[ale] HP BL460c G8 blades with 10Gb FlexibleLOM support?

[Jim Kinney]

Sadly, getting purchases like this through the PHB process is often not
possible. The mentality is "Dell, Sun and IBM make great hardware otherwise
they wouldn't still be in business". <cough> yeah <cough>

There are problems with these big makers (HP and IBM are notorious) where
they have a slightly modified version of a commodity market thing (ipmi
card, raid controller, etc) and they make the driver available to RedHat.
So it takes some digging to get that driver into another distro. IBM goes
so far as to not allow you to download a tarball unless you have a valid
support account. This totally kills the second-run market and generates
ewaste like mad.

Adding a huge SAS RAID card to a Supermicro system and having it work with
Linux is as easy as selecting it. They ALL work as SuperMicro figured out
it's better business to make the motherboard and case and provide add-in
parts they don't have to support code for. They don't have one "made for
them".

On Fri, Mar 8, 2013 at 11:22 AM, Jeff Hubbs <jhubbslist at att.net> wrote:

> Of course; there are a great many system builders, most on the West coast,
> that can build you anything you want using the latest and best
> off-the-shelf motherboards (e.g., Asus, Supermicro, Gigabyte) and CPUs and
> do it in quantity.  The systems are minimalist; you build them *up* to what
> you want.  Want big SAS RAID?  Add an SAS card known to have excellent
> kernel support; keep the system vendor out of the equation (reward the SAS
> card manufacturer for opening their specs!).
>
> Practices like you describe here with HP and RHEL are what we wanted to
> get away from when we foreswore Microsoft, Sun, IBM etc. because we got
> tired of vendor lock-in; we valued our computing freedom.  This is not
> computing freedom.
>
> If you want to tell me that the HP/Dell/IBM servers have so many awesome
> features that your typical Supermicro mobo doesn't offer, I will remind you
> at what operational cost (stick) those features (carrot) have been lashed
> to.  If you want to tell me about the importance of vendor support of
> hardware, let me point out that while one waits for the local subcontracted
> screwdriver jockey comes out with your replacement motherboard (which you
> have to replace even if it's merely the onboard RAID that's broken), one
> could simply instead be replacing the motherboard on one's own using one of
> the spares you bought a handful of because they were so cheap.  The
> interchangeable-parts paradigm that we learned to benefit from at the start
> of the clone PC era (although the basic idea goes back to Eli Whitney) is
> absent from most of modern IT practice.
>
> Do you want it to get so bad (again) that OSses can't be decoupled from
> hardware?  Losing the benefits of Free Software and interchangeable modular
> hardware - benefits that I was on hand to recognize and exploit for a
> little while - are part of the reason why I got out of the business.
>
>
>
> On 3/8/13 7:21 AM, Jim Lynch wrote:
>
>> On 03/07/2013 03:24 PM, Jeremy T. Bouse wrote:
>>
>>> If changing the OS was an option we'd just go with RHEL and be done with
>>> all the problems we've had but it's not.
>>>
>>> We've just had problems with other HP platforms going from Gen7 to Gen8
>>> and drivers not being available in anything but RHEL as HP is the only one
>>> releasing the drivers that are needed and not in the main kernel tree.
>>>
>> Are there no other hardware options from vendors more friendly to generic
>> Linux distros?
>>
>> Jim.
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-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III
*
*Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain
at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail.
It won't fatten the dog.
- Speech 11/23/1900 Mark Twain
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