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programming and human factors
by Jeff Atwood
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I was thrilled to discover that Santa Claus left a little unexpected present on my doorstep on Christmas Eve: the two Lenovo ThinkServers that I ordered for stackoverflow.com! They weren't supposed to arrive until sometime next week.
I immediately began unboxing the servers with all the eagerness of a kid unwrapping his Christmas presents. The servers are barebones, with basic levels of CPU and memory; I bought some hard drives and extra memory to have on hand for testing and installation. Configuring servers on Christmas Eve = the best geek christmas, ever!
Oooh. Just take a gander at all that hot, sweet server hardware.
After carefully unpacking everything and taking an inventory, my heart sank.
These Lenovo ThinkServers don't include any drive mounting brackets. Which means I can't install the hard drives. What's worse, there's no way to buy the drive brackets alone; you must purchase Lenovo's "server" hard drives if you want the mounting tray / bracket assembly. And Lenovo's drives start at $100 for a generic 160 GB SATA hard drive. That's a heck of a premium to pay for a drive tray. And I'd need eight of them. For comparison, I paid $80 each for a set of 500 GB SATA server class hard drives.
I had navely assumed that these servers would come with the necessary drive trays, just like they have slots for memory and CPU. Or at the very least the drive trays would be items I could purchase individually. In the case of the smaller 1U server, I can prop the bare SATA drives into position by placing a thin book under them, which is OK for test purposes, but hardly a long term solution for a server I need to ship to a data center.
It's amazing how quickly I went from best geek Christmas ever to worst geek Christmas ever. All for want of a few lousy, stinkin' hard drive trays! It's engendering some serious Nerd Rage.
I guess I'll be either returning these Lenovo ThinkServers, or selling them on Craigslist. How sad to see perfectly good hardware go to waste.
Update 1/11/09:
I bought two official $100 drive rails from Lenovo. Pity that they come with worthless 160 GB hard drives attached. Oh, and as an extra bonus "up yours" to customers, they use Torx screws.
Thanks to some eagle-eyed Coding Horror commenters (seriously, you guys rock), I also found an eBay seller with slightly older IBM SATA removable drive rails for sale at $25 each:
The older IBM drive rails work perfectly in the newer Lenovo servers, although the front design is ever so slightly cosmetically different. The model # is IBM 42R4131, and they're for the older IBM xSeries 3250, x306m, x3550, x3650, 3800, 3850 servers. So the good news is I only have to buy $250 worth of drive rails, instead of $1000 worth. Or at least that's what I'm telling myself..
@John
If bigname server vendors are loosing money selling servers without drives, they should raise their prices, rather than trying to extract money by preventing people from using their own drives. You can try to dress it up if you want, but using a propritary interface for no other reason than to extract extra money from a customer is pretty shady.
Chris on December 25, 2008 1:09 AMTo add a 2nd HD to a Tivo I used a series of zip ties to mount the drive. Not appropriate for a production server obviously.
There has got to be a cottage industry making these brackets.
Max on December 25, 2008 1:16 AMJeff you should know that if you return the ThinkServers you might be charged a 15% restocking fee.
o.s. on December 25, 2008 1:24 AMI had this same problem a while back with another computer manufacture. I called up customer service and was able to get them to send me some drive rails at a minimal charge.
revil on December 25, 2008 1:25 AMI got a new TV Tuner to work with Linux MCE, but my PS's wattage is too low to handle it. :(
Time for an upgrade! :D
Zoasterboy on December 25, 2008 1:27 AMShame on Lenovo and other vendors for using these practices. They should at least warn the buyer that he can't mount his own drives in the server, especially when he's buying the server without any drives.
@David Magda: interesting stuff, but I wonder how many vendors really do so much QA.
@Rob O.: the Thinkpad (IBM) was anti-Microsoft for a very long time. That's why your laptop had no Windows key.
@Jeff: as someone else pointed out, I think it's time for a sysadmin StackOverflow
Cristian on December 25, 2008 1:37 AMsupermicro fool!
I do like supermicro, but the redundant power (on the RD120) and true hardware RAID (on both servers) was a selling point for me.
Also don't forget the interposer adapter! I know that you need an SATA-SAS backplane adapter card in the tray to add SATA Drives. But dont know what the need is for lenovo.
