuSE, Ubuntu, RHEL, BSD) and I like the fact that Dell has less
proprietary hardware than HP. I give Dell tremendous bonus points for
support.dell.com. No other OEM gives you the power to go to a site, type
in a model or service tag and get drivers within 1 minute with virtually
no searching. I had a laptop I was working on the other day that shipped
in 1999 and I could still get the drivers, manuals, etc. just as easily as
something new. In my opinion, if I cannot get support for hardware a few
years from now, I would rather not even use it. Dell also has a ton of
involvement with open-source O/S drivers and management, making their
solutions somewhat easier to use.

-SuperMicro always seems attractive to me in some way, but has always
fallen short for one reason or another. I maintain several 4x4 SATA
chassis systems and they all have issues. On the first generation, I do
not think that we have a single drive tray that is not broken, after only
2 years of use. The trays jam and then the release mechanism breaks. They
are of very poor design and fit. The trays have been used maybe 10 times
each.

On the new chassis, it is near impossible to remove more than one column
of drives at a time because of the low clearance between columns of
drives. If you have a drive in an adjacent column just popped out of the
chassis, the drives in the next column over cannot be removed or inserted.
On top of that, the trays are so difficult to remove the first 10 times or
so that you risk whipping the tray across the room when it finally lets
loose; one must put almost all of their body weight on the tray to get it
out.

-Penguin Computing has been about the same as Super Micro on the one model
I worked with. I think the worst thing about that particular case was that
the rack rails would separate when the server was only about 1/2 out of
the rack. That made things exciting! Additionally, Penguin had zero
support materials readily available online the last that I checked.

This is out of the scope of your question, but let me gripe about EMC for
a second too. Why in the heck can I not download manuals, specs, anything
unless I own an EMC product and have a privileged account to Powerlink?
Insane.

Best Regards,
Dennis Little

--
Building a quality internship program:
http://centralpennbusiness.com/blog.asp?pid=1302