[Novalug] ranting about HP support

Miguel Gonzalez Castaños miguel_3_gonzalez@yahoo.es
Wed Nov 14 11:14:46 EST 2007


The thruth is that in terms of sales and shipping Dell is really a 
disaster, but in terms of hardware support I have a better impression 
than with HP, at least with desktops and laptops. Most of the time I 
chat with an agent, troubleshoot a couple of things and make sure what 
is going on, then they usually send me replacements or if purchased, an 
on-site engineer to fix the issue.

My concern if they have the same level on Dell servers. A long time ago 
in my previous job I used to run Linux on PowerEdge Servers and I never 
had an issue, knew for sure which were the latest updates and firmwares 
and never never had to call Dell for any issue.

Unfortunately We don't have so many servers in our office and We made a 
big investment on HP Proliant 380 G5. For small shops having too diverse 
hardware is too much for having spare parts for replacement. However, my 
current experience with HP has been really a nightmare. Today finally 
I'm getting a HP engineer (not a third-party partner) and see what 
happens, but I don't have much trust that they will be able to solve the 
data partition missing. My other concern if this model storage server is 
stable enough (I got info from some guy saying that it was not stable 
enough yet for production).

Unfortunately We are not getting for now a new unit or a reimbursement 
so We will have to stick with this unit. I don't know if we have plans 
or purchasing a twin system as spare and recovery machine.

And you are completely right, the key here is iSCSI. Actually I tried to 
make it to work with Debian virtual machines running on Virtual Server 
with open-iscsi and the reading/writing performance is really low. Since 
the server crashed I didn't have the time for troubleshooting more if it 
was dued to Debian, openiscsi or Virtual Server.

Miguel



Anthony Soucek escribió:
> Miguel,
>
> I am researching this currently for my employer... When it comes to
> support for hardware, Dell's 4 hour server support has been pretty
> good to us, just dont let them lead you into running diagnostics for
> them until the 4 hour service window goes beyond the end of business
> day.  However, all their storage server top out at pretty low numbers,
> like 3 TB and they are pushing windows storage server, which
> surprisingly, one of the smartest dudes I know, who has been on both
> sides of the fence (unix and windows) really likes.  the cool thing is
> single instance storage (though that is not solely a offered by MS).
> I would think the key is I-SCSI, because you should be able to get a
> driver for it for anything, and it wouldnt care what the partition
> type is, and active directory security could be controlled by a
> Windows file server with an I-scsi driver that thinks that the i-scsi
> storage box is locally attached and under it's control.
>
> However the freeBSD freenas has an easy to use Web management
> interface and does I-scsi and is linux based (well, BSD) and fuh-ree.
> my favorite word.
>
> I saw a nexxsan box at the FOSE trade show and was drooling over it.
> Basically it's a box of sata disks with a proprietary OS that is only
> smart enough to handle i_scsi, antivirus, and single instance storage,
> but you can buy a nexxsan box and just put 3 HD in it, but eventually
> expand it to like 64TB of drive and it takes like 8U of rack space.
>
> I haven't tested this stuff but I thought I would share what look like
> exciting prospects to me.
>
> sorry that spinrite couldnt help with your data, I feared it was the
> caching on the Motherboard that was holding all the recent data, so
> once you removed that part,   It was lost.  MS makes a big deal on
> their tests about if you have a server with write cacheing on the
> disk, unless that disk has a battery backup, you should disable write
> cacheing, so that everything gets comitted to disk asap.   One would
> hope you could trust your monster data storage box, but it just goes
> to show how important redundancy is.
>
> On Nov 13, 2007 5:13 PM, Miguel Gonzalez Castaños
> <miguel_3_gonzalez@yahoo.es> wrote:
>   
>> <completely ranting mode>
>>
>> I have a HP All-in-One 600 StorageWork. The machine started to be
>> unstable after a software upgrade. Troubleshooting with HP they decided
>> that I had to replace the cache board. I got that replacement and then
>> two data partitions disappeared showing as unallocated.
>>
>> HP just left us alone suggesting a data recovery third-party. They just
>> said that they couldn't do anything. After ranting with CDW (the
>> reseller) tech support, they got as again in the loop and tried
>> replacing the system board. Since they send third parties, they didn't
>> have a clue on the OS level so nothing was fixed.
>>
>> I've been three weeks ranting on the phone with HP engineers going from
>> Costa Rica to somewhere in Asia (India or Pakistan). They are finally
>> sending us a HP engineer and try to fix the machine but actually they
>> say upfront that will not be any way to get those partitions back (great).
>>
>> So they screw up with the cache board replacement and now how can we
>> trust this machine?
>>
>> We were much better using Linux and Samba with an old server. All this
>> fancy things about Microsoft targeting Storage servers for SMB is really
>> a...well you know what I mean :)
>>
>> </completely ranting mode>
>>
>>
>> Sorry for the rant, but I am so happy with HP support and Microsoft tools...
>>
>> Do you know any good hardware vendor for servers with good support?
>>
>> Any good storage linux solution compatible with Active Directory? We had
>> lot of issues with Samba, the configuration of the permissions is not
>> very user friendly and not very small-grained
>>
>> Miguel
>> _______________________________________________
>> Novalug mailing list
>> Novalug@calypso.tux.org
>> http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/novalug
>>
>>     
>
>
>
>   




More information about the Novalug mailing list