On 01/14/2011 07:11 AM, Roy McMorran wrote:
Most recently we've used the Sun x4170 with the Nehalem processors,
and I'm probably looking for something similar (although perhaps with
Westmere now). I'll probably consider Dell and HP, but I will also
look at 'white box' vendors. I seem to remember hearing good things
about Silicon Mechanics.
Must-haves are console-over-LAN (command-line console preferred over
KVM), redundant power supplies, mirrored system disks. Disk space
requirements are minimal. FWIW these are going to be web servers
running Apache httpd and/or Tomcat. We'll be running RHEL.
Thanks for any advice.
I'll chuck in my threepence hapney.
It all depends on where you are geographically and how much money you're
spending with them. I used to work for a hosting company / ISP in the
UK who had approximately 500 cabs of servers. Probably half of those
cabs were ours with managed servers in them, all HP, but because they
weren't all under a single service contract we didn't count as a big
customer for them. Whenever something would break we'd end up speaking
to an HP rep in India who's grasp of English would be interesting, and
waste an hour trying to arrange for the necessary support. Once we got
through all that hassle, being based in central London meant that
service was fairly fast. However it was a huge source of frustration
that HP couldn't tell you what part you needed in your server nor
understood that memory timing is important [1]. I know of sysadmins not
based in London that have found HPs service to be a bit sporadic. The
service engineers were all outsourced with different companies servicing
different areas, so along with unknown quality of engineer, you also
could have unknown quality of service company.
Dells that I've supported have always been reliable, and they seemed to
take extra good care of the education sector in the UK. I love being
able to put in the service tag and know exactly what is in the machine,
and speak to an operator who can advised based on that. It makes a huge
difference.
In Hawaii we get good phone response for Dell, but parts supply can be
interesting.
One or two of the colo customers at the hosting firm had IBM servers,
but that was the exception rather than the rule, and they have a weird
proprietary KVM type solution.
Both Dell and HP have remote control services, DRAC in Dell's case and
iLo. We increasingly used the latter at the hosting firm and found it
did most of what we needed. We had access to power controls, a remote
console etc. I've yet to do anything with DRAC, so couldn't say how it
compares. For our Dell servers we mostly use serial consoles and a KVM
switch, paired with some APC strips for power control. Probably not so
good as a complete option, but it's cheaper.
I guess for now I'd still prefer Dell over HP.
Paul
[1] Regarding memory: We'd occasionally need to add more memory to a
server, or replace a dodgy memory chip. HP at the time (and may still
do?) assigned the same product number for a memory chip regardless of
who made it or what the timing capabilities were. They only categorised
them by bus speed and size. Unfortunately motherboards are a lot more
sensitive than that. Pretty much every time we got a memory chip we'd
find we then couldn't boot a server because of the differences unless we
dropped down to single channel RAM (with associated performance hit.
Even then that wasn't always guaranteed to work. After we'd kick up a
fuss they'd decide to send out a service tech to ensure we were
installing the chips correctly, because "they are definitely the right
parts". The service tech was smarter than the phone people because he'd
built up a good stock of memory chips of each kind so that we could
usually get something that actually matched.
Regarding part numbers: With every call to HP the first thing they'd
request was a serial number. We had a major customer's master database
server that was reporting a faulty CPU fan, and it had shut down the
associated processor. It wasn't a great situation but it ensured the
server remained working. I phoned up HP to get a replacement part sent
out ASAP, and dutifully provided the server serial number. "What is the
product code of the part you want to replace?", "Can't you tell that
from the information about the server? You know what model it is don't
you?" (assuming the serial number would provide that), " Yes sir, but I
need to know the product code of the CPU Fan."
Any outage of the server would result in lost revenue for the customer,
so we were reluctant to shut down the server more than necessary. After
a lot of back and forth we bit the bullet, arranged down time and found
the serial number. They then sent the wrong part, but did send an
engineer. Server was shut down, but the part wouldn't fit. They sent
another.. same thing, on the 4th shot we had the same engineer as we had
the 1st time and he came out with a whole stockpile of CPU fans to make
sure they'd got one that fit.
At least with Dell they always knew exactly what you've got and send the
right bits, every time.
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