Scott Lowe has posted an article on the HP Proliant G6 servers. It looks like we seeing more performance, new processors, better power/cooling management and interchangeable power supplies (yay!).
If asked to choose between the 4 major brands then here’s my list:
4) Fujitsu Siemens: Rubbish in my experience and no cooperation with others, e.g. Microsoft System Center when I last looked for it. Back in 2003 we had a branch office that insisted on buying from this company. My boss relented. We told them everything had to be W2003 certified because that’s what we were installing. The branch passed that on and bought the gear. The onboard SCSI controllers were only W2K certified.
3) IBM: Awful stuff from a has-been. I’ve had an awful time with their support desk. I found it impossible to find their OpsMgr 2007 management pack. And their native hardware monitoring is pitiful. Who wants a server that fails to reboot because 1 disk in a RAID array has failed? I’d rather it reboot and alert me. There is that lagging concern about selling the server business to Lenovo. They fall off the chart if that happens.
2) Dell: Not for blades though. They can’t make up their minds if they are in or out of that market. Excellent management through MS System Center. Pretty economic. Not sure about support.
1) HP: Support is not perfect – Why can’t their India office (a) act professionally and (b) get a phone line that works properly? The best hardware I’ve used and excellent integration with Microsoft System Center. Easy to use ILO (IP KVM), Virtual Connect (Blade connection virtualisation), EVA Command View (SAN management) and Insight Manager Agents that pick up everything. I wish they’d catch up with MS and produce versions of everything that worked on a Core installation.
No, neither Sun nor Cisco appeared here. Not on my list. I still remember the days when it was cheaper to buy a BMW than a stick of RAM for a Sun server. And Cisco are too new in this market.
EDIT #1:
You can watch videos of the launch event here.
Are you able to expand on the comment "I wish they’d catch up with MS and produce versions of everything that worked on a Core installation". Is that implying that a Core install on the HP hardware may be limited in some functionality?
Unfortunately, yes. It’s something lots of people are finding across many hardware brands. If you do a bare Windows installation without the hardware management software then everything is fine. If you want to install agents and configure them, install network management and configure it, etc, then you’re in for fun. Many of them still assume a GUI is in place or have some _new_ or unique scripting language that you need to learn. What we need is either something that doesn’t need a Full installation so we can install/configure it.
It’s for this reason that I and many others have not adopted the Core Installation despite the benefits that it can bring.