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.'"

Comments

Consistency

[pickapeppa]

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.

Re:Consistency

[h4rr4r]

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.

Re:Consistency

[mr_mischief]

...and Linux, which TFA is about. I'd call that a "non-Vista option".

Also, if someone has an OS preference and is the IT department or has purchasing power in the IT department, one should be able to install the preferred OS. Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Suse, OpenSuse, Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, RedHat, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Knoppix, eComStation, QNX, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and probably a hundred other non-Vista OS distributions will install on most Dell server and desktop systems.

If world-class OS support is necessary, it's probably best to sign a contract with an OS vendor or a third party specializing in supporting the OS. Depending on a hardware vendor to support the OS is kind of risky anyway.

I've had RedHat and Mandriva on lots of PowerEdge and Optiplex systems, and I've never gotten Dell's permission or asked them for support. The only companies that make hardware that should be your final stop for supporting software are companies like IBM, Sun, SGI, or Apple that make the hardware and software both.

Re:Consistency

[blhack]

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!

Re:Consistency

[solarce]

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.

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 :/ ) 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.

Email me if you want more information, if you don't have an account representative, I can point you at mine.

Meh.

[SatanicPuppy]

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.

Re:Meh.

[SatanicPuppy]

If all I cared about was price, I'd buy from HP. And we have a big honkin corporate contract with CDW, so the prices are actually pretty nice.

We still buy some Dell stuff...Just bought a pair of Poweredge 2950's I'm pretty pleased with, though god help us if we ever need support.

By and large though, I'd rather buy a more expensive machine with better service and support than a cheaper machine with crappy service and support. We got a shipment of optiplexes not that long ago with a batch of bad capacitors on their motherboards, and for the amount of time we wasted on the phone with dell support getting them to send replacement parts for a fricking known problem...They should have looked at the service tag said, "Is it not booting?" and sent us a new motherboard with no further questions....Not made us jump through the goddamn hoops every single time. We got a guy who's Dell certified on staff, which usually means they'll take your word for it, but noooooo.

I'm just sick of 'em. It's beyond the pale. We bought 70 new pcs this year at my location, and I think 5 were Dell, and the rest were Macs and HPs.

Re:Meh.

[daenris]

Odd. I've had the opposite experience with them. I was heartily anti-Dell because of personal experiences with them and their support. However, once I started working for a large institution that used them as the primary computer supplier, I found myself pleasantly surprised. Every time we had to contact them about problems it was a quick response and extremely quick shipping/service on needed replacement parts. We actually had a bunch of Optiplexes go bad. I opened them up and saw that there were bad capacitors, so I called up our support and told them we had about 8 machines with bad capacitors and about 3 days later our local support guy showed up with new motherboards for the 8 machines, no hassle.

I would never buy from Dell as an individual, but buying/working with them through my company hasn't given me any problems.

Re:Meh.

[rmm4pi8]

Interestingly enough, while I have concerns about Dell's build quality (had server issues that were 'known upfront' like the Optiplex capacitor issue you mention), in my experience they're waay cheaper than HP (>30% on the 4 and 8 core servers we typically buy) and I've been really impressed by their speed of support and delivery.

No, the delivery speed is nothing like CDW, but you're paying (literally) 50% of what the comparable HP from CDW would be (the 30% figure above is based on quotes from HP direct), and the delivery speed is much faster than what we get from Lenovo Direct on laptops, for instance. On support, I've found that they have competent Linux admins, are aggressive about sending out replacement parts, and even though they only officially support Red Hat and SuSE are in fact completely ok with doing troubleshooting on CentOS and Mandriva systems. Also, when I have had problems the "email my manager at" links that go out on the bottom of every email from a Dell employee are monitored religiously. I've had to complain twice to a manager about something, and both times I got both problem remediation and a nice discount for my time and trouble.

This is on about $50,000 a year volume, so I can't speak to what a smaller business might experience, though obviously we're no Fortune500. Also, and this is I think the real Dell advantage, they actually sell totally configurable systems--you might get the impression from their websites that HP and Lenovo do this, but my experience has been that they will only offer decent discounts and lead times (both pretty expected in a corporate situation) if you're buying a stock or mostly stock SKU.

