Don't go IBM

[bloodbob]

IBM server we setup with 4 SATA 300 GB hard disk from IBM in raid-5. We didn't purchase any spares because well they are a rip-off in price and we figure we would get a speedy replacement. Friday morning came to work and had a hard disk making a grinding noise called IBM up they couldn't give us an ETA on when they would have a replacement.

Fast forward to today. We will get an ETA on monday next week so that over a week since we put in the support request. The reason because they have no 300 GB Sata drives in the COUNTRY. We only got that information after speaking to the team leader and then getting it escalated further to an offical complaint and had one of our directors talking to complaints.

A total and utter joke.

 

[nutball]

IBM are a four-letter word in my office and have been for the past year. I'll not go in to the details as it's kind of sensitive. But their latest classic was a drive failure, also a SATA drive, for which they sent a SCSI replacement. Nice one guys.

IBM are too large an organisation (I use the 'o' word in the loosest of senses). When you talk to their people who are moderately high up (eg. the UK <blah> manager or European <blah> manager) the language they use tells you all about the problems with the company. When people like this are saying that they don't know who is at the same level in the company who deals with <blah2>, so they don't know who to talk to to solve our problem, then you know the organisation has issues. Especially what <blah> = software and <blah2> = hardware ... and neither can decide which side of the fence OS hardware drivers sit.

 

[ChronoReverse]

Can't say much except that ordering SATA instead of some form of SCSI is a rather bad choice when choosing a server.

 

[Mize]

Can't say much except that ordering SATA instead of some form of SCSI is a rather bad choice when choosing a server.

Depends. I have an accounting server (from Penguin Computing running SLES 9) with a SATA a RAID-5 array. It serves a grand total of 8 accounting logins and some basic fileserving. I wanted RAID-5 and SATA saved me a couple grand on the drives. The server is already overkill for 8 logins.

 

[pascal]

bloodbob

You are probably using a hardware based RAID-5. Worry about the possibility of this IBM hardware failure. This happened to me almost 12 years ago, and IBM had no hardware in my country.
We had to get an old IBM server working (in production) in an IBM factory plant to replace the defective hardware and save the data.

Sometimes is better go simply RAID-1 with the OS doing/managing it.

 

[SugarCoat]

Can't say much except that ordering SATA instead of some form of SCSI is a rather bad choice when choosing a server.

sata is quickly becoming a popular choice for servers for the cost/performance (hence Serial SCSI). absolutly no excuse for hardware, any hardware be it expensive SCSI drives or cheaper SATAs, to take a dump way before the MTBF.

 

[bloodbob]

Can't say much except that ordering SATA instead of some form of SCSI is a rather bad choice when choosing a server.

Small business price is a factor sure it would be nice to have SCSI drives in raid-1 with a hot spare on a clustered system but well they can't afford it. Atleast they aren't using desktops as servers any more. Thankfully they have no managed to get the hard disks from somewhere so its supposedly going to arrive tomorrow.

 

[Frank]

Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks.

The redundany is in the use of RAID, it would be plain stupid to pay major bucks for the drives themselves as well.

 

[pascal]

The original paper from Patterson et all was "Inexpensive", but the manufacturers changed that for "Independent". I remenber that because Dave himself gave me a copy of his paper back in 1988 just before publishing.

 

[SPM]

From experience I would say that if you want to be able to replace critical components, or replace components at short notice, then go for grey market products - never buy Dell, IBM or HP products etc. if you can buy the same from the grey market so long as you know what to buy.

 

[bloodbob]

Oh yay something went wrong with one of the other disks during the rebuild of the weekend and we've lost the array thank you IBM. Also this was during the start of the nightly backup so we've lost a days work as well.