Scott Kveton

As many people have seen and heard, Drupal was able to raise close to $11,000 for purchase of infrastructure to help grow their project in a reliable fashion. The OSL has offered up to host this gear here.

When we originally started discussing upgrading the Drupal infrastructure, the discussions we had with the Drupal leaders were to just try to raise enough money to buy a server. Originally we said let’s shoot for $1000 and we can buy a cheapy machine and then we’ll be in better shape. However, as discussions progressed, people decided that if we’re going to do it, we should do it right with “enterprise”-class gear. Dual power supplies, hardware RAID, etc. To do this, I off-handedly quoted out a Dell 1850 with 2 x 2.8Ghz Xeon’s, 2 x 73G disks, hardware RAID, dual Gbit NIC’s and dual power supplies. The cost was $3056 on Dell’s site so I told everyone; why don’t we shoot for $3000 then?

Of course we all know what happened. $11,000 later and a generous donation from Sun and the picture had changed a little bit. I talked with my Dell rep and asked what they could do with the quote if we bought three of them. He was able to knock the price down to $2522 each. It was decided then that we would buy 3 Dell’s of the specifications above and integrate that with the Sun V20z that was donated.

As time has gone on, some folks have expressed concern about going with Dell for the servers and using the donations in a way that is not directly helping the F/OSS eco-system.

I wanted to just try and describe the reasoning behind the choices we have made here.

I agree that HP, IBM and Sun have all done good things for the open source community. I would even say that Dell has done a few things for the open source community but let’s be honest, at the end of the day, Dell isn’t an R&D company.

I’d like to point out that here at the OSL we use a lot of different gear. We’ve got HP’s, IBM, Dell, Sun, Apple, Netwinder, Genesi and an assortment of other gear to help provide our services to the community. There are a couple of things that we do when we consider hardware purchases. We consider price, compatibility, reliability and supportability. I’d like to talk about all of these as they relate to the usage of the Drupal donations.

We had ruled out white boxes from the get go (even before the outpouring of support from the community) so that leaves the “enterprise” vendors. Looking over the quotes we got back from these vendors (and doing some math on their websites) we could get the equivalent gear from HP for $3500, from IBM for $4500 and the equipment from Sun that was closely matched in specifications for $5000 but without dual power supplies or turn-key remote management. Bearing that in mind, we could buy 3 Dell’s and 2 of anything else. For the sake of redundancy and bang-for-buck we said let’s do more Dell’s and hopefully help avoid another outage.

Compatibility is a toughy and some people may laugh at me on that. However, would it be wise to go out and buy the shiniest gear in the world? I’ll even give you a recent Dell example and one that made us continue to use Dell’s. We had bought a new Dell 1850 with the new Intel EM64T processors. We installed RHEL 4 and away we went. This was a heavily loaded machine (you wouldn’t believe me if I told you but it supported at one time 20 million unique clients a day). After a few days it would kernel panic. Uh-oh. Reboot. A few days later, same deal. Guess what though? It was on Red Hat’s compatible hardware list which meant they had to (and did) support it. We had a couple of patches in a few days and next thing you know we’re up and rolling. The box has been up ever since.

Reliability is a critical factor. We wanted something that would have a certain level of reliability built-in (dual power supplies, remote management) but something that could be easily serviced (see below). The fact is; gear breaks. There are moving parts and components that fail. So, you have to factor in how easy it is to get support for a machine.

That leads to supportability; we wanted to be able to support this equipment as easily as possible. By that I mean we wanted to be able to (ideally) fill out a web form when a part fails and get a new one shipped to us. When the RAID controller says a disk has failed I’m inclined to believe it. I don’t want to have to sit on hold waiting for a support person that is going to ask “please make sure that you’ve run Windows Update on the machine first”. Again, mileage may vary for you and your vendor and I haven’t had experience with every single vendor in the world. I just know that what we have had with Dell (and HP for that matter) has always been great service.

Doing a little technorati digging yielded this blog entry on ahawkins.org. I feel pretty confident that I could go out on the Internet and find bad things about every single hardware vendor in the world. Heck, I’ll guarantee it. So then, what do you have to go on? You have to go on your experiences with vendors yourself. We have had a great deal of luck with our Dell gear here as well as coordinating problems with failed drives, bum motherboards, etc. We have even had our Dell rep offer up gear to help us with transitions to data centers, etc. On the other hand, our relationship with HP has not been as good mainly because they have had some turn over in their sales force and we’ve seen that HP is going through some changes. That said, I know folks that have the complete opposite relationship with HP and Dell. It all comes down to the personal relationships you have forged with a vendor.

Finally, it should be noted that we actually have spare gear here on hand for supporting projects like Drupal. As a matter of fact, we ran out of temporary gear which is why we haven’t landed Drupal here yet and are waiting for the gear order to happen. With the addition of Drupal and now Participatory Culture we’re going to be landing some cold spares here specifically to support these projects in their time of need. No more downtime; rip out the procs (or disks or power supplies or memory) and get people back up ASAP.

Our goal was to help Drupal get the most bang for their buck while still keeping it maintainable by our people here at the OSL. We don’t have any special deal with Dell (or HP, Sun, or IBM for that matter). We’re just another customer to them. However, our personal relationships, the pricing, reliability and supportability of the Dell equipment were the main factors in going that route.

As I’ve said before and will probably say again and again; your mileage may vary.