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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.'"
I buy a lot of computers for work. I work at a charity that has a nifty agreement with Dell that could save me a ton of money. But I stopped buying Dell computers a few years back because I could not get a consistent product from them. I would buy 10 identical computers, open them up and find a zillion different parts from a zillion manufacturers in them. This drives me crazy. I heard tell that Dell was addressing this, but haven't followed up. I switched to Acer a few years back. If Dell wants to sell me computers again they need A. a guarantee that the sub-contracted bits inside are of a consistent quality, and B. a non-Vista option.
Mediocre quality, slow delivery, piss poor service and support...What's not to like?
If you buy a lot of computers and deal with multiple retailers, the contrast can't help but leap out at you. HP, from being craptacular last decade, has done a much better job of "reinventing" themselves than Dell has. Middleman retailers like CDW are fricking lightning fast, and they're really easy to deal with, especially when buying volume.
Contrast this with Dell...I work for a national corporation that does millions of dollars a year in business with Dell...Or used to. We had representatives in corporate who were in direct contact with high-powered Dell salespeople. Did it expedite anything? No. We have top tier support, does it stop them from sending out techs who know less than non-experts on our local staff? I had to help some dumbass fix a printer once, and my printer repair technique is normally limited to bft.
I was a big Dell fan...once. I've yet to see any sign that they've done anything but continue their slide toward the low end of the market.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
What is clear is that people are not happy will Dell's support for desktop deployments and smaller customers. But these are not the area that Dell is interested in. The article and many others show that Dell support for their Linux SERVER products is good. Why would a reasonable person expect Dell to support uses like Desktop and small business when that is not their Linux focus? Dell does not sell Linux for the hobby or home user, it's not realistic to expect them to support these segments of customer.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Expectations have definately gotten out of hand. For years people made the argument that Dell should offer Linux pre-installed. Dell didn't want to do it because of the support problems. To which the typical Slashdotter replied, "don't worry, we just want to escape the MS tax and will likely re-install from scratch again anyway." Now that Dell actually does provide Linux installed on more and more machines they are taken to task because of support issues. This isn't going to make other manufacturers want to follow Dell's lead. It is kind of like when your child says, "if you get me the puppy then I will feed and pickup after him, pleeeaaase!" Maybe the "Linux Community" needs to pickup after themselves and stop complaining.
We've used Dell gear in my last couple of jobs. We had some stupid level of support on our Latitudes at my last job and they'd send people out to replace the hard drives and little rubber feet and everything, which was sort of nice but still annoying to take care of. We use a ton of Dell servers at my new job and at least on the hard drive failures I've seen so far Dell support has been really good at overnighting new drive right out. However, I've always been frustrated by the support levels in the same way as Microsoft licensing. There are too many options, and these options all have different numbers you have to call. Sometimes when I use the online chat support, which is much nicer than sitting on the phone, they kick me away to phone support if I start asking two many Poweredge questions. For Poweredge and linux support I highly recommend their linux-poweredge mailing list. They've got at least a few of their dedicated linux engineers on there but there's good community support as well. Sometimes searching here directly with Google brings back results that you wouldn't have found using the entire intarweb. I'm really pushing for more debian and 64bit support as are many others. OMSA is a beast though. Mebbe IPMI will save the day.
However, over the past few years I've been seeing an increase in the number of quality control issues on their PC boxes. Probably from cutting corners in the cost. Something similar happened to Gateway and Packard Bell back in the day. Also, the fact when people called tech support they got someone who barely spoke english and answered questions from a script further served to alienate users.
This time last year I was working on a project for a small mom & pop medical supply company. It was coming time for a new round of Medicare and state certifications, plus the owners were getting ready to sell the company and retire after running it for 25 years and their 15 year old computers running DOS wasn't going to make the cut. Especially when trying to sell the company. (Hey if you buy it, the first thing you have to do is buy $25k in hardware and software (mostly software).
