As an organization premised on stability and reliability, we opt for vendor built, tested, distributed AND supported server solutions.  Is there a premium to be paid?  Without question.  Is it worth it?  Most certainly.

Unnamed web hosts (which will remain unnamed) “leading the industry” in unreliable hardware architecture, wholeheartedly disregard the importance of reliable server builds.  Perhaps in the realm of 6,000% oversold bottom lines and brewing napoleon dynamited web 2.1 (credit to firefallpro for the term) websites, or reinventing the CRM wheel, an additional $800-$1200 on a server purchase for Gold Level 24/7/365 2 hour TAM support is something to scour at.  In the Redux world of redundant services, these extra dollars go the extra distance when a RAID array alerts on thresholds of predictive failure over the christmas holidays (been there, and unfortunately done that).

A vendor branded server, in our case, Dell PowerEdge servers, coupled with exceptional support services (Silver/Gold 2 hour guaranteed parts and onsite-engineers-flown-in-from-Austin assistance if needed), is truly the only way to offer a reliable, honest, and decent service to your customer base.  Filling up datacenters with low cost, bottom barrel components, sometimes assembled onsite, offer absolutely no level of protection or guarantee to the customer.

I do not want to hear the arguments regarding housing 1,000s of cloned systems, where replacement parts are literally a dollar a dozen, we are not in the year 2250 and all your bases do not belong to anyone.  You cannot tell your customer base in good faith, that you are going to maintain an acceptable level of service when you aren’t even willing to expend resources on the data integrity and protection of RAID 1/5.  Reliable services should not be premised on a providers (again, no names) ability to copy data from one failed OEM drive to what will eventually be another in 6 months, or swing a complete chassis replacement at 4AM, rather, it should (and is) premised on internal redundancies, pre-detection mechanisms, and an internal array of brilliance that only qualified server vendors (Dell/HP/IBM) are capable or providing.  Quite honestly, if your provider is reporting that your server is being taken offline in the middle of the night to deal with “bad ram,” this translates to “we have no idea what the problem is, the team at Newegg told us to do this.”  (unfair jab at Newegg, if you ever need low cost components to build a gaming rig, they are the place to go).  But again, The Microsoft Windows mentality “lets reimage the entire system and set a job/cron to reboot it nightly,” is ever so present in this regard

The next item of importance are the toolsets provided by vendors (HP OpenView, Dell OpenManager) to assist in server management.  The primary purpose of an OpenManager-ish suite of hardware and system management/diagnostic utilities is to keep an administrative team informed as to what is going on inside the box.  Do we really care what speeds each of the 27 fans inside our systems are running, or what the temperature is around the system backplane?  No, but this briefly describes the levels to which vendor management utilities will go.  Pre-detection allows for a sysadmin to address a problem before it occurs, diagnostic utilities allow for in depth diagnosis of the actual issues prior to performing the far too frequent “chassis replacement.”  By no means am I declaring a redundant system immune from disaster (see Massachusetts logs from December 2005:  http://noc.networkredux.net).

How can a provider truly know that a memory module is the reason for server irregularity when there is no legitimate testing or diagnostic probing of the system?  And how can anyone expect this level of service and manageability out of a whitebox server which cost these unnamed providers $200-$350 to assemble and put on a LAN rack?  Countless gigE links BGPified, in turn solidified by a network of desktop PCs and 250GB OEM disk drive in RAID non-existent?

I’m not going to argue in favor of one vendor or the other, all contain a varying degree of pros and cons.  What I am standing on a pedestal to argue is a higher threshold of server architecture builds and components across the web hosting industry.  Less time developing useless in house applications that your customers have little to no interest in, or figuring out a flippin’ sweeter way to web 2.0ize your production site while handing out free vote for pedro t-shirts to new customers.  Lets do the consumers a favor and redirect these resources toward hardware reliability and redundancy.