The bare SATA drives slide into the connectors fine (I ordered the SATA models, not the fancier SCSI/SAS whatever they're calling it these days). It's the fact that the drives are bouncing around loose inside the bays that's a concern.. less so on the 1U, where there are only 2 bays and not 2 x 3.
You can also google for third-party replacement parts
What works against me here is that these are brand new server models, originally introduced in October.
Jeff Atwood on December 25, 2008 1:39 AMLee Brandt, ooh, good idea -- those are the SCSI ones though.
These look VERY promising, for SATA:
I did order two of the official 160GB drives, which I'll need to confirm whether the mounts are correct or not, but..
Jeff Atwood on December 25, 2008 1:41 AMJeff,
I've had this issue before. You call the parts number and just tell them you just want the drive tray. Just figure out its part number and order it by part number. The guy will hassle you, but ultimately sell it to you.
-David
Also, you might be able to buy them from IBM/Lenovo repair partners.
. on December 25, 2008 1:46 AMI can't imagine that they would not sell you the mounts if you raise a stink. They are not going to lose a customer and a sale if thye have half a brain.
Ed Swangren on December 25, 2008 1:54 AMHere's the Lenovo SATA drive caddy from the RD120 manual:
http://img357.imageshack.us/img357/6747/lenovodrivecaddyrs120mahc6.png
Here's an IBM SATA drive caddy from eBay
http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/5509/ibmdrivecaddyebayre4.jpg
Looks pretty close. I ordered one from the eBay seller to see if they work..
Jeff Atwood on December 25, 2008 1:55 AMThe technojournalists all seem so eager to totally geek out on Lenovo and heap praise after praise upon their products, but yours is not unlike my own experience with Lenovo hardware - two steps forward and one step back. It's as though they simply fail to follow-through.
For example, everyone raved endlessly about the Lenovo Thinkpad X41 tablet PC when it was released about 3 years ago. But against other comparable products, the X41 felt cheap and plasticy. Worse, the PC's performance was dismal even with the RAM bumped to 2 GB. But the biggest sin was that the keyboard - the whole reason you'd bother buying a convertible tablet PC (which I don't recommend) - was pathetic. It didn't even feature a Windows key, something that every $4 no-name keyboard has had for the past decade. Oh, it had a useless blue button that'd jet you straight over to the Thinkpad website, but no Windows key. And the Function key was exactly where the Ctrl key should be, so every time you tried to do any key combo common to most Windows apps, you'd be invoking some setup function instead. All of this, yet the rags couldn't say enough wonderful things about the X41.
Rob O. on December 25, 2008 1:56 AMThis is typically a situation where I would send a product back. Inhibiting the freedom the choose alternatives is a sad way of doing business.
Redover on December 25, 2008 1:57 AMJust got off the phone with Lenovo 24 hour server support @ 1-800-426-7378.
Per the tech rep I talked to, Lenovo does not offer drive trays, you *must* buy drive/tray assemblies. I confirmed this with him verbally several different times, to make sure we understood each other.
Now I'm trying to figure out which will be more painful: buying $800 worth of drive trays, or returning/rebuying servers..
Jeff Atwood on December 25, 2008 2:00 AM@Jeff,
Sorry, it looks like you might be out of luck. Lenovo's FRU numbers (atleast the ones published in the hardware maintenance manuals) are for the hard drive including the cage.
I'd say give ebay a shot.
Also, www.itxchange.com has stuff every now and then. They're a refurbished lenovo dealer. It's mostly for last generation's stuff though, otherwise its pretty good. You can place orders for anything that they don't have on the site.
Good luck, and I feel your pain.
Matt
We have been bitten by the same thing with HP servers. The premium on a drive that appears to simply be a standard Seagate unit with a little HP sticker is insane. Wound up buying the cheapest HP drives with trays and swapping out the included drive for a standard SATA one.
Not in a hurry to buy HP again.
Brett on December 25, 2008 2:09 AMThis blog is popular enough to make some of the Lenovo representatives to reconsider and suddenly offer you the trays for free or for a very small amount.
Considering the image damage that they would be caused by this blog post that's how I see it..
Andrei Rinea on December 25, 2008 2:19 AMHad the same problem with Dell servers. They tried to get me to buy their overpriced drives. With enough arguments, I was able to persuade them to sell me some drive trays only for a reasonable price. It's a stupid policy on the part of the server manufacturers.
johnny on December 25, 2008 2:22 AMhttp://forums.lenovo.com/lnv/board/message?board.id=Tower_Servermessage.id=35 (Same day, no less!)
