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Wikia / Dell Spat Highlights Divide Between Corporate and Web Computing

17 points by blasdel 17y ago

ghshephard 17y ago
This isn't really a spat - and the issue with what Dell charge for gear that goes into their servers has been around for at least ten years. For about a 3 year period, (1998-2001) any Dell Server I ordered would always come with the minimum amount of memory, and we would always purchase the actual memory from Crucial. Everyone I knew who Bought Dell servers did that, even if they were "Not Warranteed" - Dell certainly never confirmed that the Memory in the System was Dell Memory, and they never had a tech blanch at fixing another broken component. Eventually, Dell was losing enough of their memory business to Crucial that they brought the price back down to market rates. The current pricing distortion (if it exists, I don't really price SSDs in Dell Servers) - will likewise be temporary as people purchase second-market SSDs to put in their Servers and stop buying Dell SSDs. What I don't understand, after having read the article three or four times, is what the actual "Spat" is - is Dell suggesting that if people put Amazon.com Intel SSDs into their systems that there will be a problem with the warranty, _and_ they are actually following through and refusing service when they discover non-Dell drives in their servers? Now that would be an interesting story, but I didn't see any mention of that behavior in the article.
- wmf 17y ago
  It's worse than that; if you attach non-Dell disks to the latest Dell RAID controller, it refuses to work. http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2010/02/10/dell_perc_11th_gen_qualified_hdds_only/ http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2010/02/10/dell_perc_11th_g...
  - ghshephard 17y ago
    Wowsa. Now _that_ is a story. Dell is effectively exiting any of massive-scale markets which rely on smart algorithms and redundant architectures on best-price commodity hardware. I have to believe this is a signal that they are going to focus their efforts on the Enterprise Market in which this "Certified" environment has value. Thanks for the link.
    - wmf 17y ago
      Dell is effectively exiting any of massive-scale markets which rely on smart algorithms and redundant architectures on best-price commodity hardware. I disagree; the massive-scale (DCS) customers generally don't use RAID controllers and they have enough clout to negotiate reasonable disk and RAM prices. Enterprise customers can also negotiate discounts. The people who are getting screwed are small customers (which was traditionally Dell's strongest market AFAIK).
colonelxc 17y ago
"...but Bergman said he’s OK with his drives failing, and has planned for that in his network architecture (he uses RAID 0), so Dell is “optimising for something we really don’t care about.”" I am pretty sure all of this is just taken out of context by an ignorant journalist, but raid 0 is striping, not mirroring, so if one drive goes, the whole array goes. Even if it was supposed to be Raid 1, I hope that they also have real backups (aka raid is not a backup).
- ghshephard 17y ago
  We use RAID 0 all over the place. Great Performance and no additional overhead on disks - Raid 1 requires you purchase twice as many disks, raid 5 has the 1 disk penalty (which, for 3 disks, means 33%). Disks have become pretty reliable lately, and, if you have a redundant machine architecture, you simply boot the bad disk and rebuild the machine. So, I'm guessing based on the context of the article, that yes, Raid-0 is precisely what they are using.
- russss 17y ago
  By RAID 0, they likely just mean "no RAID", where the redundancy is across machines, not just disks.

17 points by blasdel 17y ago

This isn't really a spat - and the issue with what Dell charge for gear that goes into their servers has been around for at least ten years. For about a 3 year period, (1998-2001) any Dell Server I ordered would always come with the minimum amount of memory, and we would always purchase the actual memory from Crucial. Everyone I knew who Bought Dell servers did that, even if they were "Not Warranteed" - Dell certainly never confirmed that the Memory in the System was Dell Memory, and they never had a tech blanch at fixing another broken component. Eventually, Dell was losing enough of their memory business to Crucial that they brought the price back down to market rates. The current pricing distortion (if it exists, I don't really price SSDs in Dell Servers) - will likewise be temporary as people purchase second-market SSDs to put in their Servers and stop buying Dell SSDs. What I don't understand, after having read the article three or four times, is what the actual "Spat" is - is Dell suggesting that if people put Amazon.com Intel SSDs into their systems that there will be a problem with the warranty, _and_ they are actually following through and refusing service when they discover non-Dell drives in their servers? Now that would be an interesting story, but I didn't see any mention of that behavior in the article.

wmf 17y ago
It's worse than that; if you attach non-Dell disks to the latest Dell RAID controller, it refuses to work. http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2010/02/10/dell_perc_11th_gen_qualified_hdds_only/ http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2010/02/10/dell_perc_11th_g...
- ghshephard 17y ago
  Wowsa. Now _that_ is a story. Dell is effectively exiting any of massive-scale markets which rely on smart algorithms and redundant architectures on best-price commodity hardware. I have to believe this is a signal that they are going to focus their efforts on the Enterprise Market in which this "Certified" environment has value. Thanks for the link.
  - wmf 17y ago
    Dell is effectively exiting any of massive-scale markets which rely on smart algorithms and redundant architectures on best-price commodity hardware. I disagree; the massive-scale (DCS) customers generally don't use RAID controllers and they have enough clout to negotiate reasonable disk and RAM prices. Enterprise customers can also negotiate discounts. The people who are getting screwed are small customers (which was traditionally Dell's strongest market AFAIK).

colonelxc 17y ago

"...but Bergman said he’s OK with his drives failing, and has planned for that in his network architecture (he uses RAID 0), so Dell is “optimising for something we really don’t care about.”" I am pretty sure all of this is just taken out of context by an ignorant journalist, but raid 0 is striping, not mirroring, so if one drive goes, the whole array goes. Even if it was supposed to be Raid 1, I hope that they also have real backups (aka raid is not a backup).

ghshephard 17y ago
We use RAID 0 all over the place. Great Performance and no additional overhead on disks - Raid 1 requires you purchase twice as many disks, raid 5 has the 1 disk penalty (which, for 3 disks, means 33%). Disks have become pretty reliable lately, and, if you have a redundant machine architecture, you simply boot the bad disk and rebuild the machine. So, I'm guessing based on the context of the article, that yes, Raid-0 is precisely what they are using.
russss 17y ago
By RAID 0, they likely just mean "no RAID", where the redundancy is across machines, not just disks.