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Dell's Linux, IT Re-Invention
jcatcw writes "An IDG analysis of Dell's attempts to reinvent itself concludes that there are some positive results, but there are problems with the company's supply-chain management and support. One area analysts want to see more improvement: the company's Linux business. 'Jeremy Cole, owner of Proven Scaling, a small consulting firm with offices in the US and UK ... is satisfied with Dell equipment, but said the company needs to show more support for open-source applications and the Linux OS. "It's clear that Dell cares about Linux, in that all their server-class hardware is well-supported by the Linux kernel and they have many people dedicated to making sure that's the case. However, it's not good enough just to boot," Cole said.'"
The whole article on one page.
"I've spent my whole life figuring out crazy ways to do things. It'll work." -- Montgomery Scott, "Relics"
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
You will need to buy the Optiplex line. Just like all the big vendors the consumer grade model varies from batch to batch, only the business line is locked for any real amount of time.
They do sell XP.
It's clear that Dell cares about Linux, in that all their server-class hardware is well-supported by the Linux kernel and they have many people dedicated to making sure that's the case. However, it's not good enough just to boot,
Ding! On the server side:
Don't get me started on what pieces of shit the "PERC" raid controllers (made by LSI) are...
We use Dell servers and workstation here at work exclusively and never had an issue with them. We have their Gold support and if something goes wrong, within 4 hours a replacement is here. Tech support for the servers has been top notch. But when it comes to home products they are seriously flawed as my little blog post states. How a company can ship over two thousand dollars worth of hardware to me but won't send me a 200 dollar camcorder because they can't verify who I am is beyond comprehension.
In addition to a non-vista option, they need to offer MS office 2003. A few months ago I logged into dell's website to order a batch of computers and noticed that the option for 2003 had was gone, and they were only offering 2007.
This is absurd.
In my experience, there is almost no demand for 2007. What I ended up having to do was sign up for a site licensing agreement with microsoft to get my hands on 2003. In the mean time, I installed OpenOffice on the computers that I had ordered. This prompted my boss to go "Why are we spending 350 bucks a hit on something that we can get for free?".
So now we use OO exclusively.
THANKS DELL/MICROSOFT!
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You know, I've seen a lot of people complaining about not being able to get XP on new machines, but while Dell's "SOHO" store seems to make that difficult/impossible, the "Small Business" store (which does not require a volume floor, dedicated rep, or anything else) has always made XP fully available. Same goes for the Lenovo website. I fully anticipate both with continue holding out as long as Microsoft lets them in response to market demand from companies like mine which just have no incentive to make the plunge (especially as because XP's been out so long, all of our machines are on it, which is nice, and in addition to the expense anyone who's ever tried to upgrade Windows on 100 laptops knows that's pretty much a non-starter). Also, Dell only offers the better-quality Latitude notebooks through the small business store. Why does anyone even bother with the SOHO store? Is their marketing just that good?
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There is no turn around in Dell. And there was better Linux/BSD support for Linux *before* Dell supported Linux.
We've been a Dell customer for 10 years. The first five years were pretty good. The old PowerEdge servers were pretty nice. But I've never met a Perc card I liked.
What is a Perc card? Well, it is generic term for the card that Dell happens to be rebranding at the moment.
What is rebranding? Well, take a perhaps decent card, screw with it for the sake of vendor lock-in, so that the original vendor's drivers and utilities no longer work with it, degrade its performance beyond measure without any hope of cure, and you have a Dell rebrand.
The new MD1000, while pretty nice arrays, are only officially supported if you use a Perc 5e card. This card is a true Dell rebrand of an LSI MegraRAID. It's a thousand dollar turd. There are no decent utilities (in fact all LSI megaraid utils will NOT work). They even took away some of the simple command line utilities for Linux like lsiutil, and replaced it with a huge, bloated Java application. Can you imagine that piece of bloatware as your only means of talking to your drive array? And FreeBSD support, while the FreeBSD community has made a valiant effort trying to support this piece of shit, still is not worth it. It's lackluster performance at best.
But here's the real kicker about the Perc 5e: It does not allow direct pass through. Yeah, that's right, if you get fed up with it's lame RAID 10 performance (and it is lame we've confirmed that software RAID on Linux and FreeBSD is significantly faster), you can't directly reach your drives. So if you want to implement software RAID, you have to configure independent RAID0 virtual disks in the Perc 5e BIOS. Why? so Dell can lock you in to their proprietary, rebranded, turd card. This is a wonderful new feature unique to the Perc 5 that wasn't there with Perc 4.
But, as we found out, the Perc 4 was an even bigger piece of crap. It was a rebranded Adaptec that had over a year-long history of locking up under heavy loads on Linux systems. They were selling this so-called Linux supported PowerEdge 2650 (boat anchor) for over a year knowing that it locked up under stress:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=92129
We got burned by this and it took us weeks to resolve (went through 3 Perc 4 cards with same result, and ended up putting in a LSI card).
If you need anything with real RAID support, run from Dell. We've been pretty pleased with the MD1000, but that Perc 5 card sums up Dell. Buy a 3ware or Areca instead. Who cares if Dell won't support the MD1000 if you use it, they don't support it anyway. Of all our calls to Dell enterprise support, we've talked to one person who seems to have half of a clue.
There is no such thing as Dell support. And their lame attempt at vendor lock-in only makes it worse. And that is why Dell is drowning.
We've moved to HP. And we've been really happy with our HP servers. Is HP support any better? I can't say. But we don't have near the vendor lock-in and rebranded voodoo we get from Dell.
http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/User:Steve_Ballmer
What you need to do is contact your Dell Small Business account rep (I'm assuming you have one) and talk to him about Open Business Licensing. All you need to do is purchase 5 MS licenses in one chunk (it can be Office, Project, Visio, XP, Vista, 2003, SQL Server, whatever, but it must be 5 licenses in one order) and you can get Open Business licenses.
:/ ) and login, plugin all your info and BAM! you are given keys for Office XP, Office 2003, and Office 2007. I've been doing this for two years and it is great because I was able to stick with 2003, but now that we are switching to 2007, 2/3rds of my organization (approx 55 people) already have licenses for both (obviously you can only use one license at a time). You can still purchase Office 2003 install media, afaik. Overall, you will find your licenses are cheaper than retail, but not OEM, but then they aren't tied to a single machine. There is also less headache in tracking because you can view all your agreements/keys on MS's site.
What happens after that is that you are given an authorization number and an agreement number (for each license or block of like licenses, say you purchase 3 copies of Office Standard) and you go to eopen.microsoft.com (Live account required
Email me if you want more information, if you don't have an account representative, I can point you at mine.
Is a Sig really an expression of the person behind the post or just random nonsense?
We are talking no power to even get to a BIOS screen. Depending on your purchase cycle depends on what GX270 you received -- bad capacitors or not. I purchased GX270s in small batches over the life of the model; I had a 50/50 failure rate on the motherboard capacitors. (which usually took out the P/S also)
M782 monitors? OH THE HORRORS! The 17" LCDs are really affordable now. Best just to forget about those monitors; they had bad juju beans.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.