Ducati Sporting Club UK > General > Idle Chat > IT Advice?

[JPM]

Originally posted by TP

Interestingly enough, Dell has just come in at a third of the pricing compared to HPQ at the rather largish company that I work for. previously HPQ had it sewn up - no competition, every server bought was bought off a list jointly prepared by our global ops team and HPQ.

There is now a dual provider arrangement whereby Dell's price point has VERY AGGRESSIVELY brought them into play. Don't take this too likely either, there are some major costs associated in bringing another vendors h/w platform into our environment because of the amount of automated management that we do and the existing skillset and OS images with the HPQ drivers etc - it was a big call.

I've worked at a big consulting firm in London that exclusively used Dell kit and was involved in a 139 server deployment for a customer in Brisbane using Dell kit and they had lots of issues, particularly with the PERC RAID controllers. They just dropped all memory of having certain array's configured - sorry we just dropped your financial's database, give her a quick reboot and she'll be sweet!

I watch with trepidation the deployment of this kit into my shiney new data centre I've just designed - no offence Ian, but I really hope your product has stepped up in quality!

....I can assure you it hasn't PERC controllers... I've got 3 in my draw, get through one a week, as you say they decide they like to configure/flush the array when they feel like it. Some of our servers haven't been rebooted in months, more like a year simply because as soon as you do they don't come back up, unfortunately I've got nearly 160 of the buggers to support, as I said luckily being swapped out for HP.

As they say you get what you pay for