I am a URL.  I refuse to be validated, if you try to validate my characters I will discuss the matter on webhostingtalk.com, and you have absolutely no control over my behavior.  You think that your sweet little webserver condom, mod_security, can control my rage… little do you know…
PHP Developers and Quality Assurance testers, the time has come to acknowledge the overwhelming damage you generate on shared web hosting environments.

Imaurl.com is my contribution to this elaborate disaster plaguing these glorious piles of unscrutinized and poorly tested deliciously “hot” little snippets and scriptlets of wonder.
Stay tuned, updates to follow shortly.

/vent

An interesting story needs to be told, one of my pursuit to ascertain qualified system specifications and pricing to meet the future needs of Network Redux.

As many of you know, we hold strong premier affiliation with Dell Servers/Storage and datacenter technologies. Throughout this rampant, yet wonderful, usage of cost effective Dell servers and storage, it came to mind that we should also consider some of the other players out there, specifically Sun Microsystems given their recent unveiling and embracing of Opteron technologies and Open Source activism.

So one regular afternoon I jumped onto sun.com, filled out a basic contact form and filled in our information, and our interest for purchasing 3-5 of their 1U and 2U opteron series (Sun Fire x2100 x4100 x4200) and we were in need of these immediately.

To briefly explain how Sun differs from Dell’s direct marketing and sales — Sun authorized resellers are responsible for handling the point of purchase/installation of Sun products. Contacting sun directly will almost always result in them locating a reseller in your immediate area.

Interestingly enough, the idea quickly passed, as I had gone nearly 2 weeks without hearing a word, and I had no interest in scouring for a reseller when my primary interest was getting someone on the phone who could answer our detailed questions regarding their architecture, power consumption and cooling requirements, warranty, etc.

Then the phone rang, this was someone at Sun who was apologizing for the delayed response. At this point our server batch had already been ordered through Dell, (takes approximately 5 minutes to configure an order, email it to the account exec who then drops the pricing by about 15-20% usually increasing it to Gold support as well — order same day, automated and easy.)

I entertained the conversation as I still needed to rule their products in or out for any future deployments. She routed me to a reseller in the portland area, who was prompt to give me a call same day. We discussed a broad range of topics, the most excrutiating being the inability to go larger than 73GB with their 2.5″ SAS (serial attached scsi) disk drives. Our current builds utilize RAID 5 arrays of 4x146GB, and to drop below this would almost be a waste of the 2 units of space.

We kept talking, I gave him a list of our needs and current Dell builds, and he said that I would receive a return call shortly. That same day we were discussing possible builds, which turned into a rather interesting, and unsettling discussion.

At this point the reseller needed to build us a server identical to the Dell PowerEdge 2850s we were running, and with all of his available resources he was unable to match the drive specifications, or even come close. He then transformed the discussion from one of buying a few servers, to one of replacing our entire line of Dell servers, with Sun, and adding a high capacity SAN solution to make up for the lacking disk drives across the board.

This conversation had become one of a customer wishing to try out a few servers, to one of Sun wishing to replace our entire operations with Sun Servers/Storage, literally taking the Dell servers out and putting their own servers in, assisting in this migration. I knew the answer was no, not going to happen, no way in hell, I’m not even impressed with the Sun business model, why would I consider migrating our entire operations to their architecture?

I gave him a day to brew up some numbers, just to see how far off in the land of taking it too far they actually were. The next day the phone rang, we went over some figures, I gave him a moderate list of the various problems that would occur with such a transition, specifically the large amounts of live data web/email/database that is being updated 24/7/365. He promised a call back next day, I didn’t promise to pick up the phone.

The moral of this story is that Sun and Dell have differing strategies in just about every category of delivering small business services. I thoroughly admire the Dell inventory supply model, as well as their direct marketing and sales. More often than not the pricing passed down to a premier dell customer is higher than the pricing one would find in the small business section of dell.com — it is quite clear that Dell is serious about selling servers and networking technologies to small businesses, without making them jump through reseller hoops or unrealistic and drastic recommended system design changes.

That’s all I’m going to say on this matter, for now we proudly remain Dell Powered.