[Beowulf] Repeated Dell SC1435 crash / hang. How to get the vendor to resolve the issue when 20% of the servers fail in first year?

[Matt Lawrence]

On Tue, 7 Apr 2009, Rahul Nabar wrote:

> Besides the hardware (IMHO) problems we are facing ought to be pretty
> generic; I don't  think it ought to matter to the "Voltage sensor
> error" if you used them for web-servers or databases. Maybe I ought to
> hunt on other forums with non-HPC-users of  SC1435's  and see if they
> have heard of any SC1435 issues like the ones I am facing.

See if there is a standalone diagnostics CD for these systems.  If you can 
get the error to occur with it, let Dell fix it from there.

With that kind of failure rate, you need to be escalating the issues, the 
first line support techs do not have the big picture, they are only trying 
to fix the system you are calling about.  Make a point of telling them 
that you wish to escalate the issue.

Yeah, I've been in the business a long time and I've had a lot of 
experience with various support organizations.

-- Matt
It's not what I know that counts.
It's what I can remember in time to use.