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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?"
Can it survive a good /. ing ?
Who asked for it and more importantly did anyone pay for it either directly or indirectly.
Help fight continental drift.
This is going to be harsh, but you need to hear it.
Obviously it is not possible to build an enterprise-grade 'your neck is on the line' production environment just for writing reviews
In order for the review to be accurate, that's how it has to be tested. Evaluating enterprise equipment in a non-enterprise environment with people who have no enterprise experience is pretty much worthless...and you're not going to fool anyone.
There's also no market for this sort of thing. Equipment on that level is bought because of high level executive briefings, price negotiations, migration options, and politics. Why? Because the market is so cutthroat and all the features that matter are there. The decisions are not made on whether or not a power cord was included, it was easy to unpack, the manuals were clear, how well built it looks, and how it did on SysMark SuperServerSimulator 2005...which is about the only thing all you 2-guys-with-a-webserver "hardware review" sites know how to do.
Further- often when a hardware vendor wants to get a contract, they provide a unit for evaluation.
On top of that, the major analyst firms already fill what little niche there is, and they have really big names 90% of the important people with Nice Shoes will recognize, which means even if that analyst is wrong, the decision to go with their recommendation is justifiable and won't get the Nice Shoes person fired. You'd be lucky if .01% recognized your name, much less trusted it. "Jones! Why does our website keep crashing?" "Well, we're having a lot of hardware problems." "Why did we go with ABC for our servers?" "Oh, XYZhardware.com said they were the best." "Jones, clean out your desk."
So...sorry, there's no market for what you're trying to do, and you don't have the means to do it.
Please help metamoderate.
Not a bad idea, but all I see is the manufacturer lowering the maximum specs to any tests will show it 'overachieving'.
What I'd like rated is the support side. My AS/400s self detect hardware problems, phone IBM to report the problem, and a tech is dispatched. The IBM support centre phones me to tell me the system detected a problem, and that a tech is on the way. Usually the tech shows up with parts in hand inside an hour. Before the hardware has caused any downtime! I've never had a catastrophic failure on an AS/400.
Good support, redundant and hot swappable hardware, like RAM, makes for the best big iron. Low to no downtime are just as important as throuput and storage.
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
Three words:
slashdot load test
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
Overload the hardware as badly as you can, see how it copes (Experience: practically all OS's have a "breaking point" after which you need to restart the machine to recover fully).
Try to install faulty components, see what happens (Experience: even if the manufacturer claims failure tolerance, this is seldom the case).
Check if the iron really runs in the manufacturer's reported maximum temperature and what happens at the temperature plus couple degrees (Experience: Sun boxes keep running, HP/UX boxes immediately shut down).
Check if the system runs itself down gracefully when UPS reports power is out. Cut power entirely, see what happens.
Check if you can administer everything without touching the iron, including shutting the box down and starting it (Lights Out Management).
"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid, it is true that most stupid people are conservative."
I 100% agree!
Once you work for an organisation that has had an IT department longer than the mid-1990s (say, a bank where it goes back 40+ years), you'll realise this article about "Big Iron" is a joke.
Where I work, we have several designations for breaking down inventory. Destkop/Wintel (including stand-alone WinOS servers), Mid-Range (Unix, cluster windows, linux), and Transactional ("Big Iron").
E15ks are big, powerful, and excellent enterprise servers. But...even then they're just servers. Their workload is managed differently (e.g. no batch) and their failure/recovery modes are completely different.
Aside from DEC, I mean Compaq, I mean HP Tandems, MVS (Z/OS, aka OS/390) would be the only thing we consider "Big Iron". Calling an E10k "Big Iron" is equivalent to noob-speak in senior IT corporate circles. If we had Crays, that would be in scope of this definition too.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"