Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Colocation and Data Centers : Dell or IBM?

[hostingen]

Hi there,
I am planning to import a few servers and I am wondering if Dell servers or IBM servers will suit my best need. What do you guys think? I am going to run linux on these servers.

Also, do you guys think it is a very good idea to colocate a level3? Or somether else?

[sshepherd]

They're both fine server brands and will both perform their role perfectly fine. Probably the only thing you'll hear is the difference in price between Dell and IBM. You'll get more hardware for your money with Dell. Whether that price difference matters vs getting an IBM for brand name leverage, an AMD CPU, or potentially better support/reliability is more for you to decide based on your "needs".

Are you only or primarily serving US based customers? What kind of traffic will you be serving from your servers? Level3 would be fine for most applications, but you should provide more information on what your actual requirements are.

[tnndotnet]

this is going to be a diverse crowd I would assume.

I love Dell tho! Go Dell!

Level 3 is good, definately quality BW, or UUNET, or a multihomed connection with both!

Dan

[hostingen]

Thanks for the advice on Dell. I will probably go for that one.

The servers are serving a diverse crowd, and I would like to collate them in the US. I heard level3 is good, they you need to pay alot. That's why I am wondering if you have any suggestion for a cheaper colocation service(with the same quality of BW)????

[tnndotnet]

Well, I am assuming your dropping these into a Datacenter in the US. Most of the time the datacenters are multihomed. Level 3 is definately a quality network and has large amounts of VoIP traffic, so it has to be good quality.

But, you want to find datacenters within your budget, lay them out with comparisons, costs, bandwidth overage fees, who their backbone provider is, support hours, everything.

If you are sending your servers to a datacenter where you may never visit, it is nice to form a personal bond with the company who will be taking care of your servers. So I reccommend calling them to ask the questions. Also try and steer clear of resellers, I have read nothing but bad news about them on the forums.

Good luck,

Dan

[PixelManual]

Honestly, I hate dell in respect to customer relations. Man they play games with their pricings and so-called 'deals'

A friend of mine swears by IBM and another by Dell. Both are great companys overall and produce quality servers.

on a side note; level3 is a great provider, just great. Their bandwidth quality is quite strong for gameservers as well. Maybe savvis as an alternative? No idea about the pricing scale though.

[tnndotnet]

I heard about the gameserver quality from some buddies of mine. We are dropping Cogent as an IP redundancy connection and are getting a Level 3 connection in the DC soon, it is going to be nice to have traffic flow freely thru both UUNET and Level 3. Right now we have UUNET weighted, so no traffic flows thru cogent.

As for customer relations, I am not certain what ya mean, of course when you call they try to sell you ever bell and whistle they can, but hey, its business ya know. And as for the support, you GET what YOU pay for. They have american based support, but if you dont want to pay the additional fees for the support, you will end up talking to Arabe Jehaveico from India!

I recently had the pleasure of talking to an american dell support representative regarding a RAID 5 setup/SMP Kernel for Fedora Core 4, the guy knew his stuff for sure, he is an asset to dell, whoever he is. But... yea..

Dell is the best for Price.
IBM is good for their stupid commercials about servers ruling the world.

This is all IMO

Dan

[PixelManual]

Originally Posted by tnndotnet

I recently had the pleasure of talking to an american dell support representative regarding a RAID 5 setup/SMP Kernel for Fedora Core 4, the guy knew his stuff for sure, he is an asset to dell, whoever he is. But... yea..

You got to speak to an American...? Lucky you. Last 5? times I've called them I've gotten (not making any racial remarks here) an Asian person who can barely speak it. I believe I've spoken to at least 2 different people, although with the accents, its been hard to tell. I've never done anything large with dell so I may not be a priority, but I'm sick and tired of dealing with that. Especially when ordering my new laptop..man that took forever - he did give me a decent deal though.

In regards to pricing, its just the games they play with discounts and upgrades, etc. If I went into detail this would be a 4-5 paragraph rant I'm just not willing to write right now.

[D4hosting]

Before I expanded, I did a lot of research on the cost of DELL vs GATEWAT vs building my own. On a dual CPU (opteron/xeon) with RAID 5 hardware and 5 or 6 disks, the custom build always came out on top. Dell hardware is pretty good (last time I bought a new desktop was Dell 3 yrs ago), but if you know enough and can build one, I think that is the way to go.

[mripguru]

IMHO, Dell is IBM done right (they both use the same base components) .

[mripguru]

Originally Posted by PixelManual

You got to speak to an American...? Lucky you. Last 5? times I've called them I've gotten (not making any racial remarks here) an Asian person who can barely speak it. I believe I've spoken to at least 2 different people, although with the accents, its been hard to tell. I've never done anything large with dell so I may not be a priority, but I'm sick and tired of dealing with that. Especially when ordering my new laptop..man that took forever - he did give me a decent deal though.

In regards to pricing, its just the games they play with discounts and upgrades, etc. If I went into detail this would be a 4-5 paragraph rant I'm just not willing to write right now.

This is why I deal with corp. sales/support, etc. .

[johnbrown362003]

We have quite a few DELL PowerEdge Servers and Powervault 220S. Getting through to DELL Support is not bad. Everytime, I have talked to someone in the US over the last 5 years. I would rate as above average.

DELL service (hardware support) is definitely an issue. DELL contracts with third party service firms to replace faultly hardware components. (The contract 4hr 7x24 or NBD does not matter).

The following are our conclusions about DELL hardware service based on our experiences (several):
- The person coming out to replace your hardware is not a DELL Systems engineer or employee. This person is typically not well versed in the hardware. You should have someone on staff that knows the hardware and has read the DELL docs.
- All that this person does is to be the "remote hands" to DELL support
- This person is more interested in getting to the next call of the day. Therefore, when this person arrives, do not let them out of your sight so that they do not leave the premises until you are satisfied.
- Do not let them pull servers out of racks as they pull servers without "looking" - (Got to get to the next call and your service call is impeding them !!!) Have your staff pull servers out of racks.

DELL Open Manage System Administrator (OMSA) is also an issue. If you are running linux, it has only been stable since late 2005. Previous to that it was quite an adventure and it took DELL quite awhile to stabilize it.

Hopefully others in this forum can enlighten us on the IBM Service on XSeries.