Re: SAN vs Internal Disks

On 9/6/07, Joel Fradkin <jfradkin(at)wazagua(dot)com> wrote:
> I am not sure I agree with that evaluation.
> I only have 2 dell database servers and they have been 100% reliable.
> Maybe he is referring to support which does tend be up to who you get.
> When I asked about performance on my new server they were very helpful but I
> did have a bad time on my NAS device (but had the really cheap support plan
> on it). They did help me get it fixed but I had to RMA all the drives on the
> NAS as they were all bad and it was no fun installing the os as it had no
> floppy. I got the better support for both the data base servers which are
> using jbod from dell for the disk array. The quad proc opteron with duel
> cores and 16gig of memory has been extremely fast (like 70%) over my older 4
> proc 32 bit single core machine with 8 gig. But both are running postgres
> and perform needed functionality. I would like to have redundant backups of
> these as they are mission critical, but all in good time.

Dell's ok if by support you mean replacing simple broken parts, etc...

I'm talking about issues like the one we had with our 26xx servers
which, thankfully, Dell hasn't made in a while. We had the adaptec
controllers that locked up once every 1 to 3 months for no reason, and
with 4 servers this meant a lockup of one every 1 to 2 weeks. Not
acceptable in a production environment. It took almost 2 years to get
Dell to agree to ship us the LSI based RAID controllers for those 4
machines. Our account rep told us not to worry about returning the
RAID controllers as they were so old as to be obsolete. One of the
four replacement controllers they sent us was bad, so they
cross-shipped another one. Sometimes you get a broken part, it
happens.

One month after we got all our RAID controllers replaced, we started
getting nasty calls from their parts people wanting those parts back,
saying they were gonna charge us for them, etc... Two thirds of the
parts were still in the server because we hadn't gotten a sheet
identifying them (the RAID key and battery) and had left in not
worrying about it because we'd been told they were needed.

These are production servers, we can't just shut them off for fun to
pull a part we were told we didn't need to return.

On top of that, the firmware updates come as an .exe that has to be
put on a windows floppy. We don't have a single windows machine with
a floppy at the company I work for (lots of laptops with windows). We
had to dig out a floppy drive and a windows CD to create a bootable
floppy to install a firmware update for a linux server.

So, my main complaint is about their customer service. The machines,
when they work, are pretty good. Normally the hardware gets along
with RH OSes. But when things go wrong, Dell will not admit to a
design problem that's staring them in the face, and they have wasted
literally hundreds of man hours for us with their stonewalling on this
subject. So, I see no reason to buy more hardware from them when
there are dealers big and small who have so far treated us much
better.