Oh, that’s terrible, terrible news. I usually value Lenovo for both good service and good products (ThinkServer and ThinkPad series, at least).
We have two or three ThinkServers here at work. They all came with all the racks even where we don’t have hard drives (i.e. a server with six rack slots came with two hard drives but six racks so adding a hard drive is trivial. It could be though because we’re a huge business that uses a lot of Lenovo hardware; I wouldn’t know, I’m not in IT. I hope you manage to get the racks. If not, return the products and if you are charged with restocking fee you should sue IMO.
Good luck, anyway.
This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard, Lenovo sucks, Dell sucks, HP sucks. Done.
They should at the very least put a big disclaimer:
We don’t care about you, but do care about your money. We note that you have to buy our own-brand hardware, which is hugely overpriced, the same thing as standard hardware, and yet probably has a warranty sticker in an awkward position, which probably inhibits your use of our products. I.E. $5,000 for a convertor cable that is necesarry for your server to function, yet is not included in the box, and has one pin more than that other one you saw for $1 at your local store.
Well, being a little more serious, I would check what their returns policy is, on the phone (so they might be able to sort you out a deal or something). If they don’t offer you something, return the damned thing and complain like hell.
OK I once had a similar problem with a Compaq server, however, they came equipped with plastic brackets that had to be in the slots that had no drives to ensure correct airflow over the disks, I got away with using these to hold the drives in place by drilling holes in the sides and cutting away space in the top.
However, I did not have to ship those servers anywhere, but in that case it probably would have been ok cause the disks seemed secure.
Hi,
That’s not really new, Lenovo bought Mamie Blue`s I Bill More policy too, some years ago we had to xchange a whole rack of raid disks. Because they sold to us a kind of SAS-SCSI-converter rails (we hadnt realized that) to put in SCSI-disks into. To upgrade was impossible, they told us, we only can order complete disks. We changed to HP, even they were not cheaper, we got the rails for a reasonable price, two raids of them are in duty until now.
The High Price Unit…
belef
You might also check if the diskbrackets from http://www.supermicro.com/products/accessories/index.cfm might fit.
It really does stink, but due to all major server manufacturers operating like this, I’ve actually just started accepting this as standard practice; kind of like razor blades. Someone should really start making these for the major server manufacturers to keep them in check or the manufacturers should just sell you the trays. I have been able to find some refurbished trays for an ibm server.
Try to buy some old second hand lenovo servers only to get that. Maybe they still use the same support for hard drives…
This is the cost of unresearched purchases.
If the place you bought them from specified the need for lenovo hard drives, you’re screwed. If it was sold as merely without hard drives a solid case can be made to return the servers and, worst case, do a credit card chargeback.
This is a nasty trick played by pretty much all the enterprise vendors. I’ve seen it with Sun, HP and IBM kit, and am sure it happens with most of the others too. I really don’t know why big companies put up with it.
We went through this with a set of IBM servers a couple of years ago, with the same result. In fact, these look like the same brackets.
In your shoes I would give up now, cut your losses and return the servers, because unless something has changed since our debacle, you cannot buy, beg or fab these mounts. Any restocking fee would be less than the premium you’d pay for the overpriced drives – if they even sell the drives you want (which was our issue).
This counts as insanely bad customer service and should be ‘rewarded’ as such. And, as you’re doing, publicized widely.
Welcome to the wonderful world of name brand servers.
I work for one of top server vendors (not Lenovo), and I’m sorry to say, you’re simply not the kind of customer we focus on. A lot of the profit in a server comes from CPU’s, DIMM’s and disk drives, and our target customers are happy to buy them from us. Our customers want highly reliable equipment backed by a warranty and on-site service for the entire system. They don’t futz around doing their own upgrades. It’s all about TCO, not initial acquisition cost.
what the frig!!!
it is only mounting rails? ONLY MOUNTING RAILS!!! I had to wait a whole month to get a new bigger harddrive for my sun server and now I find out it was just a run-of-the-mill sata drive with customised mounting rails?
I got yelled at by customers cause my ATMs were down OVER MOUNTING RAILS!!! maybe i should have unscrewed the old drive from its mounting and replaced it with a new 250gb maxtor. I hate branded pcs, servers and such like.
That and looking like a parvenu in front of cybernetically challenged hoipoloi!!!
Jeff, i feel your pain
That’s one brand I’ll avoid in future.
Jeff,
I searched EBay for Server tray and it came up with several different models, with prices ranging from $19 to $40, maybe some of them might work for you.
This is why open hardware is so much better than propriatary crap.
now I find out it was just a run-of-the-mill sata drive with customised mounting rails?
Oh yes, this is one of the worst kept secrets in IT. The only difference between server parts and commodity desktop parts is the pricetag. Oh, and the fancy name.
The only exception to this, IMO, is RAID controllers and redundant power supplies. Those are truly server parts and priced accordingly…
I was thrilled to discover that Santa Claus left a little unexpected present on my doorstep on Christmas Eve: … They weren’t supposed to arrive until sometime next week.
Good for you. I have the opposite experience. UPS was going to deliver a package on the 24th and the tracking site stated that they had started it, but then at 3 o’clock I discovered in that log that they were unavalable to get signature on the 1st delivery. Rescheduled blah blah blah. And I was at home and waited for it all the day! They just never came and decided to have a really short and merry day. What a shame, UPS! Guess when they plan to deliver now. On the 29th!
Oh yes, this is one of the worst kept secrets in IT. The only difference between server parts and commodity desktop parts is the pricetag. Oh, and the fancy name.
Kinda, the server parts tend to be rated for operation in less-forgiving server environments. Theoretically it’s better quality hardware, but in much the same was as CPU manufacturers underclock dies capable of higher speeds and sell them cheaper (purely to satisfy the market), they’re usually the same hardware these days.
My advice: Get stroppy. Works on Dell.
As people have mentioned, search ebay or other sites. Unless the design has been recently changed, I’d be surprised if people aren’t selling off these kinds of parts from retired machines.
I used to work for another name-brand server company and we had lots of company-specific drive trays laying around labs everywhere. Here’s hoping somebody at IBM reads your blog and offers to send you some - I’d do it just to get the free good publicity.
The comment from John above is right - the price-sensitive consumer isn’t the target customer for Sun, HP, or Lenovo servers. Dell is a little bit more interested in that lower-end market, but certainly they want you to buy the drives from them and so they do things like this too.
The high-margin drives the server vendors sell aren’t the same as what you can buy - check the model numbers with the vendors and I believe you’ll see they have a higher MTBF. I’m not saying that’s worth the price difference.
Just curious Jeff, but why did you choose Lenovo servers in the first place? What features or capability or other attributes were you looking for?