Edward Ned Harvey <[email protected]> writes: > If you assemble all these "standard compatible" components from various > manufacturers, each one will only warrant their own component. You have a > problem, you call up Seagate, the drive passes the diag, so they tell you > it's your HBA. You call Intel or LSI or Adaptec, the HBA passes their diag, > so they say it's the drive.
Funny, my experience sysadmining (other people's) dell kit, entirely consisting of dell or HP parts has been that not only is the warranty quite a bit shorter than the warranty for the individual parts, but if you have an intermittent problem that passes the 'dell diagnostic' even during that warranty period the dell folks won't fix it until you figure out and prove exactly what the problem is. I've probably spent more than six months of my life trying to figure out problems with under warranty dell servers that Dell wouldn't help us with until I proved exactly what the problem was. Also, if you max out the ram, you usually end up paying about 2x per system going with dell over assembling supermicros. That pays for a /whole lot/ of spares for the occasional "I can't figure out what is wrong with this server, throw it out the window and pop in a new one" > You call up Sun or HP or Dell, with all of your components being one-name > branded, and they assume support ownership for the system as a whole. Not > just one component. And since they've got thousands of units deployed, they > don't have weird compatibility glitches like this anyway. You do have a point with the 'weird compatability glitches' - Dell does help there, at least for servers that are fairly new. The big problem is that I find that my clients who use dell often end up keeping servers around for 4, 5, sometimes even 6 or 7 years. Long past the time when I've given them to my little brother, an employee, or ebay. (I tend to toss a server after 3 years) - usually getting parts out of dell for a server more than 5 years old is impossible, or, at least really, really expensive. Once I wanted to upgrade the ram in a old workstation. they wanted something like a grand for 512MiB of rambus. The thing is, if you are paying twice as much per server as I am, the "pay for new hardware vs pay for sysadmin time and power to run old junk" equation tips in the other direction, but that's another source of sysadmin frusteration. I would have saved many hours last month if I had just ordered from dell. But, I'd also have paid twice as much; being as my company spends more than twice as much on hardware as it does on my salary, it's worth it for me to figure out what is going on. (and I really only have to pay this cost once every time I change my arcatecture. now that I know what's going on, I've got a few years of trouble-free ordering cheap supermicro systems.) -- Luke S. Crawford http://prgmr.com/xen/ - Hosting for the technically adept http://nostarch.com/xen.htm - We don't assume you are stupid. _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
