Why we use Dell or HP Servers and third party monitoring agents on client sites.

Yesterday our network operations center reported that a server on a client site in Colorado (we are in Seattle) was reporting hard drive errors that were critical in nature. They looked something like: ‘Driver detected a controller error’ or ‘we have discovered that an Exchange data read took longer than expected’ and ‘Controller device reset at the site’. Error messages in the event log were sparse and difficult to interpret.
That distance is almost a thousand miles. What to do? As we had just re-up’d our maintenance contract with Dell on the server in question we placed a quick call to Dell tech support. Using the data provided by our monitoring agents we were able to convince Dell Tech Support to look into the issue.
A Dell technician using dell utilities quickly determined which drive of our mirror set was the culprit. We then scheduled a next business day appointment. Dell Fedex’d a new drive and it was installed on the client site by late morning by a Dell technician. Case closed.

Lessons learned:

• Keep your maintenance contracts up to date.
• Take error messages with a grain of salt; we were advised by our Network Operations Center to run chkdisk with the /f flag. This could have wrecked havoc on the mirrored set.
• Use monitoring agents on your servers in order to provide proactive reporting; we were able to fix the problem before we had a server down situation.
• Purchase your hardware from well known vendors like Dell or HP and pay for service contracts.

Thank you Cliff, Mike and Dwaine from Dell.