VoIP Mailing List Archives

[bwentdg at pipeline.com]

Steve - Where are you buying your HPDL380 's ? I may need quite a # of
these for a new project.

What factors were the Most Important to you in selecting this product ?

What, if anything, is there any you do NOT like about these boxes ?

How many have you deployed ?

What is the largest box you have deployed ?

Who does your hardware maintenance ? HP ??

Thx for sharing !!!

Steve Totaro wrote:

[stotaro at totarotechn...]

Well it greatly depends on your budget. CDW or PCConnection are my
usual providers of server hardware. I like PCConnection, because I
have a very good relationship with my sales rep and he will often drop
VAR pricing further without being asked or with a small hint about the
price. In a pinch, I have found a guy on Ebay that sells "refurbed"
DL 3XX servers that are supposedly great servers. They work for me in
the situation where required, although, never a first suggestion.

The most important features are the fact that PCConnection/CDW are
very quick (overnight) to provided support on the boxes. HP servers
are rock solid (not like HP/Compaq desktops or especially laptops),
their servers have given my no problems.

I would try to get a cool sales rep at PCConnection and in initial
conversations, mention that you are going to purchase that many
servers and never just accept the price, at least not with my rep,
they negotiate.

My largest deployment was seven HP DL320s for TDM to SIP gateways (HP
DL320s with Sangmona quad port T1 cards, Two DL380s maxed out to
handle a callcenter application/CRM integration, and the second to
handle recording and archiving EVER call into the call center.
Several hundreds simultaneous calls without using Asterisk MixMonitor,
my recording solution is totally separate from Asterisk that has no
potential of crashing the call center itself, just the possibility of
losingin recordings.

What I really like about the DL380 is the ability to have multiple
power supplies and several slots for your RAID preferences.

Thanks,
Steve Totaro

On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 4:38 AM, Al Baker <bwentdg at pipeline.com> wrote:

[jesse at opendreams.net]

If you want barebones where you add your own processor, RAM, hard drives, and options, try SuperMicro brand servers. They are thousands of dollars less than the "big" (fat) names like IBM and HP/Compaq, but very good quality.

I've built several clusters of computers with SuperMicro systems. They are great if you want to do barebones, clusters, or other special projects.

It just takes a little more time to do the assembly work.

Try newegg.com for some sample pricing.

On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 04:38:43AM -0400, Al Baker wrote:

[mattgibson.ca at gmail...]

I've had good luck with these guys:

http://rackmountsetc.com/

supermicro have never failed me yet.
On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 6:03 PM, Jesse Molina <jesse at opendreams.net> wrote:

[bwentdg at pipeline.com]

ok - but, who do you call for HW problem ? HP has all levels of
warranties all depending on how much $$
you want to spend. What do you do if you buy and install Supermicro ?????
HP also has 24x7 support center , again not for free, what do you do
with Supermicro ???
I am really interested because I hear a lot of folks putting * on them
but I never have worked on them while I have put in bunch of HPs really
big boxes..
Thx for sharing your experience

Matthew Gibson wrote:

[jesse at opendreams.net]

If you can't troubleshoot a hardware problem, then you should definitely not be thinking about this. Going with a support-yourself plan is not for everyone, especially if you don't have good hands-on hardware ability local to where the systems are.

The cost savings can be significant enough that you don't' need to worry about third party support. Just buy some cold-spare systems. Out of eight servers, you can buy three spares and still have money left over -- assuming a three year life span for the systems and related support costs. This is true on 1U and 2U systems -- I'm not sure about larger stuff.

After all, what are Dell/IBM/HP-Compaq going to do for you, other than replace the hardware? Nothing. They don't support your custom software and configurations, just hardware. Yank the hard drives, RAID controller, install in a spare system, and you're up and running again. Figure out what went wrong on the old system later. If it's under warranty, get it RMAed at your leisure. If it's not, you've got another two spare systems on the shelf, waiting there 24x7 just for you.

Once again, it's not for everyone. If you don't feel comfortable with it, don't do it! It works for some businesses, not for others. It depends on who is supporting your servers. If IBM supports your servers, get IBM support. If you support your servers... then why are you paying them to do nothing??? Don't pay for emotional support.

On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 06:55:10PM -0400, Al Baker wrote:

[shadowym at hotmail.com]

You don't have to build Supermicro stuff yourself if you don't want to.
Most Supermicro dealers do it for you if you buy all the parts from them.

It's true that what your doing with Dell/HP is paying for emotional support.
When it comes to PBX's you not getting any value paying for Dell/HP support.
If your getting good stuff you should never need their hardware replacement
warranty either.

-----Original Message-----
From: Jesse Molina [mailto:jesse at opendreams.net]
Sent: Tuesday, March 25, 2008 9:11 PM
To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion
Subject: Re: [asterisk-users] Had it with Dell Garbage - HP Question
If you can't troubleshoot a hardware problem, then you should definitely not
be thinking about this. Going with a support-yourself plan is not for
everyone, especially if you don't have good hands-on hardware ability local
to where the systems are.

The cost savings can be significant enough that you don't' need to worry
about third party support. Just buy some cold-spare systems. Out of eight
servers, you can buy three spares and still have money left over -- assuming
a three year life span for the systems and related support costs. This is
true on 1U and 2U systems -- I'm not sure about larger stuff.

