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What Do You Look For in a Big Iron Review?
ValourX writes "We're starting to write more reviews of enterprise-class hardware and software and although we've done pretty well with our reviews, the high-end products are a lot trickier when it comes to testing and evaluation. Obviously it is not possible to build an enterprise-grade 'your neck is on the line' production environment just for writing reviews, but maybe we can do something smaller, just for testing purposes. What do you as an IT professional want to read in a review for a server OS or a high-speed switch, or a big iron server or proprietary workstation? What tests should we run? What results and feature comparisons are going to be most meaningful to you?"
If you knew our operations guy, you would test resistance to physical attacks.
Bossman Compatibility: Verifies that the hardware vendor has taken my boss's boss out to dinner and purchased suitably expensive drinks. Rating based on the number of stars the restaurant recieved, although points may be docked if the filet mignon was a little overdone. This one is related to the...
CYA Verification: Vendor must have a name recognizable to people who read periodicals such as "CTO Magazine" so, when it breaks down, I can say "who ever hear of XVY Company's gear being bad?" If the vendor is a company like Dell which also sells home PCs, this metric should also include going to my boss's boss's house and verifying that his Dell is running okay so I don't have to hear shit like "I don't know why we got Dell, my desktop at home has problems all the time, too, and it's only six years old!"
Sweetness Factor: Not as much of a factor as it once was, depending on how big of iron we're talking about. But it the thing has, say, requires a cooling tower that happens to have a waterfall built into it, that's point right there. May conflict with....
The Under-Desk Operation Profile: Since it'd take at least a month and a dozen SRs and books of useless paperwork just to get the beastie screwed into a rack at our NOC, the server must both fit nicely under the desk in my cube with all the other machines and not be too loud. Generation of excess heat is a plus since the facilities people have set 61 degrees as a reasonable temperature for my office in the winter.
Extra-App Capacity Testing: For when some moron in another department comes in and convinces my boss's boss that "all that server is doing is running the backend for our entire operation, so can we put our incredibly messy half-working app on it too and treat it like QA?" If this server can alert a Terminator unit to go to the aforementioned coworker's home in the middle of the night and slay him and his family, this requirement can be waived (oh, I wait for the day this will be waived....)
I'm sure there are a few other benchmarks you could run, but honestly these are the Big Five that I decide on.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
If it wouldn't make a good sci-fi set, or look like a CRAY, it ain't big iron. I recently relaxed the requirement that it has tape reels and men with clipboards wandering through it. They can now be women...