[…] Parcelforce texted the delivery slot. No delivery. Parcelforce and HP’s tracking systems then claimed I had refused the parcel. I scheduled a redelivery for the next day. Parcelforce then rang me and the agent acknowledged a delivery had not been attempted and that the tracking information was false. It claimed HP had requested that the parcel be returned to sender.
We’ve recently kicked out our entire Cisco networking core due to it actively refusing to interoperate with other pieces of necessary hardware for us, which was causing us to have to run an almost entire second redundant core network. Switching it out with ALE has been really nice in that regard, SPB scales like a dream even between locations and cities, we even get working L2 routes all the way over to some of our locations almost half a country away.
For us, Dell has been the far better of the two (HPE/Dell) big server-providing beasts in terms of just being able to use the hardware they provide, but they’re very close to getting a complete block from future procurement due to how they’ve been treating us.
Honestly, Fujitsu is probably our best current provider; their hardware is reasonably solid, their rack-kits aren’t insane, their BMC doesn’t do a bunch of stupid things, they don’t do arbitrary vendor locking on expansion cards, etc. Unfortunately their EFI/BIOS is a complete mess, especially in regards to boot ordering and network boot, and they’ve so far not been able to provide us Linux-based firmware upgrade packages - despite using a RHEL image in their BMC-orchestrated offline firmware upgrade process.
Yeah, we dumped Cisco for Aruba two years ago. Completely replaced the entire company core network infra. No major complaints.
On the Enterprise side of things, I was a huge VCE fan pre-Dell days. Only thing close to that now is Pure Flashstack, which isn’t bad, just pricey. I’m just not a Dell fan, Michael Dell is a fuck-whit.