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

[Greg Lindahl]

On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 10:52:03AM -0600, Gerry Creager wrote:

> Who do they think they are? NetApp?

That's what you get for buying commodity stuff that's not marketed to
you.

If you have a business-critical database that needs a lot of 9's of
uptime, and to never, ever lose data, it makes sense to only buy disks
which are the exact hardware/firmware that's been tested with that
controller. Note that this is what Dell considers a high end
controller.

If you're an HPC shop, you don't want to pay for that kind of
reliability.

I'm having a similar fun situation with HP. They don't sell any MLC
SSDs, because they aren't reliable enough to run a traditional
database that gets lots of writes. Well, I know I don't write that
much. Also, their support organization no longer understands the
concept of parts that wear out. I managed to talk them into selling me
caddies for MLC SSDs, but only because it was the end of their fiscal
year.

And don't get me started about the fun of getting support when I'm
using their "high end" P410 RAID card as a JBOD...

-- greg