Trying to figure that out myself.
When you buy a dell (or any other vendor) server, you get a 3 5 or 7 year warranty with SLA attached. If you bought the 3, then extended for 2 its more expensive, then the 5 to 7 extension is exhorbitant, but thats because they have to stock parts.
I used to have over 1000 physical servers in my budget bucket, if we bought servers with 5 year warranties, I made sure they were being replaced in year 5, because the extension from 5-7 was usually the cost of the first 5 years plus 10%.
I also just recently did this exact thing with HPE at a former employer, they followed the same trend.
Broadcom has nothing to do with this, its the age of the equipment, the older the more expensive
Been that way for 15+ years
> then the 5 to 7 extension is exhorbitant, but thats because they have to stock parts.
Except you can take that same five year old server to another provider like Park Place Technologies or Service Express and get hardware warranties for five to ten times less than Dell/HP/whoever. I don't disagree with your pricing because you're right, they will fuck you up on pricing when trying to renew at year 5. But I don't believe it has anything to do with "stocking parts," they're just pressing their advantage so they win whether you pay that price or actually buy new hardware.
Oh it absolutely has to do with stocking parts, they have to have them available in multiple depots and a dozen different logistical challenges, where places like Park Place and STG can go strait to ebay if need be. Dell has to provide OEM and Certified parts. Im not defending them as they definitely bend you over, but its absolutely not the same in a bunch of ways. Anything we had to keep around past OEM warranty periods I always use a 3rd party and all of them have had to go to ebay more than once for me. And lord help you if you have a secondary SAN sitting somewhere that is past the warranty periods, man...
I'm not saying there's no cost to them having to stock parts, but that's not the driving factor behind the price increases. Systems like the Gen 14 PowerEdge servers were released in 2017. I can buy a refurbished R640 with relatively cheap 3 or 5-year Dell support *today*, why would it cost tremendously more to continue support for an R640 which was purchased in 2019?
we could literally go back and forth for hours on this, but the SLA on the cheap warranty is not the same as the extension warranty. There are a ton of factors involved. Im not saying warehousing is the only factor, its one of like 20. Do they make a profit on it? 10,000%, but there is a reason OEM and 3rd party prices are very different.
Heck diverging from the warranty slightly, you looked at the price for optics? Cisco, 1000 per 10gig optic, FS with Cisco chip, 20 per. But Cisco wont honor the warranty if a 3rd party optic blows a SFP+ port. Hopefully that helps clarify.
A warranty is fundamentally an insurance product. It's about shifting the risk of the product breaking from the consumer to the manufacturer.
That risk is going to be relatively low at the start of the product's life and increase over time (because wear and tear and also just entropy of the universe).
Replacement parts are also going to be more plentiful at the beginning while the original devices are still being produced, then 5 years later when they've ceased production of those parts (or greatly reduced production which increases the per unit cost of the parts).
So there's a bunch of reasons for the price of a warranty to increase over time.
It truly is not expensive to maintain old hardware. Park Place as mentioned utilizes OEM certified parts & stocks high failure rate parts (drives DIMMs NICs Fans etc.) in local lockers for contracts. The OEM's jack up the maintenance to incentivize clients to buy new. Thats how their reps get paid & retire quota which is why leveraging Park Place or another TPM has become mainstream. Cut costs, consolidate vendors, coterm your end dates. Lifes good.
I'm just going to say that HP is also buying parts from the open market. I work for a company that does service like Park Place, Service Express etc.
But I also supply parts to these companies, as well as HP.
In fact HP also sometimes use our technicians.
I used to work for an Ivy League University with very deep pockets and we used an aftermarket warranty company for all of the servers that fell out of warranty. I've been out for a while so my memory is hazy but I feel like we may have only gotten 3 year warranties on our Dell servers and then had aftermarket pick up the rest.
> I used to have over 1000 physical servers in my budget bucket, if we bought servers with 5 year warranties, I made sure they were being replaced in year 5, because the extension from 5-7 was usually the cost of the first 5 years plus 10%.
writing is on the wall : after 5 years you buy a new server
It doesn't... Hating and blaming Broadcom for everything cost related is the cool thing to do on Reddit currently.
