[Opinions Wanted] Dell PowerEdge 2950 Servers ...

[Paul Schmehl]

--On Friday, January 26, 2007 09:35:06 -0600 Dan Nelson 
<dnelson at allantgroup.com> wrote:

> In the last episode (Jan 26), chris neill said:
>> On Fri, Jan 26, 2007 at 09:41:19AM -0500, David Robillard wrote:
>> > 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.
>
> Maybe it depends on you you end up talking to.  We recently had a PERC
> 4e/Di go bad in one of our PE2800s.  Dell sent us a new motherboard
> same day and we replaced it ourselves in 2 hours (took so long only
> because we had never done it before).  It did ship with an out-of-date
> BIOS, though, so it took a while to flash everything up.

It surely must.  We have hundreds of Dell servers of every size, shape and 
description and have never had any trouble at all with support.  We call, 
them the part that's bad, and they express it to us right then.  We've even 
had parts "hand-delivered" from Austin by our rep.   I think the key is to 
bypass 1st tier, which you can easily do by asking your rep for the 2nd 
tier #.  We've found the Dell's to be extremely reliable  (we just retired 
a six-year-old server because we were concerned that the drives might start 
failing), and we often sign up for additional support after the initial 
three-year warranty period has expired.

I personally maintain a Dell (PowerEdge 500!) that is about five or six 
years old (don't recall exactly), and the only failure I've had a single 
drive.  (I took the opportunity to upgrade to 5.4 at the time.)

Paul Schmehl (pauls at utdallas.edu)
Senior Information Security Analyst
The University of Texas at Dallas
http://www.utdallas.edu/ir/security/