[Opinions Wanted] Dell PowerEdge 2950 Servers ...

[chris neill]

On Fri, Jan 26, 2007 at 09:41:19AM -0500, David Robillard wrote:
> My personal experience with Dell is that it's ok until you hit a
> problem. Then it's hell. So bad, in fact, that we don't purchase them
> anymore and have gone with IBM and HP systems for our FreeBSD, RedHat
> and Windows machines.

Can you say PERC?

> 
> IMHO, the problem with Dell is not their hardware, but their support
> (or lack of it).

Ditto -- We had a (duh) PERC 3/di go south on a PE2550 and getting Dell to
fix it was like pulling teeth. Once I finally leaned on them enough to get
them to agree to an RMA, I had to wait until the next day for the part to be
courried to my datacenter (which was a slight gaff, since they don't usually
do S&R), and another couple of hours for the guy to show up.

> 
> If you plan on running your Business on Dell, be prepared for
> Incredibly bad and horrible support. Be it consumer product support or
> Enterprise 24/7/365 type support.
> 

Agreed.. and since FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE runs on Sun X86-64 servers (X2100,
X4100, X4200), I don't see any reason to have to bother with it.

However, I do have a handful of PE2950s in deployment, just upgraded them all
to 6.2-RELEASE, no problems yet (unlike those crappy SuperMicro Pentium D
boards).

Cheers,