271
HP says I should have known its £399 laptop bargain was too good to be true
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2023
271 points (98.9% liked)
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They have awful support. They build machines that are prone to overheating, their servers are second to Dell (who have considerably better support), there's a lot about HP not to appreciate.
As a friend of sysadmins I hear horror stories of HP server racks and I hear most shops running with Dell enterprise plans both for laptops and servers.
Got a pair of old HPE gen8 1U servers that are chewing through fan packages like nobody's business, replaced at least five burnt-out fans on them in a similar amount of years.
We're running a mix of HPE, Dell, and Fujitsu servers and they all absolutely suck in their individual ways - HP(E) adds a bunch of arbitrary hardware limitations which we have to work around, Dell intentionally degrades our multi-system setups with firmware updates, and Fujitsu's boot firmware goes absolutely pants-on-head retarded if you're doing netboot first.
We've gotten some Supermicro systems now as well, and they've been a real treat in comparison, though their software UX feels like it's about two decades behind.
Comparing my experience with Cisco B and C Class, HPE DL and Dell PE server experience over the past 20 years:
Cisco: Expensive, Good support/service during lifetime of product, excellent management tools w/o buying additional lics, reliable, but eosl/eol is short and poorly supportable after.
DELL: Just retired some 30 of their servers and storage. No regrets. Expensive, horrible support, licensing is a nightmare, but e360 and online tools were better than others. EOL/EOSL support is okay for a max of 2 yrs afterwards.
HPE: Just deployed 20 DL380G10+, Cheaper than other 2, licensing is a pita, support is meh, but InfoSight and support costs are cheap and there's good support past eol/eosl.
I've done the whole white box thing like SuperMicro a number of times and while it is cheaper upfront, it's a headache over time.
We've recently kicked out our entire Cisco networking core due to it actively refusing to interoperate with other pieces of necessary hardware for us, which was causing us to have to run an almost entire second redundant core network. Switching it out with ALE has been really nice in that regard, SPB scales like a dream even between locations and cities, we even get working L2 routes all the way over to some of our locations almost half a country away.
For us, Dell has been the far better of the two (HPE/Dell) big server-providing beasts in terms of just being able to use the hardware they provide, but they're very close to getting a complete block from future procurement due to how they've been treating us.
Honestly, Fujitsu is probably our best current provider; their hardware is reasonably solid, their rack-kits aren't insane, their BMC doesn't do a bunch of stupid things, they don't do arbitrary vendor locking on expansion cards, etc. Unfortunately their EFI/BIOS is a complete mess, especially in regards to boot ordering and network boot, and they've so far not been able to provide us Linux-based firmware upgrade packages - despite using a RHEL image in their BMC-orchestrated offline firmware upgrade process.
Yeah, we dumped Cisco for Aruba two years ago. Completely replaced the entire company core network infra. No major complaints.
On the Enterprise side of things, I was a huge VCE fan pre-Dell days. Only thing close to that now is Pure Flashstack, which isn't bad, just pricey. I'm just not a Dell fan, Michael Dell is a fuck-whit.