Opinions Wanted: Dell PowerEdge Servers ... ?

[Jerry McAllister]

> 
> I'm currently weighing options ... my last two servers were HP Proliant, 
> and I *really* like them, but I might have a line on a supplier in Panama 
> that deals in Dell Servers and not HP ...
> 
> Looking at Dell's web site, the PowerEdge has an optional "Remote Access 
> Controller" that will it *sounds* like will give me similar functionality 
> as HPs iLO ...
> 
> But, I've heard bad things about their 'desktop offerings', and am not 
> sure if that follows through to their "Servers" ...
> 
> So, I'm kinda looking for both good, and bad, experiences with the 
> PowerEdge stuff ... anyone with opinions?

We had about 70 sites with Dell Poweredge servers and they ran FreeBSD
just fine.   They were used for general purpose network servers and 
didn't do any desktop stuff.  They did name service, web, email, listservice,
radius dialup authentication, web proxy, etc.  The number of users on
each varied by site from a handful to a few thousand.

The only trouble was with the DAT tape drives.  Most of our sites had 
problems with the DATs.  Dell service had to replace lots of them, some more
than once.  But a couple of sites spent the extra money to buy the DLT drives 
and they worked just fine, with no problem.   It seemed to be mostly the DATs
couldn't handle the service load we put on them.

Recently one site decided to get an HP Proliant 350 just because they had
a bunch of HP machines and it has been almost the same to work with as
the Dell PowerEdge machines except the NIC driver was different and the HP
was bought with the HP LTO Ultrium tape drive which I have come to like 
a lot - it is fast.

SO, functionally, they seem to both be good and about the same.
I have never made use of the Dell (or HP for that matter) remote
diagnostic stuff.  I don't know if that is hardware or requires
some installed software.   We completely wipe and rebuild the disks
so anything Dell might put there is gone.

ps.  I have had no particular problem with any Dell desktops either, but
    haven't been completely happy with the HP desktops I have encountered.
    But, there haven't been many of them.

////jerry

> 
> Thx ...
> 
> ----
> Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
> Email . scrappy at hub.org                              MSN . scrappy at hub.org
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