Is it just me, or does that response boil down to We don't sell the drive trays separately because OEM drives will break your server. Why will they break your server? Because we made it that way! Bwahahahaha!
pantsgolem on December 25, 2008 2:29 AMThis is a picture of the drive tray Lenovo won't sell, at least, not without a drive attached..
http://www.diguniverse.com/images/medium/COMPUTER/SY2237442.jpg
Jeff Atwood on December 25, 2008 2:40 AMI guess you can't fabricate your own..
Andrei Rinea on December 25, 2008 2:45 AMOr you can do it the hacky way and suspend them from strips of used bicycle tires. I've done that on several servers. Great airflow and completely silent. (but possibly that's a bit too cheap)
Leif Denby on December 25, 2008 2:45 AMProbably a fabrication would :
1. Void any warranty on the sever(s)
2. Make him sleep bad at night thinking of the strips breaking and shortcircuits and so on..
3. Surely the datacenter would refuse to install such a server
Just sent your link to a friend of mine at Lenovo.
Will we need to count all the way to 10?
Peter Maxwell on December 25, 2008 2:55 AMThat's awful! I remember the pain of having a Christmas present break before/on Christmas and not having anything to really play with, and with the day being a less exciting event as you get older it must be horrible when you actually have something to look forward to.
I'm sure that you'll be able to talk them into selling drive trays to you for a fee, as long as you pester them enough into doing it.
Mike on December 25, 2008 3:02 AMthe extra money you pay is for the warranty, which provides for next-business-day replacement
I use these data center drives for $80 each
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136143
My plan is to buy four extra hard drives at a grand total of $320 and have them sitting in their anti-static bags at the data center ready to plug in when a drive fails (all our 3 servers will use this same drive). That's much cheaper and faster than paying exorbitant warranty hard drive prices, times the # of drives (10).
Jeff Atwood on December 25, 2008 3:04 AMThat's actually amazingly uninteresting.
Cook-a-doodle on December 25, 2008 3:05 AMCook-a-doodle: Yet you took the time to post.
Bernard on December 25, 2008 3:17 AMI guess you don't buy server hardware very often. I doubt you'll find any non-OEM vendor who will sell you servers that don't require you to buy hard drives from them. I've purchased servers from HP, Dell, IBM, Sun, EMC, they all follow the same policy. Some vendors even require a custom firmware in the drive so that even if you were to find brackets somewhere your generic drives still wouldn't work.
If you want to use generic hardware, I recommend you buy your servers from somewhere like Supermicro.
Kamil Kisiel on December 25, 2008 3:28 AMThat sucks.
That's like the adult version of getting the really cool toy and you don't have the right sized batteries.
J.D. Meier on December 25, 2008 3:36 AMThat's like the adult version of getting the really cool toy and you don't have the right sized batteries.
EXACTLY. I was so excited about getting these servers, too.
I can ghetto up something that will allow me to install the drives temporarily, for testing at least.
Jeff Atwood on December 25, 2008 3:44 AMBernard: Of course. Because he needs to know this isn't interesting.
Waw. That's really unbelievable. Not wanting to help a good customer out. And now they have done it to a the writer of popular tech blog.
Talk about bad publicity.
I've tried but I cannot wrap my head around this. Lenovo...what a joke.
I've been bit by this before. I've gone to buying generic Supermicro servers, which conveniently come with drive trays. They work well. You don't get on-site part swap support contracts with them, but thats the price you (don't) pay for cheap.
Yann Ramin on December 25, 2008 3:49 AMI've had the same problem with another manufacturer. Trays are included if you buy their overpriced disks. If you can somehow figure out the part numbers of the trays --and the matching screws!--, they suddenly do sell them separately. But those simple bits of metal and plastic will magically cost the same as the cheapest disk they sell, except you don't get the disk. If you're not an important corporate customer (my company wasn't) it's a shameless ripoff.
As suggested above, search eBay for the parts on eBay, google for refurbished parts, etc. Don't give in to their racketeering!
HappyCustomer on December 25, 2008 3:59 AMHad this same problem with HP. With some searching on the net I know we were able to find a third party vendor for HP drive trays. I wish I could remember the site now, but I'm drawing a complete blank. Look around though and you can probably find someone selling replacement Lenovo trays.
spooky on December 25, 2008 4:08 AMOh, 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.
Fil on December 25, 2008 4:23 AMOK 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.
