
Wikia / Dell Spat Highlights Divide Between Corporate and Web Computing  - blasdel
http://gigaom.com/2010/03/03/wikia-dell-spat-highlights-divide-between-corporate-and-web-computing/
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ghshephard
This isn't really a spat - and the issue with what Dell charge for gear that
goes into their servers has been around for at least ten years. For about a 3
year period, (1998-2001) any Dell Server I ordered would always come with the
minimum amount of memory, and we would always purchase the actual memory from
Crucial. Everyone I knew who Bought Dell servers did that, even if they were
"Not Warranteed" - Dell certainly never confirmed that the Memory in the
System was Dell Memory, and they never had a tech blanch at fixing another
broken component.

Eventually, Dell was losing enough of their memory business to Crucial that
they brought the price back down to market rates. The current pricing
distortion (if it exists, I don't really price SSDs in Dell Servers) - will
likewise be temporary as people purchase second-market SSDs to put in their
Servers and stop buying Dell SSDs.

What I don't understand, after having read the article three or four times, is
what the actual "Spat" is - is Dell suggesting that if people put Amazon.com
Intel SSDs into their systems that there will be a problem with the warranty,
_and_ they are actually following through and refusing service when they
discover non-Dell drives in their servers? Now that would be an interesting
story, but I didn't see any mention of that behavior in the article.

~~~
wmf
It's worse than that; if you attach non-Dell disks to the latest Dell RAID
controller, it _refuses to work_.

[http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2010/02/10/dell_perc_11th_g...](http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2010/02/10/dell_perc_11th_gen_qualified_hdds_only/)

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ghshephard
Wowsa. Now _that_ is a story. Dell is effectively exiting any of massive-scale
markets which rely on smart algorithms and redundant architectures on best-
price commodity hardware. I have to believe this is a signal that they are
going to focus their efforts on the Enterprise Market in which this
"Certified" environment has value. Thanks for the link.

~~~
wmf
_Dell is effectively exiting any of massive-scale markets which rely on smart
algorithms and redundant architectures on best-price commodity hardware._

I disagree; the massive-scale (DCS) customers generally don't use RAID
controllers and they have enough clout to negotiate reasonable disk and RAM
prices. Enterprise customers can also negotiate discounts. The people who are
getting screwed are small customers (which was traditionally Dell's strongest
market AFAIK).

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colonelxc
"...but Bergman said he’s OK with his drives failing, and has planned for that
in his network architecture (he uses RAID 0), so Dell is “optimising for
something we really don’t care about.”"

I am pretty sure all of this is just taken out of context by an ignorant
journalist, but raid 0 is striping, not mirroring, so if one drive goes, the
whole array goes. Even if it was supposed to be Raid 1, I hope that they also
have real backups (aka raid is not a backup).

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ghshephard
We use RAID 0 all over the place. Great Performance and no additional overhead
on disks - Raid 1 requires you purchase twice as many disks, raid 5 has the 1
disk penalty (which, for 3 disks, means 33%). Disks have become pretty
reliable lately, and, if you have a redundant machine architecture, you simply
boot the bad disk and rebuild the machine. So, I'm guessing based on the
context of the article, that yes, Raid-0 is precisely what they are using.

