[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.

To me the test is: Is there a price-markup on the specific part
recommended. If a vendor just said "Drive X is compatible and tested;
please use it" and then I peg Drive X against competing drives and see
a significant price markup without commensurate observable statistics
improvement then I smell a rat. I feel further that a Vendor could
make itself more neutral in this exercise by just naming one or more
compatible, validated drive-models rather than trying to sell those
themselves after re-branding. That creates an obvious conflict of
interest. It makes it difficult to deconvolute monopoly-pricing from a
genuine desire to promote reliability.

I'm not sure how much of a price markup there is on the approved Dell drives.

-- 
Rahul