Michael Gorsuch <mgorsuch@fogcreek.com> wrote:
> Greetings all.  Is anyone here running production NetBSD systems on Dell 
> hardware?  If so, what have your experiences been with the support staff 
> when hardware fails?

 At my day job at the central IT department for a very large public
University in the U.S., my department has somewhere around 50-100 Dell
servers, particularly 2650s and 2850s.  I believe the Windoze guys have
had some serious problems with a Dell re-badged (made by someone else, but
sold with a Dell name logo) FCAL-based disk array. They were down for a
very unpleasant amount of time as a result.  I think part of this was due
to departmental penny-pinching and ending up with some disk arrays that
had been EOLd.  But part of the problem was Dell's support.

 Within my own group, which runs only Unix-y machines, i believe we have
about 15-20 Dell 2650s that run FreeBSD and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and
i'd say they are average reliability.  There have been one or two machines
with consistent problems with their hardware RAID, but i don't recall any
other problems.  This is a slightly higher failure rate than our Sun
hardware. Please keep in mind that my primary responsibility is to manage
an application that runs on Suns, so this is second hand information.

 I have not interacted directly with Dell, but based on my coworkers'
descriptions, their support is average, or maybe slightly below average.

 Keep in mind we are located in Austin, TX, Dell's HQ, for whatever that's
worth.

In a separate reply to your message, someone mentioned a comparative
survey that ranks x86 vendors as: IBM, HP, Sun, and Dell. The URLs are:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06/27/gcg_server/
http://gabrielconsultinggroup.com/pressrelease20060620.php

 I know at least one large shop that selected IBM x86 servers primarily
because IBM's support of Linux is "very good."  This was described to me
as IBM ensuring that Linux has solid drivers for the IBM x86 machines by
the time my colleague was setting up the new IBM x86 machine.

 That may have affected the survey results in ways that would not be
relevant to someone selecting x86 hardware that will run NetBSD.

 -johan