White Box, Or Big Names for Lower-End Servers?

LazloToth asks: "Those of us who manage small- to medium-size networks face the decision all the time: for the run-of-the-mill web, print, or storage server running on i386 architecture, should we buy HP or Dell, for example, or build it ourselves from commodity hardware and save some bucks up front? In my operation of fewer than 50 servers, one will see a mix of the two. For servers that take more abuse, I tend to buy the proprietary stuff. But not always. I wonder what experiences other admins and managers have had with do-it-yourself servers in a production environment, and whether they feel that white-box servers perform as well - - and last as long - - as anything else? What is the mix in your network of big-names to no-names?"

Comments

We go proprietary

[mnmn]

I bought a noname 2U server at $600 CDN for the company which gave us alotta grief... modems would never work in its PCI slots. So we decided to always go proprietary. All our big servers are ibm xseries.. and we buy ibm xseries 206 ($600 USD) for cheaper stuff. We never go Dell on servers.

I know you can build a superior system thats whitebox. MDG sells machines for cheap with Intel motherboards. You can buy Tyan mobos for whitebox systems.

However keep support in mind. Everytime something breaks on IBM xseries servers, we call tech support. In 4 hours of calling the replacement part arrives, and the techie arrives the same or next day and replaces the part no questions asked. Sure we've had lots of trouble on our tape drives etc, but it gets replaced painlessly, no driver changes, and no financial hits.

Another benefit of name brands is that you can say youve worked on so and so servers in your resume. Smart employers wouldnt or shouldnt count that, but you do see people asking for MCSE and proliant servers, etc. Its even more specific when you get into UNIX... they'll only accept that brand of unix.

white boxen for vanilla services

[dr_leviathan]

We buy hundreds of white 1U pizzaboxen from SiliconMechanics.com every month (not only are they white, but they are also blank -- we net boot debian GNU/linux onto them ourselves). SM has an excellent record for replacing broken parts, although we're never in an emergency when something breaks since we deploy backup hardware for everything. If something breaks we can switch to the current backup, start converting a spare machine to be the new backup, and then take our time getting the broken hardware fixed, its all under warranty.

All of our vanilla services: mail, web, and even database are on white boxen from SM. We have some black box stuff for heavy mass storage.

Re:Opposite Experience Here

[phaze3000]

Wow, all I can say is you must live in some alternate universe to the one I live in.

Here getting Dell to come out a fix one of their servers (even with 'silver' 4 hour cover) is like getting blood from a stone. With the IBM auto-support I had one occasion where a disk failed and we had the replacement before anyone noticed the problem (incorrectly configured RAID monitoring was the culprit re the lack of notification).