[ale] HP BL460c G8 blades with 10Gb FlexibleLOM support?

[Jeff Hubbs]

Of course; there are a great many system builders, most on the West 
coast, that can build you anything you want using the latest and best 
off-the-shelf motherboards (e.g., Asus, Supermicro, Gigabyte) and CPUs 
and do it in quantity.  The systems are minimalist; you build them *up* 
to what you want.  Want big SAS RAID?  Add an SAS card known to have 
excellent kernel support; keep the system vendor out of the equation 
(reward the SAS card manufacturer for opening their specs!).

Practices like you describe here with HP and RHEL are what we wanted to 
get away from when we foreswore Microsoft, Sun, IBM etc. because we got 
tired of vendor lock-in; we valued our computing freedom.  This is not 
computing freedom.

If you want to tell me that the HP/Dell/IBM servers have so many awesome 
features that your typical Supermicro mobo doesn't offer, I will remind 
you at what operational cost (stick) those features (carrot) have been 
lashed to.  If you want to tell me about the importance of vendor 
support of hardware, let me point out that while one waits for the local 
subcontracted screwdriver jockey comes out with your replacement 
motherboard (which you have to replace even if it's merely the onboard 
RAID that's broken), one could simply instead be replacing the 
motherboard on one's own using one of the spares you bought a handful of 
because they were so cheap.  The interchangeable-parts paradigm that we 
learned to benefit from at the start of the clone PC era (although the 
basic idea goes back to Eli Whitney) is absent from most of modern IT 
practice.

Do you want it to get so bad (again) that OSses can't be decoupled from 
hardware?  Losing the benefits of Free Software and interchangeable 
modular hardware - benefits that I was on hand to recognize and exploit 
for a little while - are part of the reason why I got out of the business.


On 3/8/13 7:21 AM, Jim Lynch wrote:
> On 03/07/2013 03:24 PM, Jeremy T. Bouse wrote:
>> If changing the OS was an option we'd just go with RHEL and be done 
>> with all the problems we've had but it's not.
>>
>> We've just had problems with other HP platforms going from Gen7 to 
>> Gen8 and drivers not being available in anything but RHEL as HP is 
>> the only one releasing the drivers that are needed and not in the 
>> main kernel tree.
> Are there no other hardware options from vendors more friendly to 
> generic Linux distros?
>
> Jim.
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