Re:Meh.

[blhack]

HP, from being craptacular last decade, has done a much better job of "reinventing" themselves than Dell has. Amen to this.

HP/Compaq have moved their level 2 tech support to British Columbia. I have had 2 laptops in the last two years that have needed replacements and have actually had their tech support staff CALL ME BACK a few days after the warranty claim to check in with me.

That absolutely blew me away. IT wasn't an automated email, or phone message or anything. it was:
"Ryan?...he this is Heather from HP....I talked to you earlier this week?"
"oh hey!"
"Yeah, i just wanted to make sure that you got the box to put your computer in and that everything was okay!"

awesome :)
and no, i don't work for HP....
Everybody needs to model their tech support after THAT!

Re:Meh.

[g2devi]

I've just bought a pair of Dell Laptops and these seem to be fairly good quality and everything works flawlessly with Ubuntu (if you apt-get the backports).

As far as Linux goes, I'd recommend them. The main issue I see with Dell's isn't the the features, it's the anti-features like Media-Direct.

For those that don't know why this is an anti-feature, a brief explanation, if you press the Media Direct button when the laptop is *off*, it normally runs the Media player for Dell in the Media Direct partition. Sounds good, except if you reformat your drive to reclaim the 40-60GB Vista-mirror+Media-Direct+Dell Utility partitions and put Ubuntu or anything else there. If you do that, Media Direct dumbly messes up your partition table and randomly writes over your disk. Essentially, Media Direct is should be called Media Destruct if you don't follow the Gospel according to Dell. This wouldn't be so bad, except that there isn't even a BIOS feature to turn it off. The only "solutions" I've seen is to write 0s on the entire hard disk (so that the media direct button can't do anything other than display a splash screen) or manually disable the button by opening the case.

I'm not sure if other vendors have similar anti-features, but it is a big reason I won't even consider doing a BIOS upgrade for my Laptop or keep the Utility partition. The last thing I need is one of these anti-features reverting my machine back to "the button of death" configuration.

Single-page (printing) URL

[Lord of Hyphens]

The whole article on one page.

Re:I don't get it

[jswinth]

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.

Server side linux support is a joke

[Anonymous Coward]

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:

• OpenManager (the all-seeing, all-encompassing web-based management tool) does not work on 64 bit OS's because it is compiled for 32 bit, and needs 32 bit libraries. The RPM dependencies are not properly set, which they claim they're "working on", but they can't even be bothered to provide a list of the packages we need to install
• Redhat AS / Centos 5.1 are not supported. Various drivers either don't load, or segfault after spewing error messages on the console.
• All the parameter conventions for their utilities are DOS-style. Example: "-?" to get help. Usage help returned by binaries sucks.
• There are no man pages....for ANYTHING.
• Basic unix filesystem conventions, much less the FHS, is/are ignored. Example: OpenManager installs loads of binaries into /etc/openmanager
• The various update utilities are compiled against older versions of libstdc++. The RPM dependencies don't account for this.
• The "driver update" DVD contains a "figure out what needs to be updated for firmware/bios", but is also compiled against a specific version of libstdc++. Installing the specific version it demands does nothing- it still refuses to work, claiming it needs the version you just installed. Did I mention that the first time you run suu, it spends several minutes copying itself into /tmp, and that the entire thing is a giant ugly clusterfuck of Java?

Don't get me started on what pieces of shit the "PERC" raid controllers (made by LSI) are...

Not sure on their linux side

[ducomputergeek]

Ironically, they are the same issues that drove me from recommending Gateway and go with Dell about a decade ago. Really this hit one of my clients about this time last year. (For the record I mostly do my Consulting business in video production arena, which is mostly dominated by Apple at the small/medium level and BOXX for those deploying none-custom Linux boxen) I was doing some work at a small medical supply company who were still running their inventory and billing software on 15 year old DOS based systems.

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.)

Re:Not sure on their linux side

[rmm4pi8]

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?

Poor service, bad field engineers, poor quality

[olivercromwell]

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.