Covered in several places last week, including The Standalone Sysadmin, was the story about Dell updating their RAID firmware/systems on the latest PowerEdge servers to block the use of non-Dell supplied disks.
The offending support letter from Dell (quoting as per Standalone Sysadmin) reads:
Howard_Shoobe at Dell.com Howard_Shoobe at Dell.com
Tue Feb 9 16:17:54 CST 2010Thank you very much for your comments and feedback regarding exclusive use of Dell drives. It is common practice in enterprise storage solutions to limit drive support to only those drives which have been qualified by the vendor. In the case of Dell’s PERC RAID controllers, we began informing customers when a non-Dell drive was detected with the introduction of PERC5 RAID controllers in early 2006. With the introduction of the PERC H700/H800 controllers, we began enabling only the use of Dell qualified drives.
There are a number of benefits for using Dell qualified drives in particular ensuring a positive experience and protecting our data.
Now, there’s been a bit of disquiet on that last sentence above – “our data”, in particular. I’m willing to ignore this, as I can readily believe this would have just been a typo or slip on behalf of the technician.
But I’ll cover the other aspect – the more pertinent aspect – denying access in servers for non-Dell drives.
This is nothing more than a PDTD – Profit Driven Technical Decision. And one based on a false economy.
Now, I can understand why enterprise storage vendors take this strategy. That’s regardless of who the enterprise vendor is. EMC, NetApp, HP, etc. – when it comes to enterprise SANs and NAS units, I’d consider this fairly appropriate.
We’re not talking enterprise SANs and NAS units though. We’re talking about DAS. You know, the cheap storage people opt for when their requirements aren’t sufficiently high enough to warrant a SAN or NAS, or when they have a business too small to warrant enterprise class storage.
DAS is not about extreme cost – or at least, it shouldn’t be. It’s not about paying an arm and a leg for 2TB of storage. (For that matter, comparatively, neither are enterprise SAN or NAS – they’re about building high quality systems from the ground up.)
Dell might very well argue that they have to do a little more work to support non-Dell drives (which may possibly mean non-Dell firmware) within their RAID system. This is the heart of a PDTD – there’s a small element of technical truth the argument, but the real heart of the argument is not a technical one, it’s about profit. Every server – indeed every desktop and laptop – manufacturer charges a premium for the hard drives they sell in comparison to buying those drives outright. If you want absolute simplicity and are prepared to pay for it, you buy the system you want with the storage you want from the supplier you want at the price they want. Particularly if you’re a smaller IT shop, what you want is to be able to buy a “basic” shell that has good warranty and then tweak it and add to it as required to suit your budget.
The effects of this decision on Dell will be subtle, given its current state. It’s made a reputation for being cheap and cheerful, building its business model on delivering systems faster and cheaper than its competitors. It has bigger problems, now that its competitors have caught up (and for some, overtaken it) on both these fronts, so differentiating business loss as a result of this decision vs business loss because their model has been under a sustained attack and they’ve been unable to adequately respond is not going to be easy.
But it will, at some level, hurt them. I once sat in a meeting where a particularly … stubborn … IT manager said that he’d never authorise the purchase of Dell equipment again after it took them 3 months to send out a missing bezel for a server he’d purchased in his last job. He was quite vitriolic.
Blocking extra market drives in a DAS environment is significantly more annoying than failing to send out a bezel. There’s going to be a lot of IT staff out there who have say, recommended Dell servers with the intention to install third party drives for DAS storage who are going to be suddenly looking bad in front of their managers. This does not create good customer experiences, and such experiences carry from job to job. The cumulative effect of this decision in future sales shouldn’t be ignored. If I were a Dell share holder at the moment, I wouldn’t be happy with their decision, I’d be … aggrieved.
Thanks for the tip off – I was about to buy a DELL server and noticed that 2TB disks were … £790 EACH! I asked my DELL account manager if RAID stood for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Dell’s … the servers cost less than the disks! He assured me that the I in RAID stood for Independent not Inexpensive. I checked … the inventors were definitley trying to create large arrays from cheap disks.
Pehaps you clever system builders and data custodians could help out and create a DELL ‘incompatibility’ list i.e. those RAID controllers which will accept any SATA disk, DELL qualified or not.
My trawl around the net suggests that only the new DELL 6Gb/s RAID controllers have firmware to block non-DELL disks and that the Perc 6i will issue a warning but not block unqualified hardware. Will the 6/iR be OK?
Maybe some brave super-experts will have a way to modify the firmware on a non-DELL disk to say “Michael himself has inspected moi – take me for a spin, already!”. No doubt its not quite as simple as that 😉
Unfortunately I can’t personally vouch for any recent Dell equipment as to what can or can’t work with non-standard disks. It does seem though that it’s going to have to be a case of buying “previous generation” gear, or buying them without RAID cards, and adding your own if possible.
Just FYI, there is a new post up on Standalone Sysadmin stating that Dell reversed this policy on April 14, 2010.