Re: hardware advice

>________________________________

> From: M. D. <lists(at)turnkey(dot)bz>
>To: pgsql-performance(at)postgresql(dot)org
>Sent: Friday, 28 September 2012, 18:33
>Subject: Re: [PERFORM] hardware advice
>
>On 09/28/2012 09:57 AM, David Boreham wrote:
>> On 9/28/2012 9:46 AM, Craig James wrote:
>>> Your best warranty would be to have the confidence to do your own
>>> repairs, and to have the parts on hand.  I'd seriously consider
>>> putting your own system together.  Maybe go to a few sites with
>>> pre-configured machines and see what parts they use.  Order those,
>>> screw the thing together yourself, and put a spare of each critical
>>> part on your shelf.
>>>
>> This is what I did for years, but after taking my old parts collection to the landfill a few times, realized I may as well just buy N+1 machines and keep zero spares on the shelf. That way I get a spare machine available for use immediately, and I know the parts are working (parts on the shelf may be defective). If something breaks, I use the spare machine until the replacement parts arrive.
>>
>> Note in addition that a warranty can be extremely useful in certain organizations as a vehicle of blame avoidance (this may be its primary purpose in fact). If I buy a bunch of machines that turn out to have buggy NICs, well that's my fault and I can kick myself since I own the company, stay up late into the night reading kernel code, and buy new NICs. If I have an evil Dilbertian boss, then well...I'd be seriously thinking about buying Dell boxes in order to blame Dell rather than myself, and be able to say "everything is warrantied" if badness goes down. Just saying...
>>
>I'm kinda in the latter shoes.  Dell is the only thing that is trusted in my organisation.  If I would build my own, I would be fully blamed for anything going wrong in the next 3 years. Thanks everyone for your input.  Now my final choice will be if my budget allows for the latest and fastest, else I'm going for the x5690.  I don't have hundreds of users, so I think the x5690 should do a pretty good job handling the load.
>
>

Having
plenty experience with Dell I'd urge you reconsider.  All the Dell servers
we've had have arrived hideously misconfigured, and tech support gets you
nowhere.  Once we've rejigged the hardware ourselves, maybe replacing a
part or two they've performed okay.
 
Reliability has been okay, however one of our
newer R910s recently all of a sudden went dead to the world; no prior symptoms
showing in our hardware and software monitoring, no errors in the os logs,
nothing in the dell drac logs.  After a hard reset it's back up as if
nothing happened, and it's an issue I'm none the wiser to the cause.  Not
good piece of mind.
 
Look around and find another vendor, even if
your company has to pay more for you to have that blame avoidance.