One thing I did not mention about this morning's outage was how absolutely amazing it was to be able to connect to and manage the server through its IPMI interface. I think I am sold on getting rid of the non-Dell servers after that.
@jerry It's nice. I'm working with servers from That Company That Used To Make Printers and they're fine, but not quite as nice as the Dells I remember.
Of course, a previous job was for an accidental giant in the online gaming industry which was run by someone who couldn't tell the difference between IT staff and seasonal warehouse workers. The servers were all Dells with DRAC interfaces carefully connected to a separate management network which... somehow... had less bandwidth than two tin cans with a half kilometer of string.
Rather than asking "Why is the network terrible and how can we fix it?" their solution was to ignore the issue and literally hire someone whose job it was to sit at a desk in the datacentre all day, doing any remote management tasks in person and walking around the racks looking for red lights because actual hardware monitoring was (mysteriously) unreliable.
About four months into working there I remember talking to a recruiter and saying "What's the company called? Ashley Madison? Yes, I know who they are but it's got to be better than here."
@jerry Dell doesn't often make acceptable products, but their servers are excellent. IDRAC is great. I'm about to try Supermicro OOB as well, I might report back on that.