does anyone sell good quality servers anymore?

[sean at csupport.com]

I have had good success with System76.  www.system76.com

Sean Keating
-----Original Message-----
From: Lonni J Friedman <netllama at gmail.com>
Sender: linux-users-bounces+sean=csupport.com at linux-sxs.org
Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2012 13:17:33 
To: Linux tips and tricks<linux-users at linux-sxs.org>
Reply-To: "Linux Users \(formerly Caldera\) discussion" 	<linux-users at linux-sxs.org>
Subject: does anyone sell good quality servers anymore?

$DAYJOB has been using HP's rackmount servers for a few years.  Mostly
1U, but a few 2U as well.  We spend around $75k/year on new servers to
replace older, or additional for expansion.  For the past year or so,
the quality of the servers has taken a noticeable nose dive.   We've
experienced all sorts of time wasting nonsense with brand new, out of
the box, servers:
* hardware RAID controller kept marking every brand new disk in 1
drive bay as failed, until they replaced the RAID controller (and that
took them 2 weeks to debug)
* CPU was triggering MCE's until the CPU was replaced
* multiple ECC RAM modules in several servers were being flagged with
ECC failures until we replaced them

All of this was under warranty, but it was a huge PITA (delayed 1
project by over a month as we couldn't get the server to remain stable
when being tested under load).  HP acted as if it was business as
usual to ship new servers with bad components, simply because they
passed their factory test suite.

My manager & I have reached our limit with HP.  We escalated the
fiasco to an "HP escalation manager" (you know something is horked in
your process when you have to hire someone to deal with all your
screw-ups), who gave us a lot of lip service, but repeatedly failed to
schedule the meeting that they offered to convince us that they had
identified & corrected the problems.

We really don't have exotic needs:
* 1U form factor
* 6-8 hotswap 2.5" drive bays
* SAS disks
* HW RAID controller (with battery backed cache), with support for RAID 1,5 & 50
* at least 64GB RAM support
* two CPU sockets
* at least two onboard Gb NICs
* all hardware works without crazy out of tree, side band Linux
drivers (or pre-compiled drivers that only load in some ridiculous
subset of Linux distributions).

We don't care what kind of CPUs it is (Xeons or Opterons), or the
number of cores, or clock speed, or cache size.  Nothing we're doing
with these servers is CPU limited.

I'd like to start sourcing from some other vendor.  Except that I
can't find one that isn't a disaster too.

We actually tried out SuperMicro's offerings for a while a few years
ago, but they were horrible.  While there weren't any immediate
manufacturing quality problems, they were generally unstable in other
ways.  SBIOS bugs, poor Linux support, and rather crappy overall
performance.

I tried to go to IBM, but their website's "Hardware Configurator" is
completely broken.  It presents configuration options, and then spews
errors about how that option can't be selected.  Or the options have
cryptic descriptions such as "Essential Package (A2WK, standard with
79141EY) ".  It even presented a NULL option at one point (with a cost
of $0, what a bargain!).  I'm guessing there's some very narrow
combination of configuration options that works, and everything else
is completely untested (both on the website, and in reality).

So I went to Dell's website.  Its not half bad, except that the
customization options pale in comparison to what HP's offers.  So we'd
have to spend a few thousand extra just to get at least the same
minimum requirements as we currently get with the HP servers.  For
example, every disk in the server must be identical, even if I want &
intend to create more than 1 RAID array from two different groups of
disks.  This forces me to buy 8 1TB disks, when I really want 6 1TB
and 2 500GB.  Once done, the server will cost almost twice as much as
we're paying HP.  Sure this might be worth it if we can unbox the
servers and not spend a week+ finding random faulty components, but I
don't know that yet.

All of this brings me back to the subject.  Is there any company out
there who is selling good quality servers, that doesn't make it
painful or time consuming to customize them prior to ordering?  Also,
good warranty support.  If a part fails, I don't want to spend half my
day on the phone appeasing some drone with a checklist.



-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
L. Friedman                                    netllama at gmail.com
LlamaLand                       https://netllama.linux-sxs.org
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