August 30, 2006 at 7:03 am
Hi Steve,
If you really don't care about the spec on the machine, just that it works quickly, I'd say you find someone to spec per your budget, and buy a new machine.
The upgrade is to save time right? How much time will you save if you spend it all in research?
I happen to like researching hardware, but others don't.
Anyway, your idea of migrating the machine to test is fine, if you have good hardware there already, since older hardware is good to loadtest your ideas to be sure they won't bottleneck the production servers. You won't need 500 clients machines to do a loadtest on older server hardware.
There's also software out there that will get all your machine specs. For example Crucial.com will get your mainboard specs (via an ActiveX control) to be sure you get the right memory.
Just my two cents,
John
August 30, 2006 at 9:22 am
One of my customers has a big Dell tower (don't remember the model) that they use as one of the SQL servers in their plant. One day one of the drives in the RAID array kicked its legs and croaked. Long story shortened - Dell had a new drive there the next morning.
Some interesting facts: The plant is in a smallish town in a small southern state. The failure occurred near the start of the day shift pretty much while the sys admin was watching. The failure was rapidly, and properly, diagnosed. It was reported to Dell right away. The customer was paying for four hour support.
I firmly believe in good backups and maintenance contracts. Support contracts, hardware and software, are a kind of insurance. You have it on your car and home. Your company has insurance on its facilities and people. How often have we heard "Your data is your business"? Two days ago (28th) was the anniversary of the Katrina land fall and the 11th of next month it will only be five years from the World Trade Center invasion. We now all plan for things like that. You do know where your disaster preparedness plan is, right? You have to keep your support contracts up to date and keep on top of your support options.
ATBCharles Kincaid
August 30, 2006 at 11:48 am
Tend to agree with some of the research comments. If I had to get something done this week or next, I'd just buy a new server. However since I have some time and I'm trying to decide what to do with this machine, it's worth a little time. Unfortunately DELL doesn't do the best job of making it easy to upgrade old machines. Their model is based on selling something new.
Good contracts are important. All my production machines have them, but the test ones have expired. Cheaper to buy a new box in a pinch than maintain that.
Those contracts do make sense for machines you depend on and you should be sure you always factor that cost into things when purchasing hardware.
September 1, 2006 at 11:59 am
We purchased two new Dell 2850's earlier this year. One developed a memory problem. Took several days to determine that was the issue but once Dell said it was faulty and they would send new memory, they did.
20 minutes later I had the new memory in hand and it was installed 10 minutes later by myself.
Can't beat that for service.
And I live in Anchorage, a little off the beaten path.
I found out the Dell parts house is just down the street from us. They used a local courier who must have been standing there when the order came in.
As far as my old Dells go, I had a serious issue crop on a Sunday afternoon (hence the replacements above)on a server 10 years old. A $99 dollar fee for help late at night was worth it. I found the part needed at a 3rd party site and it up and running in 2 days. The only downside was Dell parts service required "approval" to locate the required part and it took about 5 days to respond with a highly overpriced part. I had rebuilt the entire server by then.
Viewing 4 posts - 16 through 18 (of 18 total)
You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply