Opinions on Penguin Computing's Blackfoot Series?

Stunt Pope asks: "I'm looking for general opinions on Penguin Computing's Blackfoot 2500 series racks. Pro's or con's, anecdotal evidence, rants, raves, particularly using RAID1 and RAID5. The price seems competitive and I'm wondering how they hold up under production environments in terms of extended uptimes and hardware reliability. "

Troubles with Penguin

[dubl-u]

Last year I ordered some hardware from Penguin and was pretty disappointed with them.

My main beef with them was that they were very disorganized, repeatedly missed delivery dates, and made a number of mistakes in getting me what I asked for. My impression was that they were growing faster than they could handle. I was also sad to discover that there were hardware problems with all three servers.

In their favor, they did eventually replace all the broken hardware for free, although it took quite a number of calls to get them to do it. And they seem to be getting more organized these days; now they seem to return calls after one or two attempts, rather than four or five.

Personally, I'd be a little cautious buying from them; you may want to test them with a small order first. Have other people had problems like this? Or did I just get lucky?

Regarding RAID, I've been pretty happy with software RAID; it's not as fast as hardware RAID, of course, but it's a lot cheaper.

Well...

[randombit]

the OS should be much more of a factor as far as uptimes go... (unless you need/want 1-2 year uptimes). Hardware failures really are few and far between, even for commodity PC hardware - and the Blackfoot seems significantly nicer than that (especially the SCSI drives and controllers). And if it's really a concern you should have redundant, hot-swappable power supplies and hot-swappable SCSI with hardware RAID.

Of course, the question you have to ask yourself is, "Do I really need (or want) this hardware?". If you're planning on running a big site, yes, these look pretty good. However, I spec'ed what might be considered a "reasonably good" server for about $4500. Probably you could get something cheaper by building it yourself (though I _do_ like their Niveus machines)

And just to make this post somewhat offtopic (but related to the use of rack mounted machines), does anyone know where I can get 2U/4U cases and/or small racks online?

Looks good

[molda]

all i need is a rack to put one in.