does anyone sell good quality servers anymore?

[Lonni J Friedman]

Thanks.  Unfortunately, their only 1U offering doesn't meet my storage
requirements (no SAS, and no 6-8 disks support).

On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 2:18 PM,  <sean at csupport.com> wrote:
> 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