does anyone sell good quality servers anymore?

[Rick bowers]

While I don't have any direct experience buying large numbers of systems, I've sold hardware and enterprise software my entire career. 
I agree with Vu and Michael. If you feel Dell has the basics of what you want, call them and get an account rep. You will get better pricing and should be able to configure your systems exactly as you want without being restrained by their web site's "cookie cutter" configurator. 

~Rick

Sent from my iPhone

On Nov 21, 2012, at 16:17, Lonni J Friedman <netllama at gmail.com> wrote:

> $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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