* Scott Lurndal:
We've customers in the fortune 50 that use whitebox systems. I don't
particularly think you know whereof you speak.
You think wrong. I'm working for a multinational enterprise with several
dependancies and subsidiaries around the globe for way over a decade
now. The IT is part of my job. And I know what most of our partner
corporates and contractors use. The only ones using whitebox systems are
some small contractor companies with a handful of employees. The others
are getting their IT from HP, Dell, IBM, Sun, FSC and the like.
The only whitebox machines we have can be found in a few of our engineer
labs. They are there for research reasons (the fact that you can swap
out parts and find lots of alternatives is postitive for what they are
used), if they are broken it doesn't really hurt. But neither my
employee nor any of of our bigger partners do (even most of the smaller
companies use brand name stuff).
You're pretty far disconnected from the reality of the situation.
Consider that an enterprise is buying systems year-in and year-out.
They'll never be able to have an identical configuration across all
their systems, so the 'alternate part' problem is not limited to
whitebox manufacturers.
For most HP systems for example I easily can get the *exact* same
configuration today that was sold 2004 from HP without problem. Try that
with whiteboxes...
One of my customers spends over USD 2,000,000,000 each year for
enterprise data services, and while they have IBM bladecenters, they
also use whiteboxes. It depends on the application needs and the
datacenter power and cooling capabilities.
Sure. If you don't need service or if it's no problem that the quality
level is varying then whiteboxes are probably ok. But it didn't look to
me that for the OP the lack of real service or often questionable
quality is acceptable, though.
Other customers are HP or Sun clients, but they also use white-boxes
for some portion of their infrastructure.
If it's for nothing business-critical or important, why not.
One of the customers is a large hosting provider. Much of their
infrastructure is whitebox systems.
ISPs and site hosters are indeed a different story, they often use
whitebox systems to be able to compete with the already low prices and
the high competition. But still the number of hosters who offer hosting
on brand name servers (usually Dell) is increasing.
But hosting provider has not much to do with someone looking for a AMD
system with Dell-like professional support.
You pay Dell/HP/IBM extra for that 3-year warranty.
Nonsense. All of our HP workstations come with 3 year onsite warranty
NBD as standard.
The white-box
vendor will be happy to provide the same warranty, for a smaller
upcharge.
Yeah, for a little upcharge, and still not able to provide you with the
exact same spare part for at least the three years he warrants the
whitebox. Everytime something breaks you don't know what gets in the box.
Besides that, there is a certain risk when buying whiteboxes that the
vendor itself goes down the drain. If your assembler closes down you can
stick the warranty you paid that little upcharge where the sun doesn't
shine because no-one is going to honor it. Even worse, lots of
manufacturers of generic components don't provide real customer support.
Either you won't get an answer, or replacing a broken part means sending
it in and waiting for weeks to return (and probably being replaced by a
different model), or they just tell you that warranty things have to be
done over the shop you bought it from or over the distributor which can
lead to even more waiting time (I had cases where replacing a component
took two month).
It's been my experience that the enterprise data center will
typically discard a system after three years (more power-efficient,
faster and more capable systems replace them). Face it, when a
system costs $1000 is is cheaper to replace it than fix it after a
year or two.
Maybe, but you are ignoring several facts:
First, you seem to think that whitebox is always cheaper (means: lower
initial costs) than brand name which simply is wrong.
Second, for datacenter usage (and also for most highend desktop
applications) the hardware costs are simply (almost) irrelevant to the
overall costs. A hardware support contract alone can cost the same you
paid for the machine (or even more), the software usually costs a
magnitude more than the hardware, also the software support (which is
often completely unavailable for you with whitebox systems), your IT
staff and other little things. Most corporates don't give a shit if the
Dell machine costs 500$ more than the whitebox because if the whitebox
fails it can cause much more loss than that (imagine the mobo breaks,
the whitebox vendor comes with a different type of mobo which requires
the installation of different drivers; a spare part that is different
from the original part easily leads to additional work, and having only
one person from your IT staff to do that additional work because the
part is different can easily cost you more than you saved by buying
whitebox initially).
Third, the OP was not looking for a server for his datacenter. He was
looking for a AMD computer with Dell-like support. And no, whitebox is
definitely something with Dell-like support.
