On Jan 14, 2011, at 12:16 PM, Brodie, Kent wrote: > The past year we've been purchasing Dell poweredge servers - lots of > R710's, but also many of the other PowerEdge models. The drac6 > management modules work well for me. The perc controllers do raid > nicely. When we've had to contact Dell for service, they've been > responsive.
The Dell servers I've seen require the use of PCs running Windows and Internet Explorer to perform certain systems administration tasks, like updating firmware, some aspects of remote console access, configuring the PERC RAID controllers, etc.... They do things like Active-X plug-ins that download from the server to your browser, and if you're not running IE on Windows, then you're screwed. Personally, I would stay away from Dell unless pretty much all the other machines you've got would be running Windows. If you have any admins who prefer to use Linux as their desktop OS, or Mac OS X as their desktop OS, or need to be able to perform these kinds of things remotely from a handheld device like a smartphone, then you are likely to run into various problems with the Dell hardware. I'd rather go with HP or one of the more *nix friendly lesser-known vendors, like Iron Systems, SuperMicro, etc.... Of course, I'm a little biased towards Iron Systems, since they are heavily used at ISC and f.root-servers.net, which I'm sure is only partly influenced by the fact that Paul Vixie is one of the principals involved with Iron Systems. -- Brad Knowles <[email protected]> LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