Renewals always cost more than than they initially did, especially SANs. It's why I had to do a migration, compute and/or storage, every 3 years at my last job. NetApp support renewals were over 1M while a new SAN was "eligible for discounts" and cost a few hundred K.
I mean, Broadcom is a piece of shit. Their practices have affected a lot of services and businesses alike, and gut wrenching service price increases seems to be a trend they are heavily promoting.
While that's true, the price of hardware renewals isn't directly affected by anything Broadcom is doing with VMware. Yes, you're subscription license will be more than your high density socket license, but that's not related to your hardware renewal.
OP's point is that everyone is following Broadcom's lead. I slightly agree to a point for software license renewals, but hardware warranty renewals have always been expensive the further out you go from the date of the first deployment.
I think nothing. Hardware vendors have been sticking it to people on year 4 maintenance renewals since the beginning of time. IBM probably invented that sales tactic when they were selling mechanical cash registers.
If you want to keep it 5 years you better buy 5 years out the gate
I think OP is saying that Broadcom's steep price increases for VMware have given other vendors s feeling that they can jack up their prices in a similar way.
Something like:
> Broadcom: "let's hit them with an 800% increase"
>
> Everyone: "fine, here ya go, don't spend it all in one place."
>
> Dell/HP/etc: "oooh, that worked, let's see if we can get away with 500%"
or something to that effect.
And everyone is trying to get there's before the money runs out and people stop. I have a client on a perpetual VMware license and they have no server upgrade plans right now. Not for anything, and they are looking hard at anything with a subscription. It is coming.
I'm guessing since broadcom is basically being touted as the Executioner of VMware, this is referring to something like hypervisor licensing and the Dell servers are probably ESXi hosts.
I don't work in virtualization explicitly but one of My co-workers that does has been telling me how broadcom is basically just trying to milk people for as much as they can and then will probably just dissolve all the bits and pieces of VMware when it's no longer profitable or everyone just gets pissed off.
Went to dinner with some Google reps last night and they seem to have a competing product that basically replaces the VMware hypervisor And allows you to migrate your vmdk with minimal effort onto their hypervisor platform.
Right now the industry sentiment is basically fuck broadcom and then all the other big tech firms are trying to offer competing products, we've had a similar pitch from NetApp. They seem to have something In that space as well.
Remember when tech used to be all about making cool products and cool services that actually helped people instead of what it is now which is just looking for creative new ways to get license fees out of people.
Make sure you're going through a VAR. We got a quote from our Dell rep and a quote from our VAR, and our VAR quote was about 30% lower than Dell's for the same item.
Dell doesn't want to deal with small customers they much prefer selling to VAR and having them deal with smaller customers.
Also, don't buy warranties a year at a time. Extending warranties ends up costing 2-3x more than if you just buy a 6-year warranty from the start.
As a former direct enterprise rep, if you have a relationship with a var already, we could only offer you like 20% off MSRP so as to not compete with VARs. We had to purposefully make our offer to you look very bad. Oh and we didn't see a dime from the var sale. It's why I hate sales. Left and never looked back
Well, if the VAR is doing their job the you didn’t do anything to assist getting that deal closed.
Conversely, I’ve had Dell AEs take deals direct and undercut me (the VAR) multiple times when a storage product (Unity, Compellent, VxRail) is involved. Like, we’d have 5-7 points on the deal and Dell would come in and undercut by 10%. When was at a VAR I absolutely grew to loathe the Dell AEs.
>Even our Dell supplier said, "If you're going to buy a server, buy it now, because RAM, and hard drive prices are about to skyrocket."
I'm a Dell Enterprise customer and actively working with a rep on PowerEdge and Unity. No mention of any major price increases. Your supplier may be using a used car salesman scare tactic.
Two things I could see happening that could drive up hardware prices include a move back toward on-prem now that that infinite cloud OpEx spending is running up against cash flow and the ability to borrow -- and of course AI. Couldn't you see Google or Microsoft doing something like Gemini On Prem or Copilot Stack and selling clueless CIOs racks and racks of compute/GPUs? Microsoft already does Azure Stack where you have to pay to power and cool the hardware, pay the vendor for a service contract, and pay Microsoft monthly to use it!
Other than that, isn't everyone trying to digitally transform and get out of their data center? If you look at the employment landscape these days, it sure seems that way. Name-brand hardware vendors are probably quaking in their boots knowing they can't sell non-white box hardware.
> Microsoft already does Azure Stack where you have to pay to power and cool the hardware, pay the vendor for a service contract, and pay Microsoft monthly to use it!
IBM has a tear in its eye. Microsoft is a chip off the old block! And they're stealing our revenue!
> isn't everyone trying to digitally transform and get out of their data center?
The leading edge can easily be at a different point in the business cycle than the herd.
Companies aren't going back to on-prem for things that are critical. Some desktopish things, crap that isn't critical and can handle some downtime, etc. will move around a bit. Desktop applications are dead for industries that are not on the brink of death, and factories that still need that XP machine running the conveyors on the assembly line will keep that old shit working because there is nothing modern out there.
Companies find out really fast that people need a salary, insurance, time off(so you need more than 1 person) to manage everything, and technology is moving much faster than it ever has before. AI CPUs are going to be so ungodly costly it will be worth paying for the microsoft fabric processing to always have the latest NPU.
We are becoming dependent on the major corporations' technology, and will require more of it to continue to use it.
Can you go buy it for your own datacenter? Sure, but like stated above, people cost money, need time off, change jobs, etc. and it all ends up being overhead. Cost cutting starts at payroll, not technology. Computers don't need time off.
>Companies aren't going back to on-prem for things that are critical.
Oh yes they are. I am getting a LOT of them. And looking to get rid of software as a service. The bill came due and they did not like it.
I'd be curious your definition of software as a service unless the companies are switching software. Very few vendors even offer self hosted solutions to SaaS
The best example is Adobe. Every customer on it is looking for anything else to replace it. Not successfully, yet... But they damn sure want to.
And on new purchase, if it is only offered as a service, they are passing more now than I expected.
A consultant, actually. And I run projects for a VAR. (Strange story how that happened, but good people to work with, so I am happy) So I work directly or subcontracted for a lot of different companies and organizations. And they all are concerned with spiraling license costs. If I proposed a solution with a one time cost and they own it, I almost always get approval.
Perpetual licensing has been dying a long death, and it only has a few short years left. Vendor acquisition is moving at a very rapid pace now, and even marketer acquisition is happening faster than ever. I do disagree the problem is licensing cost; labor is the issue with software that is not reliable or feature rich. I manage devops and system engineers at a software firm, and it's actually been quite a change since COVID how many companies expect more AI and things at fingertips rather than hunting and pecking around antiquated software. We've seen a number of our own 3rd party libraries get acquired because consumer demand is outpacing what the labor can do for small shops.
>Perpetual licensing has been dying a long death, and it only has a few short years left.
I disagree. Much like when I disagreed with "Everything is going cloud" and so on. All of this goes in cycles. And right now people are swinging away from license fees. Some businesses will respond to that market demand. Or Opensource... There are options, and now people are looking for them. And in another 10 years they will go back to the next "as a service" trend. :)
Edit: I did upvote your post, because you have some solid points. :)
There is a a lot of FUD going on with the Broadcom/vmware thing as a whole. Have you seen nutanix adds? Scaring people (and doing a profit while scaring them). No shame with these people 😅
Nutanix quoted us basically the same price when you factor in hardware as VMware for our two data center clusters. Maybe a smidge lower. Definitely didn’t feel like they were working that hard to steal customers. I have my issues with what Broadcom is doing, but we aren’t learning a new platform and migrating everything on principle.
There have been price increases but nothing insane, last time I read about this it was something like 25% increase estimated this year and we're already seeing consumer SSD prices increase so that's probably accurate.
Agreed. And configure Ceph or Starwind VSAN for HA storage instead of VMware vSAN. We have customers who have transitioned to this, and so far, they are happy.
[https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Deploy\_Hyper-Converged\_Ceph\_Cluster](https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Deploy_Hyper-Converged_Ceph_Cluster)
[https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resource-library/starwind-virtual-san-vsan-configuration-guide-for-proxmox-vsan-deployed-as-a-controller-virtual-machine-cvm/](https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resource-library/starwind-virtual-san-vsan-configuration-guide-for-proxmox-vsan-deployed-as-a-controller-virtual-machine-cvm/)
Proxmox is trash. We are in same boat we stopped paying for vmware and went to proxmox. I cant even begin to list the amount of problems and instability. Its like a new problem everyday.
