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?"

Comments

Re:Not Speed

[Dr Caleb]

For Load They should max out the system slightly above the recommended specs and see how well it handles it.

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.