November 22, 2001 at 2:34 am
Hi all
I just got a price for 1Gb of HP ECC ram for our HP LP2000R box.
For the record, id just like to say "what a complete and utter rip off".
For some strange reason, they are charing approx $3900+ for a single 1Gb SIMM,
but the Kingston version of the same (ie. identical) chip is $830.
Now, for the life of me, why would I want to buy a COMPAQ, or a HP or
any other souped up so called name brand at such hugely inflated prices
when I could opt for a 4 node cluster of "lesser" brands and get a HA
solution and probably still end up cheaper!
Thoughts/comments on this one..
Cheers
Chris
P.S. all Aussie prices - and no, the price didnt include beer or any sort.
Chris Kempster
www.chriskempster.com
Author of "SQL Server Backup, Recovery & Troubleshooting"
Author of "SQL Server 2k for the Oracle DBA"
November 22, 2001 at 6:22 am
I've never had problems with Kingston or Crucial. I see no point in paying vendor prices for RAM, even in production boxes.
Andy
November 23, 2001 at 4:53 am
We always wait until warranty has gone past before we go with aftermarket. Once that is the case though the gloves are off.
The main reason for staying with vendor supplied products is support coverage, i.e. they will not provide full support if you are running Kingston in a Compaq server (at least from what I have read / seen, this is the case).
David
David
@SQLTentmaker“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose” - Jim Elliot
December 4, 2001 at 2:50 pm
I've been using Kingston and Cruicial Memory for years without issues. I don't know if being a certified self-maintainer makes the difference but if something breaks, I just order new parts.
December 4, 2001 at 2:57 pm
You are strictly paying for the name, not the product. Often is the same product, but the vendor is standing by it. For corporate IT who buy single source, this is a great source of income for the vendor.
Of course, can't get fired for buying HP memory for an HP box, can't say the same for buying Kingston.
Personally, I'd buy the Kingston. Never had an issue with them or crucial.
Steve Jones
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January 1, 2002 at 12:13 am
I've used IBM, Dell and Compaq servers as a customer and supported Compaq Industry Standard Server products as an employee of Compaq. Some additional engineering goes into the design and testing of the OEM memory modules and other components. If you install other than OEM modules into your servers you are technically voiding your warranty and also losing manufacturer support. But, going to aftermarket components can save big dollars.
In the case of Compaq products, there are also pre-failure warranty issues and you may not be alerted of a pending failure on a component (not just memory modules, but other peripherals as well). So, like DavidB stated, it's probably a good idea to wait at least until your hardware goes out of warranty before considering non-OEM/after market components for your systems.
For mission critical systems, I recommend maintaining OEM components throughout the lifecycle. I suggest you let someone up the food chain make the decision to go to aftermarket components. If you're the one up the food chain, well, that's why you get paid the big bucks.
Always Learn!
January 1, 2002 at 5:39 pm
I must admit its a tricky one, the cost of downtime because you tried to have some money on the hardware would be difficult to explain to your manager on a friday arvo. I suppose my point is, the inflated price can not be justified no matter how you look at it. This is especially the case when the cost becomes so inflated that I could opt for a HA cluster solution with the money saved and be much better off.
I checked the warrenty with HP. The warrenty is not void, but they will suspect the RAM if the system is not stable and will ask the client to take it out, HP wont touch it.
Cheers
Chris.
Chris Kempster
www.chriskempster.com
Author of "SQL Server Backup, Recovery & Troubleshooting"
Author of "SQL Server 2k for the Oracle DBA"
January 1, 2002 at 8:05 pm
Doesn't void the warranty... but they won't come look until you've got HP memory in there. Which basically means you've got to have some on hand.
Though with that said, I can't really argue with the vendors here as far as supporting 3rd party products. When I was in the US Air Force, I managed a couple of computer contracts and one of the biggest headaches for our vendors was trying to support applications and products that had been placed in/on their systems which weren't part of their contract offerings. Some refused to deal whatsoever because of the cost involved. Others had special ordering solutions for such integration resolution problems. Most of the time there were a lot of hours involved which meant a sizable bill rate.
If I produce it, I should know how it works. If you produce it, I have to take your word on how it works, provided you'll even tell me. Even if you do, I have to spend additional dollars to figure out the impact to my products.
K. Brian Kelley
http://qa.sqlservercentral.com/columnists/bkelley/
K. Brian Kelley
@kbriankelley
January 2, 2002 at 8:42 am
I agree with Brian's points, but I still use Crucial memory.
However, a recent development in the last week of 2001. A friend was testing some high end clients with fully populated DIMM slots and was recieving funny errors. After a lot of tracking, he found that less than excellent quality memory will cause some strange errors when the motherboard is fully populated. None of the inidividual DIMMS has an issue, and when he used better quality RAM from the vendor, there were no issues.
Don't have a good explanation technically as to why, but it appears to be true. Perhaps if I had spent US$100k on a server, I'd suck up the US$5k for more RAM rather than pay US$500 for less expensive.
Steve Jones
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January 11, 2002 at 7:29 pm
Steve
Point taken, our servers are $30k (aus) each, not including the external disk array. We will run some thorough tests on the RAM (30day money back) and see wat happens. Just recently there has been a price hike on RAM, the 21k we were quoted for 6Gb (6 dimms) has risen to $31k within two days. The large HW vendors make all their money from servers and RAM is a classic example. In the end, I compare my 6 chips with a 31k car and lets face it, there is something very wrong with the price hikes.
Cheers
Chris.
Chris Kempster
www.chriskempster.com
Author of "SQL Server Backup, Recovery & Troubleshooting"
Author of "SQL Server 2k for the Oracle DBA"
January 11, 2002 at 9:49 pm
Agreed.
Steve Jones
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January 14, 2002 at 6:06 am
At a previous employer, we had a customer that that used after market memory instead of buying Compaq memory for their servers due to the cost. They ran into an odd timing problem with the memory that would randomly corrupt the Exchange store on one of their mail servers. Every few weeks the server would crash and Exchange would be corrupted. It took some time to find it, but they finally replaced the memory with official Compaq memory and no more crashes. It ended up being very expensive "cheap" memory.
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