[Beowulf] Third-party drives not permitted on new Dell servers?

[Rahul Nabar]

On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 7:41 PM, Joe Landman
<landman at scalableinformatics.com> wrote:

> Please indulge my taking a contrarian view based upon the products we
> sell/support/ship.
> I can't and won't sanction their tone to you ... they should have explained
> things correctly.  Given that PERC are rebadged LSI, yeah, I know perfectly
> well a whole mess of drives that *do not* work correctly with them.
>
> So please don't take Dell to task for trying to help you avoid making what
> they consider a bad decision on specific components.  There could be a
> marketing aspect to it, but support is a cost, and they want to minimize
> costs.  Look at failure rates, and toss the suppliers who have very high
> ones.

Another worry is what happens in the long run if the vendor either
folds shop or stops selling and / or supporting that particular model
of drive. Frequently the lifecycle of these devices is longer than the
warranty. The inability to shop around for drives could be  an issue.
Especially with this rigid approach of firmware rejecting a foreign
component and not just a warning.

Perhaps this is a paranoid scenario since these are big vendors and
not likely to go bankrupt.

-- 
Rahul