On Sat, 24 Jun 2006 22:03:42 -0300 (ADT) "Marc G. Fournier" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I'm currently weighing options ... my last two servers were HP Proliant, > and I *really* like them, but I might have a line on a supplier in Panama > that deals in Dell Servers and not HP ... > > Looking at Dell's web site, the PowerEdge has an optional "Remote Access > Controller" that will it *sounds* like will give me similar functionality > as HPs iLO ... >From my experience (this is going back a little way now) with Dell PowerEdge 2650s with a Dell ERA II controller, the controller was nowhere near as good as the iLO on a HP ProLiant DL360 G3. The Dell cards were only able to transmit text to a remote controller, which given that at the time I was working with Windows Server 2003 was a real pain! The controllers also came to us with identical MAC addresses (across thousands of machines), which was a blast... All this having been said, however, the newer Dell controllers are undoubtably leaps and bounds above the ERA II. > But, I've heard bad things about their 'desktop offerings', and am not > sure if that follows through to their "Servers" ... Funny, I've always heard (relatively) good things about their desktops / laptops :-) > So, I'm kinda looking for both good, and bad, experiences with the > PowerEdge stuff ... anyone with opinions? I found I had really terrible support from Dell. This may just be a Dell Australia issue, or perhaps the "technician"s allocated to my employer weren't all that capable, or some such. I found countless problems with (for instance) the OpenManage software with things like not showing missing HDDs under certain circumstances (I seem to recall my main concern at the time was that a missing hot-spare for a RAID 5 array would go totally unnoticed / unreported in OpenManage despite being indicated on the machine's front information display). Having to scrub RAID volumes created with the Adaptec onboard RAID controller (a PERC 5/Di (Dell's designation), from memory) was a pain, too, and very lengthy (it would take around 20 hours for a 4 x 80 decimal GB disk RAID 5 set). My experience with HP servers suggests that this process isn't required for the cards they use, but I'll happily confess to being really ignorant of this whole process. I tend to think of Dell as a low-end provider that will cobble together systems based on whatever bits happen to be lying around (don't think that one PE 2650 is the same as the next!), which in turn are invariably the cheapest bits available for a particular job. I've made this sound bad - somewhat intentionally - but there's certainly a market for cheap over quality. I would be far less averse to chucking in Dell kit at home - particularly if it cost significantly less than other options - than I would be to chucking it in a big, geographically diverse organisation with much more expensive uptime requirements. Hope this had been useful, sorry to go on for so long! > Thx ... > > ---- > Marc G. Fournier Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org) > Email . [EMAIL PROTECTED] MSN . [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Yahoo . yscrappy Skype: hub.org ICQ . 7615664 -- Nick Withers email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: http://www.nickwithers.com Mobile: +61 414 397 446 _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
