Martin Widlake's Yet Another Oracle Blog

Fastest £1,000 server – what happened? July 12, 2011

A couple of people have asked me recently what happened to that “fastest Oracle server for a grand” idea I had last year, after all I did announce I had bought the machine.

{Update – it came back.}
Well, a couple of things happened. Firstly, what was a small job for a client turned into a much more demanding job for a client – not so much mentally harder as time-consuming harder and very time consuming it was. So the playing had to go on hold, the client comes first. The server sat in the corner of the study, nagging me to play with it, but it remained powered down.
Secondly, when the work life quietened down last month and I decided to spend a weekend getting that server set up I hit an issue. I turned on the server and it turned itself straight off. It than rested for 5 seconds and turned itself back on for half a second – and then straight off. It would cycle like that for as long as I was willing to let it.

OK, duff power switch, mother board fault, something not plugged in right, PSU not reaching stable voltage… I opened the case and checked everything was plugged in OK and found the manufacturer had covered everything with that soft resin to hold things in place. I pressed on all the cards etc in hope but no, it was probably going to have to go back. It is still in warranty, the manufacturer can fix it.

So I rang the manufacturer and had the conversation. They were not willing to try and diagnose over the phone so I had to agree to ship it back to them to be fixed {I did not go for on-site support as the only time I did, with Evesham Micros, they utterly refused to come out to fix the problem. Mind you, it turns out they were counting down the last week or two before going bust and, I suspect, knew this}. I shipped it back and the waiting began. Emails ignored, hard to get on touch over the phone. Over three weeks on and they only started looking at the machine last Friday (they claim).

On the positive side, this delay means that solid state storage is becoming very affordable and I might be able to do some more interesting things within my budget.
On the bad side the technology has moved on and I could get a better server for the same money now, but that is always the case. Mine does not have the latest Sandy Bridge Intel processor for example. Also, I have time now to work on it, I hope not to have time next month as I’d like to find some clients to employ me for a bit!

I better go chase the manufacturer. If it is not fixed and on its way back very, very soon then they will be off my list of suppliers and I’ll be letting everyone know how good their support isn’t.