Kjartan r on December 25, 2008 4:23 AMHi,
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.
BTW: The most important part in HP devices are the HPU's.
The High Price Unit...
belef
You might also check if the diskbrackets from http://www.supermicro.com/products/accessories/index.cfm might fit.
Kjartan r on December 25, 2008 4:32 AMIt 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.
Kevin on December 25, 2008 4:39 AMTry to buy some old second hand lenovo servers only to get that. Maybe they still use the same support for hard drives...
Hoffmann on December 25, 2008 4:40 AMThis 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.
Jtim on December 25, 2008 4:40 AMThis 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.
Stephen Darlington on December 25, 2008 4:45 AMWe 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.
James on December 25, 2008 5:22 AMJeff,
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.
Ricardo on December 25, 2008 5:22 AMThis is why open hardware is so much better than propriatary crap.
Jim on December 25, 2008 5:24 AMnow 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..
Jeff Atwood on December 25, 2008 5:25 AMI 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!
Geo on December 25, 2008 5:34 AMOh 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.
Dan on December 25, 2008 5:41 AMAs 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.
steve on December 25, 2008 6:02 AMI 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?
Phred on December 25, 2008 6:08 AMYou could try to ghetto up some (insanely powerful) velcro on the inside of the rack and the surface of the drive, and try to see if it fits your needs.
What a disgusting move from Lenovo's side. Won't be purchasing them anything from now on.
ManuelF on December 25, 2008 6:30 AMThat sucks. Nothing more depressing than being unable to fire up a new machine.
Like others suggested, if you can't find the trays on eBay or through a repair shop, send the units back and take the restocking hit.
We never had any problems getting parts from Dell.
JimS on December 25, 2008 6:36 AMSee, Jeff, we told you about having a sysadmin section on Stackoverflow, you didn't listen. You could have avoided the hassles if you consulted with the community before ordering. ;)
alex on December 25, 2008 6:41 AMSo ... let's see .... do you still think that buying your own hardware is cheaper than paying someone else for hosting it?
Toothy on December 25, 2008 6:43 AMThat's brand servers for you, sad to see you being ripped off. If you don't want to build your own servers with Supermicro (or Tyan) barebones, you can also find many system integrators who will build these for you. You get the benefit of professional work (mostly...) at a modest surcharge and you don't get locked in and ripped off with prices for parts (you can always order them from somewhere else). These are smaller companies without the visibility (or web presence) of the large vendors, so it takes a while to find them, but they do exist.
Had the same problem with Dell recently.
Spoke with my account rep and he confirmed that they do not sell the rails separately. After complaining about how I can get a 1.5TB ES SATA drive for the same price they are charging me for a 120GB, he relented and gave me a great deal.
Good thing I found out before the order was placed or I would be in the same situation as you, and very pissed.
Bob on December 25, 2008 6:54 AMTwo words, man: duct tape.
High five.
Dave on December 25, 2008 6:59 AM@Toothy: I don't think he said it would be cheaper. He just wanted to have more 'control' over it.
But Jeff, I'm surprised that you did not build the servers yourself as usual. That would have been interesting for your audience and you would certainly not have these problems now. So, my advice now is: Return them and build your own.
kaiz.net on December 25, 2008 7:03 AMWe buy all our servers from Silicon Mechanics. They use Supermicro so you can easily fiddle with it after the fact but quite honestly between their prices and their attention to detail (even if you order it without an operating system, they still do 24-48 hour burn ins) I just order it exactly the way I want it.
You're a software guy. Let the experts worry about the hardware. Building a computer at home is one thing. You don't want your site to come screeching to a halt just because you decided to save $20.
The fact that you're talking about running the site with just two servers is slightly scary. You've got zero redundancy. Good thing it's not a pay for site.
Christian on December 25, 2008 7:17 AMJeff, this is standard practice with servers. You can get cheap trays (and server-quality drives) from http://www.discountechnology.com (note only one T)... they are fabulously friendly and helpful.
I don't know where you got your drives from, but you're going to want to make sure you bought server grade drives, which usually have a MTBF about five times higher than the el-cheapos you see piled up for $89 apiece at Fry's.
Joel Spolsky on December 25, 2008 7:44 AMAlmost sounds like a razor-and-blades business model:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_and_blades_business_model
Sell the server relatively cheap, but they stick it to you on hardware you MUST have but they don't include with the server.
Also reminds me of an old joke I heard years ago - Free bag of groceries, only $50. The groceries were free, but the bag was $50.
I would return the servers on principle. Let them know they can't get away with that garbage.
As I recall, Larry and Serguei at Google custom-build all their own servers from parts they hand-pick themselves. Maybe you could go that route?
And I seem to remember you making a comment about system administrators knowing just enough to be dangerous...
You can also google for third-party replacement parts. Several companies sells trays as well like http://discountechnology.com .
Also don't forget the interposer adapter! I know that you need an SATA-SAS backplane adapter card in the tray to add SATA Drives. But dont know what the need is for lenovo.
//andy
andy on December 25, 2008 8:36 AMSend them back and never every do business with them again. We have GOT to send these companies a message that this kind of behaviour is unacceptable.
Oh, but take a crap in them first.
Mitur Binesderti on December 25, 2008 8:39 AMI salute you sir for not forking over the cash for the drives. This kind of business practice is diseatful and one that will only change if consumers choose to not fall for it.
Brook on December 25, 2008 8:44 AMI use these data center drives for $80 each
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136143
My plan is to buy four extra hard drives at a grand total of $320 and have them sitting in their anti-static bags at the data center ready to plug in when a drive fails (all our 3 servers will use this same drive). That's much cheaper and faster than paying exorbitant warranty hard drive prices, times the # of drives (10).
Jeff Atwood on December 25, 2008 03:04 PM
Ummm -- Jeff? Did you read the comments on the page you linked to? The comments indicate that these drives have an extremely high failure rate. You really sure you want to go with these drives???
Bill on December 25, 2008 9:00 AMNot selling empty drive mounts is a mean habit of many server manufacturers. I had the problem with Dell as well as with Apple.
Maybe you can fetch empty mounts off ebay, that's where I got mine.
I agree what Lenovo does with these servers is a bit underhanded. But Jeff, you were under informed. You should have done more home work.
meh on December 25, 2008 9:54 AMYou might save some money by doing it your way, but in the long run I think this is very small.
First, the drives you plan to get probably have a higher failure rate than the ones the server company is going to sell you.
Second, trying to get a replacement drive when you are under warranty from newegg or western digital is going to be a much larger hassle than from the server company you bought from. They are set up to ship you a replacement that day or next day. Sometimes they ship ours in the middle of the night before we come in the next day and find a drive has failed.
Third, how much of your time have you already spent on this issue? What is your time worth? I hear you go on about developer efficiency and to buy the proper tools for them because the price is worth it. The same goes for server work sometimes. At what point does your time make up for the added costs of those drives?
Right now you only have a few servers and this might be the right choice for you (I don't think so, but that is my opinion without knowing all the info you know about your situation). Once you get up to 10, 30, or 50+ maybe your tune will change on this topic. I would love to see if you are continuing this practice at that point.
Brian on December 25, 2008 9:59 AMThe 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.
John on December 25, 2008 10:13 AMMany 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.
Lance Cooper on December 25, 2008 10:47 AMIf 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.
Nick on December 25, 2008 11:09 AMI 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">http://www.readynas.com/?page_id=82/a">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.
David Magda on December 25, 2008 11:18 AM@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!
Ezra Zygmuntowicz on December 25, 2008 11:37 AMLOL, I would return them and get supermicro. Good prices for the chassis and even replacement parts are cheap.
Quellhorst on December 25, 2008 12:10 PM@Mark,
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:
1. Why not purchasing a SAN now? It isn't that expensive these days.
2. 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
Kent on December 26, 2008 1:57 AMI 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.
bigfatdummy on December 26, 2008 2:14 AMThis 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.
Nick on December 26, 2008 2:27 AMYeah, 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?
Rivari on December 26, 2008 3:20 AMJeff, 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?
Gio on December 26, 2008 3:41 AMYou'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?
Christian on December 26, 2008 3:51 AMTyan barebones are a good option. Appro provides the empty drive trays as well.
mieses on December 26, 2008 4:04 AMSo 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.
Scott on December 26, 2008 4:09 AMI worked for Lenovo at their plant in Research Technology Park, North Carolina, developing C++ install/driver/preload software for the ThinkXxxxx line they'd just bought off IBM. Overpriced hardware with a jillion idiosyncracies necessitating a slew of obscure software/driver patches. That contract, along with first-hand experience with the sorts of issues you describe in this post, convinced me never to buy from Lenovo.
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