After all, what are Dell/IBM/HP-Compaq going to do for you, other than
replace the hardware? Nothing. They don't support your custom software and
configurations, just hardware. Yank the hard drives, RAID controller,
install in a spare system, and you're up and running again. Figure out what
went wrong on the old system later. If it's under warranty, get it RMAed at
your leisure. If it's not, you've got another two spare systems on the
shelf, waiting there 24x7 just for you.

Once again, it's not for everyone. If you don't feel comfortable with it,
don't do it! It works for some businesses, not for others. It depends on
who is supporting your servers. If IBM supports your servers, get IBM
support. If you support your servers... then why are you paying them to do
nothing??? Don't pay for emotional support.



On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 06:55:10PM -0400, Al Baker wrote:

[bwentdg at pipeline.com]

I used to have hundred big HP 9000 boxes running HP-UX 11.0.
Having some open th entrailsls of those big boys and due surgery was a
damn good feeling. The also came with very very good HW diagnostics and
had some place you cold send KERNEL Dumps on troubled system that was
often a life saver

shadowym wrote:

[bwentdg at pipeline.com]

How do you get notifications ?
Is this thru one of the add on packages HP sells for the box ? Which One ?
Could you be more specific about what you mean by a "recovery CD"
and hod do you get console access below multi used to do "recovery ??

What is "integrated ILO BIOS Access" sounds cool.

What O/S you usin and what made you pick it ?

What kind and how many RAIDS are you using. The HP site gave like 8
different RAID controllers and like 20 CPUs to chose from. How did you
chose ?

Thx for sharing !!!

Darren Wright wrote:

[dwright at d2-tech.com]

Notifications can be done either thru SNMP traps or SMTP. Insight
Manager is free from HP, but any SNMP trapper can work with alerts.

The recovery CD is just a build that reloads the majority of the system
with a static ip. We backup off site to one of our servers via FTP.

ILO access is an integrated IP KVM. So you can see the machine boot,
get virtual media access, etc.

O/S is CentOS.

For smaller systems, RAID 1, and for larger DL380 based systems 0+1

-D

[jkinard at closeup.org]

I've got two DL385s and a DL320, and they all rock. iLO especially rocks, but to leverage the full functionality, you'll need to get the "Advanced License", which opens up full blown remote console capabilities (via Java). It's a separate piece of hardware that, as long as the server PSUs have power flowing into them, lets you do things like remotely power on/off/reset the machine (referred to as virtual power), monitor OS crashes (picks up Windows BSoDs and NetWare ABENDS....haven't Oopsed Linux on one yet). iLO's allowed me to do everything from BIOS upgrades to fixing NetWare boot issues all from the comfort of my home at 3am in the morning.

The build quality is superb...more metal than plastic, so they can weight a bit more, but I expect that of my servers versus desktop boxes.

I myself use RAID5 in my DL385 G1's (AMD Opteron), which hold up to six Ultra 320 SCSI drives, on a HP SmartArray controller (64MB of cache though....need to upgrade that). The DL320 is a RAID1 on 2x 10k rpm SAS drives, on a...P400 I think w/ 256MB of cache. All battery backed.

OS Support is great so far. Just check HP's site for the "Proliant Support Packs" specific to an OS, as they sometimes provide better drivers than what ships stock w/ the OS (this is especially true for NetWare).
--J


-----Original Message-----
From: asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com
[mailto:asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com]On Behalf Of Al Baker
Sent: Thursday, March 27, 2008 8:02 AM
To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion
Subject: Re: [asterisk-users] Had it with Dell Garbage - HP Question


How do you get notifications ?
Is this thru one of the add on packages HP sells for the box ? Which One ?
Could you be more specific about what you mean by a "recovery CD"
and hod do you get console access below multi used to do "recovery ??

What is "integrated ILO BIOS Access" sounds cool.

What O/S you usin and what made you pick it ?

What kind and how many RAIDS are you using. The HP site gave like 8
different RAID controllers and like 20 CPUs to chose from. How did you
chose ?

Thx for sharing !!!

Darren Wright wrote:

[michiel at vanbaak.info]

On 08:02, Thu 27 Mar 08, Al Baker wrote:

[bwentdg at pipeline.com]

Helps a bunch !!!
One follow up question - out of all of your possible choices for the OS
how did you pick *Debian*.
I 'm not saying is bad, I just know nothing about the particular disto.
and and very curious what
it brought to the table that made you pick over say *RedHat* - where you
can *buy support *or *SUSE* - where you can *buy support*. My fear from
hell is that I' get 50 or 60 of these boxes in, start having kernel
panics, and have no damn body to help except the folks on mailing lists.
Mind you these are often really smart people, very generously giving of
their time, but not quite the say as a manned/paid support organization.

Thx for sharing !!!

Michiel van Baak wrote:

[bwentdg at pipeline.com]

How did you chose "Centos", versus Red Hat, Suse, Debian, ?
Was there some key feature it offered that the others didn't ?
Cost ?

Darren Wright wrote:

[tzafrir.cohen at xorco...]

On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 02:34:36AM -0400, Al Baker wrote: