Blades seem to make you give up a lot of flexibility. With an old fashioned server I can run them diskless today and add disks tomorrow if the way that I want to use them changes. But if I have a blade, I'm stuck.

Good point. I don't particularly doubt that it is there, just don't want to count unhatched chickens, you know? HP used to sell Proliants with the built in virtualization disabled via BIOS. Not that IBM would pull that, but without knowing that the feature is there for sure, it's something to look into.

@DustinB3403 said in SAM-SD Hardware Server Vendors:

@scottalanmiller is there a ballpark entry price for SAM-SD hardware? Are you approving all of all the systems designed? Or did you simply license the term (like Trump) licenses his name?

Prices will be available soon. It's full support, real support unlike SMB devices. So not super cheap 🙂

SuperMicro is beginning to make the lines between Tier 1 and Tier 2 blurry as they increase their level of engineering on their products and begin to offer more and more enterprise class support for their products.

http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/1122819-perform-ssd-over-provisioning-optimization-on-the-array-good-or-bad

@thecreativeone91 said:

Scale is a big factor. It's the only reason google's crappy desktop motherboard, single psu. Single HDD model works. They have have a lot of nodes. The nodes, don't matter. The redundancy isn't in the nodes, it's in the network of the nodes.

Same logic for Facebook's datacenter or BackBlaze's storage pods. Disposable nodes in large quantity.

@ryan-from-xbyte said:

FYI - For those of you who have already purchased a server from xByte, we can go after the fact and add Dell ProSupport.

Oh very nice. People will love that they can add it to pre-existing machines!

Very cool!

@bsouder said:

Pluralsight:
($50 monthly subscription - can turn off at any time - unlimited training for that month.)
http://www.pluralsight.com/search/?searchTerm=Linux

Linux Foundation:
(Online Classrooms)
http://training.linuxfoundation.org/linux-courses

Learnable:
Not sure how good this one is. I was going to check out some of their topics.
https://learnable.com/courses/a-beginner-s-guide-to-production-linux-49#overview

bsouder thank you for providing links on the educational part. I really need all I can get. I really do appreciate that!

Always good to check with upper management.

"Hey boss' boss, just wanted to run this by you. My boss needs me to document trivial IT tasks that the intern (that we don't have) should be able to look up without a problem and spend time and company money maintaining them so that he, not I, can repeatedly do entry level tasks without needing to get assistance from elsewhere. I'm happy to do this but this puts us at risk of the documentation being wrong since I am just making copies of the industry or vendor documentation, and because it is impossible to keep every internal doc continuously in sync with the latest vendor changes, guidelines and best practices. Just wanted to make sure that you agree that making this kind of documentation, all for one person, is a good use of government financial resources?"