What vendor do you speak? Dell/HP/IBM

I was talking with a friend the other day on the way home, he was telling me of the issues he’s been having between switching server vendors. By this I mean he’s been deploying Dell for a few years servers but the organization has started buying another vendors servers and he’s been trying to get used to using them, understanding how they work, what the process for driver packs etc is, how they do business (when logging calls etc).

Related to this (and not picking on anyone in particular) could the vendors create a how to guide/translation when coming from another vendor?

So that if overnight I switched from Dell or HP to IBM servers, what is it I need to know? What’s the IBM equivalent of SmartStart? I know there’s IBM Director for hardware monitoring, but what about network card teaming, and when I do a firmware upgrade on an IBM server do I need to do the driver pack as well? On the Dell what’s the lights out card called and can I mount virtual media (the answer is yes you can and it’s called a DRAC – Dell Remote Access Controller). When I replace a hard drive in an IBM do I need to match the hard drive firmware?

It’s these intangibles, these little things that make the difference.

In essence how can we make the information more accessible, how can we simplify core elements of the provisioning and ownership easier, on board more users, and then have the advanced/more technical or lower level documentation still available?

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