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Advice on Server purchase: Anyone with Dell experience?

F

fdiskboy

Golden Member
Hey guys,

I know this is technically the wrong forum for this request, but I respect all of your opinions.

I have been tasked with putting together a server at work to offload some of the data loaded currently on an OS390/DB2 system.

I'm currently looking at the Dell PowerEdge 6450 Rackmount Dual 700 Xeon w/2M cache along with a PowerVault 8 Disk Storage Array.

Does anyone have any Dell experience, good, bad or indifferent? If you do, would you PM me about it or post it in this thread. I'll probably be fighting against our horrible acquisitions team who insists we buy HP Servers and overpriced ones at that.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. And if I could use someone here as a technical reference (as in, this person speaks highly of these servers and would be willing to vouch for their reliability/performance at least in their experience), that would be most excellent!

(Of course, the server would be loaded with the lastest Dnet client, so maybe this IS on topic after all)

Thanks!
 
And in my opinion, you CAN go wrong with HP. The latest HP boxes we've gotten at work, are SUCK!

JHutch
 
By all means. Dell Poweredge servers rock. Support is top notch. I have never had a problem with a Dell Poweredge that couldn't be addressed in less than 4 hours (We buy the 24/7 4 hour support options.) Those problems have been very few and far between, but machines will fail at somepoint.

PE6450 is an incredible machine. I would have a few suggestions when looking at a machine that size/price.

1) Do you need Xeons and do you need to expand up to 4? Would Dual PIII's of some other kind work. We typically reserve the purchase of Xeons for special cases.

2) Do you need Ram Above 2 Gigs?

3) Does Price Matter?

What I typically suggest is the PE 2450. A 2U box that you can max out at 2GB, ram Dual PIII 1GHz, 4 x 36GB 10,000 RPM Drives, Dell Perc 2DC Raid Card with 128MB. You can add The powervault to them as well.

The 2450 will save you space in the long run (2U compared to 4U. Yeah I know its not alot but when you have alot of servers.) It will also cost less upfront.

Just my $0.02 worth. I've been dealing with dell for the last 4 years and have prob purchased on the order of $3million in equipment from them. I'm a walking Dell ad.

Moose
 
I've had experience with Dell servers and workstations.
Their equipment is put together to work, and in the rare cases where something is not right they get it fixed quickly - usually with a tech they send to your site at their expense (in my experience).
Of course you should pay whatever small amount they might want to charge for the most elevated level of service available unless it comes bundled with the package you are buying. On site support is great.
Their customer service is great. No question about it, you wont be sorry if you buy their box.
The box you are talking about sounds solid and powerful, wish I could afford it😉
HP will screw you over. Support is all like: "press 1 to sit on your a$$ and wait all day until maybe we can get some 14 year old to pick his nose and talk to you like you are a retard".
Just my humble opinion formed by years of practice.
 
We got our first Dell server about three weeks ago - a PowerEdge 2400. That's not enough time to see how it's going to go, but we purposely called tech support three times to see how they respond and we were very satisfied. It's a well-built machine. Hot-swap 6-bay RAID 5 SCSI enclosure plus another 2-bay SCSI enclosure for mirrored system drives. It's a dual P3-733 system which does 4.07 Mkeys/sec in RC5. 🙂

Now, Dell is trying very hard to get all of our desktop/laptop business, so we might be getting extra-special treatment, but I doubt it.

Also, YGPM.
 
Thanks for the responses, guys.

Kranky, I'd like to talk to you about your configuration if you don't mind--would you drop me an email or pm?

Again, I knew I would get some top notch feedback from all of you!
 
Dell is a good choice for a server; I happen to be partial to Compaq. My workplace now has about a dozen of the newer DL360s and we have several of the older Proliant 1500/2500/4500 series servers in our branches. I've not had any problems with either the technical support nor the service with Compaq, though I would NOT recommend Compaq for either PCs or notebooks - in fact, we now have about a dozen of the Dell Latitude notebooks, warranty and service for them has been excellent.

 
Well, we have an assortment of servers from Dell:
8450's
6450's
6400's
6300's
2450's
2400's
2300's
WebApp 100's
CacheApp's
BigIP's
Not to mention a ton of SAN equipment.

Their service is top notch and their machines are rock solid. I really like the 6450's as a server base. They are very rack dense (only 4U) and are plenty powerful when fully loaded. We currenly have over 2000 users using exchange off of one 6450 (Exchange server).

We have about 12 Dell racks just about fully populated with servers and SAN equipment, and I have only had to call Dell once for a failed HD. 3 hours later, I had it replaced.

If you have any questions, just let me know. If Dell has built it, we have it or it is on order 🙂

 
Thanks! I may get in touch with a few of you on down the line as I finalize our configuration--depending on what our acquisitions team prices out an HP at.

Anyone want to place bets on how much higher it is than Dell?
 
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