The drive sleds thing is the standard MO of name brand server vendors. Welcome to enterprise hardware. I hope you never have to shop for racks and mounting brackets, which are priced as if made from compressed unicorn horns.
Many commenters have decried the way brand name servers and accessories are priced. I admittedly have a vested interest (my paycheck), but I don’t see it that way. I think what really bothers some people is that the top tier vendors aren’t interested in selling to THEM. I understand that anger/frustration, because I’ve felt it myself many times. I’d just ask you to step back and look at the situation rationally.
A business model is not unjust or corrupt simply because it doesn’t work for you. Companies have no moral obligation to be all things to all people. Server vendors aren’t engaged in fraud or deceit, nor are they relying on information asymmetry. Believe me, Fortune 500 buyers are very knowledgeable about their purchasing options, yet most choose to buy brand name servers. Jeff didn’t do his homework before making a major business purchase. Shame on him, not on Lenovo.
Also, it’s not like the top tier vendors have a monopoly. There are vendors selling servers intended for use with third-party disk drives. If that’s what you want, buy a server from them. I’m sure they’ll be thrilled to have the business. If enough people shift their purchases away from top tier vendors, those vendors will either change their ways, or go out of business.
@John: which are priced as if made from compressed unicorn horns
Actually, the unicorn horns are relatively cheap. Dell even has their own unicorn ranch in the Texas hill country to ensure a steady supply. The real cost of rack mount rails comes from the fairy dust coatings.
I had this problem with Dell as well, and solved it by figuring out the part number and finding it from a third party vendor. It came to around $25 a piece, which is much more reasonable.
If you do end up sending them back and buying new hardware, take a serious look at Sun’s x64 SunFire’s. Reasonable prices, great build quality, and they do include drive brackets in the bare-bones models.
I don’t think the only difference between consumer and enterprise stuff is simply the price, but additional QA testing. For example, for Netgear’s ReadyNAS product, the serial number of the drive determines whether there is a bug in the firmware or not, and whether the software needs to work around it (see Footnote 1 at bottom):
Seagate disks with SN04 revision of firmware does not handle Secure Erase command properly and therefore will require RAIDiator 4.01+ which has the workaround to handle this problem. Firmware SN03 on these disks will work fine with RAIDiator 4.00+.
a href=http://www.readynas.com/?page_id=82http://www.readynas.com/?page_id=82/a
Note that you don’t actually have to buy a ReadyNAS unit with drives; you can purchase a bare-bones unit and get them separately if you want (or buy one with two drives, and buy another two on your own as you need space).
Another one that’s bitten people is when the OS tells the drive to flush its cache, and the drive says okay, done flushing, but in fact lies about this. You can get some serious data corruption in cases like this (especially when dealing with DB journalling entries). Do the drives purchased from Random Shop have this bug or not? Of course this dishonesty shouldn’t happen in the first place, but bugs happen: are you willing to do the QA testing? How important is your data?
Of course if you’re willing to take the risk, I think Lenovo (and any other manufacturer) should sell you the trays for a ‘reasonable’ price if you ask for it.
@John, regarding name-brand server hardware:
What a load of tosh! Let’s pretend I buy the story about TCO being lower with name-brand hardware (haha!). That’s still got nothing to do with making proprietary mountings and fittings which can’t be bought separately.
Think about what you said: The big spenders are what the Dells and Lenovos are aiming for. They’re the ones who will buy the full solution, the 4 hour on-site service contracts, etc. Are they interested in proprietary drive brackets? No, they don’t give a shit. It doesn’t affect them either way. What about the price sensitive little guys? Well, it affects them negatively. Do the math. The only thing they’ve achieved is pissing off part of the market.
supermicro fool!
LOL, I would return them and get supermicro. Good prices for the chassis and even replacement parts are cheap.
There’s insufficient profit in bare bones servers. The top tier vendors have no incentive to make it easy for people to buy a bare server and add their own CPU’s, memory, and disk drives. The relatively high margin accessories are subsidizing the relatively low margin server. Take away the accessories, and there’s no point being in the server business. The vendor can actually lose by selling more bare servers, because it drives down financial reporting metrics like Gross Margin and Average Unit Price.
I understand being pissed off on an emotional level, but I don’t think it’s rational. Vendors aren’t obligated to sell you anything, especially at a price of your choosing. Lenovo hasn’t lied, cheated, or stolen. They haven’t harmed you. They just don’t want to sell cheap drive carriers. Porsche and Ferrari don’t sell cheap cars. Are you pissed off at them too? [Yes, I know the analogy isn’t perfect, but it’s not too far off]
two questions:
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Why not purchasing a SAN now? It isn’t that expensive these days.
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Why not returning your 8 generic hard drives and buying new one with the rack from Lenovo?
Suggestion:
If you haven’t bought the second processor for these two barebone servers, buy it now. A server I bought earlier this year with only one processor cost about $2500 but now a second processor I want to add will cost me about $2000. Reason why? because the model I bought was recently discontinued.
Happy holiday, Kent
I have been dealing with this issue for quite some time now. I can’t believe they won’t sell the brackets. At the time I purchased a few of these servers, the biggest drive they offered was 250 GB. I could purchase a 750gb all over the net, but not from IBM. I bought 4 drives from Newegg.com and was shocked to see the mounting rails were not included. I tried to deal directly with IBM but had no luck. I also called reps are CDW, Insight and PC Connection to see if they could find the parts, still no luck. I ended up modifying the case myself to hold the drives.
This already cost Lenovo 8 to 15 servers in sales loss (for starters).
I’m the tech guy of a large transportation company in charge for a DMZ for our remote accounting department access (relocated and externalized to the Mauritius Islands). We were presented with a technical solution based on Lenovo servers (with and without virtualization). I’ll have a talk with the outsourcing consultant on Monday before presenting the bill to my boss next year!
Jeff, I feel for you and it must have been some emotional free-fall feeling when you realised that you would not be able to get the server running by Christmas Morning.
But… You did buy a server that is specifically without hard drives, apparently without investigating which drives you could plug in and their prices. I’d have to say that the fault lies 100% with you, not Lenovo. Did you think that you could just substitute anything for the list of supported drives on the Lenovo support site?
I agree that the hard drive prices for the Lenovo servers are extreme, but it is not like they were held secret for you before you bought the server.
Yeah, been there, stung by that before.
I lost one of the feet on my HP laptop. A new set of feet is only $70 for 5 rubber feet.
You either get good at fabbing up bracketry or you start buying no-name parts that use standard parts, or you open up your wallet real wide. I’ve done all three. It depends on your goal.
Why not do it google style?
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000305.html
Why don’t you buy a normal computer and use it as a server?
Jeff, when you were on the phone with them, did you mention that you run two very popular websites, who’s target audience happens to be their customer base?
You’ve got zero redundancy.
How is this any different than my current rental situation? I have zero redundancy. I’d have to re-provision a server from scratch (beyond the OS, I mean) and restore data backups myself if there was a catastrophic failure.
Renting just two servers is scary as well, but I wasn’t commenting on that since you’re moving away from that setup.
With the rental at least, the hardware (and hardware replacement) is their responsibility. If there’s a catastrophic failure they should have you on new hardware in at most a couple of hours. How long will it take you to replace your homegrown setup? Days?
Tyan barebones are a good option. Appro provides the empty drive trays as well.
So man up Chauncy and use your geek-fu to find a way to get regular rails to fit. Can’t be too bad.
Are you starting to rethink a couple of Amazon EC2 instances? Looked at Azure?I betcha Ray Ozzie could find some space on Azure for you.