You misunderstood. The White Box Vendor won't take clients outside
of the radius they feel comfortable providing their quite high level
of service to.
As I said Dell doesn't do that over here, too. And HP (which is what my
employee primarily buys) has contractors for service almost everywhere.
So what?
Ah, proof by anecdote. Does my anecdote trump yours?
So short said that means you can't name a whitebox vendor that offers
guranteed reaction times and also stocks parts so that he can provide
customers with the exact same spare part during the whole warranty period.
But maybe I can help you out: there are assemblers like Maxdata (one of
the biggest assembler in Europe) which come quite close. They do stock
certain parts (not everything, though), and they do offer service almost
comparable to brand name standard services. But still after a certain
period the replacement mobo for your PC with 3yrs warranty is likely to
be different from the original, and these whitebox computers cost the
same like comparable computers from HP or Dell.
While my WB vendor doesn't do any EMI testing or certification, it is
expected that the component manufacturer has.
What a nonsense, you obviously know nothing about EMC. FYI: putting
together a computer from components that are EMI tested doesn't make
your resulting computer EMC compliant. In fact, EMC requires that the
complete system has been tested, and not only in one configuration (i.e.
only with the Geforce 8800GTS from MSI) but with *every* combination
of components. Yes, Dell does that, HP does that, too (at least with the
business models, the outsourced Pavilion and Presario SoHo models are a
different story, though).
And even if the whitebox assembler has done EMC tests with the exact
configuration you bought (which is very unlikely as EMC tests cost a lot
of money), as soon as the great service replaces a defective part with a
different part EMC has changed.
Who overclocks in an enterprise environment. That would be pretty
stupid.
Exactly.
They use the same exact products as the large guys. Motherboards may
be custom, but the processors and memory depend on the supplier
chain, and even IBM doesn't stockpile spares to that extent.
They do, as does every brand name manufacturer. in fact, a few days ago
one of our Compaq ProLiant ML370 G2 servers died because a broken VRM
killed the CPU. Of course HP still has the parts on stock. The ProLiant
ML370 G2 uses Pentium3 processors btw.
Funny, my whitebox vendor integrates IPMI into all the systems they
deliver. They work directly with the vendors (e.g. Tyan, supermicro)
to ensure that they deliver a working solution.
The IPMI capabilities of most standard mainboards are extremely limited.
TYAN and Supermicro (and intel) are probably the only three exceptions,
and even there this is usually only valid for their expensive
multiprocessor server/workstation mainboards and not for their standard
boards.
And still it lacks integrated management solutions like HP Insight...
Unified system image is hardly the responsiblity of the vendor.
Assembling the image is your problem of course but the vendor is the one
that enables you to prepare one system image and deploy this single
image on all desktop computers you bought during the last 3 years. Try
that with whiteboxes.
Honestly I doubt you really know much about corporate IT. You don't know
anything about EMC, you don't know about software certification (most
people that don't know what software certification is think about
Microsoft which is probably one of the few big ISVs that doesn't require
certification), you don't know system management, and you obviously
don't know a lot of other facts that are important in corporate IT.
No offense here, but it's just obvious. I don't want to start a "I know
more than you" flamewar (what I do, what I know and what not can be
found with google). You are just missing out too much important factors,
factors most outsiders just can't know.
To make it clear: I never said whiteboxes are bad. They are great for
home users who want to fiddle around on their own systems and where the
time you put into the computer is basically free. They can also be a
good choice for freelancers or small companies if they don't require
business-critical reliability. And they are great as a platform you
continually upgrade instead of to replace the whole system after some
time. But they are usually not a good choice if the computer is just a
tool for you that you make money with, if you have to run expensive
software that you need to have support for, and if you rely on
first-class service that you want to be sure to continue to exist over
the whole warranty period. Especially since whiteboxes from assemblers
that offer comparable service are not cheaper than a comparable system
from the big brand name vendors.
BTW: that's the reason why companies like Dell and HP still sell their
business computers to corporate users successfully and also invest in
business-oriented solutions, something which just wouldn't be the case
if whiteboxes were the best thing since sliced bread for corporate IT.
Go figure.
Benjamin
