PERC H700 - works perfectly fine with non-dell disks
I'm sure Dell would love to support your non-dell disk setup
Spec Me The Ultimate Server - Budget £5,000
- Thread starter Saberu
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I'm sure Dell would love to support your non-dell disk setup
I'm sure Dell would love to support your non-dell disk setup
I'm sure they'd love to as well
Don't worry, If one of the F1's fails, we won't be expecting dell to send out a disk. Of course I will be expecting them to support the rest of the server though.
Interesting - the dell representative who told you that, what department/job title were they from? If it was Sales, then the comment wouldn't suprise me. If it was someone high up in technical though, then i suppose it's possible they block non dell disks on the cheaper H series cards as they are effectively software (fake) raid. As I say though, the F1 drives slotted straight into the H700 without any issues, and behaved just as one would expect.
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I wouldn't expect anybody in Dell to make that mistake when dealing with us, we're one of their largest customers after all (nobody in the UK gets more discount than we do
), even our sales exec is pretty clued up. I wasn't paying maximum attention but it came up as we'd heard second hand they were blocking third party disks on all H series cards - to which the response was "yes we are, the H series cards have custom firmware as do the Dell retail drives and they do some advanced stuff" - what that is or how true it is I don't know but they've usually been pretty truthful with us previously...
I presume they've taken a beating from a substantial customer or two and removed the limitation but if you google there are plenty of examples of third party drives not working and appearing 'blocked' when used with H700 and H800 cards.
We moved on and ignored it as we don't buy third party units (discount level factored in we'd struggle to get cheaper bare drives anyway)
From a support point of view, I wouldnt normally bother wasting my time with third party drives - they may cost a few quid more but for the lack of hassle it's worth it.
Saying that, recently I wanted a mid range server with SSDs - Dell SSDs are very expensive and HP don't do them in the DL series, so I looked at aftermarket ones. I was told Dell would request the original disks are put back in the server for any diagnostics (even for a failed PSU), whereas HP would only do that if the failure was disk related.
Not sure how true that was, but I went for the HP in the end with Intel SSDs
Saying that, recently I wanted a mid range server with SSDs - Dell SSDs are very expensive and HP don't do them in the DL series, so I looked at aftermarket ones. I was told Dell would request the original disks are put back in the server for any diagnostics (even for a failed PSU), whereas HP would only do that if the failure was disk related.
Not sure how true that was, but I went for the HP in the end with Intel SSDs
SAS drives you're right... but SATA (e.g. 1TB+) even with a hefty premier discount are still ridiculously priced we've found.
Edit: Not that we actually deploy much with SATA... but customers do ask.
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Rent until you are bringing in enough that it is cheaper to buy and colocate. The company you rent from should have a SLA which you can pass on to your clients.
One or two places also offer lease to buy. After the first year the server(s) are yours and you just pay colocation fees, which are not always the best value. The one I saw was US based but I do not recall the name.
RB
One or two places also offer lease to buy. After the first year the server(s) are yours and you just pay colocation fees, which are not always the best value. The one I saw was US based but I do not recall the name.
RB
Definitely not a prebuild like a Dell
Rule 1: Don't build your own servers. Ever.
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Depends what your discount level is, I'm (amazingly) contractually banned from talking about ours! But then we signed our souls away and agreed not to buy servers, desktops or laptops from anybody else...
NDA is standard for all premier partners.
Suffice to say we wouldn't be able to get anywhere close to the Dell pricing by building servers ourselves, especially once you factor in staff time to build and test the server.