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

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: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: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...

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.

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!