does anyone sell good quality servers anymore?

[Lonni J Friedman]

If so, I'd love to know.  They do appear to meet my hardware requirements.

On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 2:32 PM,  <andrewlylegould at gmail.com> wrote:
> Does anyone have any experience with ixsystems?
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Lonni J Friedman <netllama at gmail.com>
> Sender: linux-users-bounces+andrewlylegould=gmail.com at linux-sxs.org
> Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2012 14:30:24
> To: <sean at csupport.com>; Linux Users (formerly Caldera) discussion<linux-users at linux-sxs.org>
> Reply-To: "Linux Users \(formerly Caldera\) discussion"
>         <linux-users at linux-sxs.org>
> Subject: Re: does anyone sell good quality servers anymore?
>
> 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