Their software vendor was still in business. They recommended going with Dell (They had some sort of deal with them plus had stated they were able to get support from Dell as opposed to HP or other vendors with their product lines). However, the company was also very upfront with the fact that their software WOULD NOT work on Vista.
I kept telling the business owners they needed to purchase their workstations last January before the switchover to Vista happened. I kept telling them that as soon as Vista was released, they would not be able to get a Dell PC shipped with XP Pro. And I kept getting the: "We have 30k of public aid money coming. We'll buy them when it comes in." Now this was more of a small business owner problem than a Dell problem, but nothing happened for a couple months and I got a phone call at the end of Feb (may have been early March). "We called Dell, and they said they can't(won't) ship a PC workstation with XP pro on it. It's all vista and the software won't work on Vista and probably won't for another year or more!". I was originally hired to back up their data from the DOS box and for my advise on what to do next. (Going to a hosted solution, vs. storing the data locally, which basically meant listen to the sales folks, and then tell the owners of the business my opinion.)
I was nice and checked around and Gateway was the only somewhat major vendor, ironically, that still offered machines you could order with XP pro installed. Well, they ended up buying Dell's with Vista. and eventually spending another $500 downgrading to XP Pro. And that was after 3 months of being the software vendors Vista beta test bitch (And the software vendor still charged the medical supply company $15k with no discount for the honor)
And this wasn't the first time. I also remember this happening in the transition from Windows 2k pro to XP. A lot of my clients at the time liked Windows 2K Pro and saw no major need to upgrade right away. (And I still don't blame them.)
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I work for a large maker of an enterprise wide healthcare application. We sell a complete turnkey system including the hardware (servers and workstations). We used to sell Dell pro-actively as an alternative to Copmpaq/HP. We no longer do so, as we would continually run into problems with poor support, and horrible field engineers (contracted out to Unisys). In one instance, a customer lost a terabyte of data that needed to then be retrieved from tape (the filed engineer started swapping disks between cages in a RAID 0+1 enclosure). After several years of grief, we dropped Dell. If a customer insists on Dell, which som do, we no longer act on their behalf for hardware issues, as we would for an HP shop. Their support contracts cover our software only, and they are on their own as regards hardware support (including negotiating the support agreement itself). As far as I am concerned, Dell sucks, and it will take a WHOLE lot to convince me otherwise.
It's not for lack of talent in the Dell Linux team. I've been following the Dell Linux server list for years, having been responsible for all-Dell Linux server farms in the past, and Matt Domsch and the team there has been doing great work, considering the obstacles thrown in their way by the randomness of the hardware.
This is constantly-morphing commodity hardware, with light-outs support, RAID, and other details optimized for Windows, and a new interface randomly tossed out the door in each new server model. The hardware lands in the the Linux support group's laps after the fact, and they do they best they can, bound by the proprietariness and sometimes just plain weirdness of the hardware features.
We'll start buying Dells again when they have standalone lights-out management like Sun and HP. They are making slow progress. It's unfair to say their stuff is junk. You can get good support, if you follow their rules.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Riiight... I guess it just couldn't be that the people who said they didn't want support then, and the people who want support now, are different people?
I mean, that would be just totally impossible right? All Linux users are always the same. There's no variety at all.
This is pretty similar to the driver experience I have for Dell Windows PCs:
If you want to install Windows on one of their servers, you have to use their server configuration CDs which are Linux, as the Windows CDs don't recognize the PERC controllers
I am writing this from a Dell Ubuntu PC, which I don't need to download drivers for, as all of the hardware is natively supported by Ubuntu. It is the sweetest PC I have ever owned.
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
We buy a ton of computers from Dell and HP and the one thing that really bugs me about Dell is that they give price breaks on the same models to consumers first, and then we 'premium' buyers basically have to beg them to match that price. Same models, crappier prices for their business customers. I just don't understand....do they think we can't see their banner ads all over the internet?