Goodbye Dell, Hello NetApp (almost)

I’ve been writing about how Dell’s PowerVault 220s are junk for quite awhile now. We experienced our 3rd major crash for the year this week. We had everything restored and back in operation 23 hours later.
In the meantime we brought in a data storage consultant to analyze our storage infrastructure. They presented a detailed report [...]

The 4th Time (Why I Hate Dell)

Well, we’re at it again. For the 4th time in six months our lovely Dell PowerVault 220s drive array has died on us. What a piece of junk these things are. The pattern is the same as before (even with the patch that supposedly would fix our problems). A drive goes bad in the array. [...]

51 Hours in 3 Days

51 hours, that’s the amount to time I spent at work the first three days of this year. Tuesday morning started out normal enough; I got up and drove to work. The commute was a little more difficult than before the holiday but nothing too bad. I got the morning update from my staff, which [...]

Monitoring Dell Hardware with Nagios

We use the excellent Nagios network, host and service monitoring software at the office to track the status of our servers, routers, and network devices and connections. The program works great and we love it. However, the one area that we have wanted to track was the status of Dell PowerEdge servers, particularly those running [...]