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

[Greg Lindahl]

On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 02:08:32AM -0500, Mark Hahn wrote:

> I'm curious: you imply that vendors have no recourse to force the _disk_ 
> vendors to supply parts which work right (as defined by standard).
> is that really true?  I'd be surprised if Dell doesn't get pretty emphatic
> cooperation from their disk vendor(s).

If you recall our past discussions here about "raid duty" disks, there
are a couple of things not in the standard which are significant:
vibration resistance, and the disk's maximum retry time vs. raid
controllers deciding there's a timout. Most standards have problems
like that. You can't imagine the interesting time PathScale had getting
our InfiniBand products to cooperate well with Mellanox parts.

-- greg