Blade Watch

Check out this article talking about how to choose the best x86 server for your data center, it covers some great topics including the power utilization, price and systems management. Your server choice is going to depend on a number of issues:

• What centralized purchasing agreement you might have – you might get a volume/enterprise discount.
• What level of experience you have with a vendor – if you’re already HP, it might seem better to stay with that vendor for ease of management – you know what to expect, how to behave.
• What level of experience the support teams have – if the support engineers are certified against that vendors kit, switching vendors might require re-training.

Key things for me would be:

• Systems management – the ability to build servers automatically with your management tools – do they have a plug in for your monitoring tools/automated build tools like Altiris or CA NSM?
• Firmware issues – if I upgrade the firmware, does that mean I need to upgrade the drivers? Best practice would recommend but in the real world you might be busy, your build might be set to specific drivers.
• Lights out – you might not necessarily need lights out, but it’s useful to have and check two things, firstly is it included, secondly is there a license needed for the actual screen view using the lights out card.
• Manage price with functionality, you need to pay what you can afford, but consider the cost of switching vendor against direct savings.

I had a similar discussion recently, the client had three on site engineers supporting 200 Compaq/HP servers, they were considering switching to a mixture of Sun and Dell and they asked my advice.

• A few things:
  • You’re engineers are already familiar with the Compaq/HP support process, with the hardware – a DL580G2 is rapidly different against a DL580 – but they understand the concepts.
  • The hardware support contract might need to be adjusted to include spare parts for three vendors – check the cost of doing this, and check if the vendors/service providers want your engineers to be re-trained.
  • Check the management cost – your operating system build, does that need changed? Does your monitoring need changed? Do we need to provide additional hardware monitoring servers/tools?

We need to move with the times, we need to buy servers, storage and network infrastructure that are in line with the business requirements, at the same time, we need to manage the marginal cost of doing so. Switching vendors is not world ending and indeed can be achieved with relative ease, but as you scale out the infrastructure, as you think about it long term consider the impact of today and the near future where you might have several vendors and the associated support requirements, hardware and software.

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