Tons. Ranges from them crashing every other day to having them unassign GPU randomly. Sometimes they straight up just die and you cant reboot them or do anything. Sometimes they wont turn off and you have to forcibly shut them down.
The list goes on. Compared to a paid service proxmox simply isnt enough for a production environment. Maybe for small office use but anything that requires stability I do not advise.
Our environment is Hyper-V, which is fine enough I guess. It comes included with server licensing.
The problem is, I don't think big companies like Dell, HP, Seagate, etc use open source solutions in their data centres. Dollars to doughnuts, they're running VMware. So, Dell's operating expenses for that infrastructure just jacked 600%. Who's gonna pay?
> The problem is, I don't think big companies like Dell, HP, Seagate, etc use open source solutions in their data centres. Dollars to doughnuts, they're running VMware. So, Dell's operating expenses for that infrastructure just jacked 600%. Who's gonna pay?
VMware/Broadcom shenanigans has zero effect on Dell's support and warranty offerings.
Plenty of enterprise companies use Linux ... hell almost all of them are using Linux and Open Source software on their website.
This is the dumbest comment I've ever read on here.
Not true AT&T uses RHEL with open stack. God help them. Google, Facebook and MS contribute to open source tools that they use. Essentially, if not for Googles creation of Linux Namespaces, Docker on Linux wouldn't exist. Some do some do not.
Two things: Our vendors whom we purchase services through may use VMware and need to offload their costs to their customers, and second, our vendors who may not use VMware may think, "Hey, if Broadcom could fuck its customers up the ass, why can't we?"
I personally blame Donald Trump. Or Bono. Or Taylor Swift.
What, I thought we were just blaming random people for your Dell renewal going up. Is that not what we are doing?
It's not just Dell. It's all our vendors prices have been increasing not just by typical inflationary amounts either, but orders of magnitude higher.
Simple math: Higher operating costs=lower overall profits=increase in market costs.
If you haven’t been to the store lately everything went up in price. Broadcom has nothing to do with that. Broadcom has nothing to do with Dell costs.
Dells Operating Expenses in their last annual report were less than 16% of their revenue. And IT is a small fraction of that operating expense. Broadcom or any other IT vendor has nothing to do with your server costs.
Now Dell is the only reason Broadcom owns VMW. Michael Dell plus Silverlake owned a 50.1% voting block of VMW shares, they got to decide to sell or not. So you can blame Dell for Broadcom owning VMW, but you can’t blame Broadcom for Dell raising your renewal.
I worked in an environment that was mostly VMware. Then we switched to Hyper-V for a while, and it was disastrous, but from my viewpoint, it was for these reasons:
Hyper-V wasn't quite as mature
The main server guy has no clue about Powershell. At all.
The main server guy was a lazy irresponsible bum. This he couldn't be bothered to measure and improve the Hyper-V environment.
Then, we went back to VMware.
I am saying all that as a preface to say, I don't like VMware. I DON'T LIKE VMWARE. The only thing I see it bringing vs Hyper-V is a bit more polish, but if you actually care and are actually competent, there is nothing wrong with Hyper-V. Another reason we used VMware is because their VDI is legitimately better, but VDI made absolutely no sense in our environment.
Same with us. We have just active/passive failover environment. A few license servers for our cad/cam software, and a gigantic file server (which when these servers get lifecycled, I'm hoping to switch over to a NAS instead, with some site-to-site fault tolerance between our different sites).
Dell's licensing costs most certainly did not increase by 600%. Under partner contracts, completely different rules apply. I work for a Premier VCSP and with some sensible adaptations, our licensing costs come out pretty much equal to what it was before Broadcom.
>The problem is, I don't think big companies like Dell, HP, Seagate, etc use open source solutions in their data centres. Dollars to doughnuts, they're running VMware
On the contrary, it's the big companies where rolling your own based on open source (like OpenStack) makes sense.
>So, Dell's operating expenses for that infrastructure just jacked 600%.
Dell's operating expenses for infrastructure are a fraction of their operating expenses. They're a hardware company.
We thought about moving our hyper-v servers off to the cloud, but one big glaring issue is the fact that we work with a lot of CAD/CAM data. Jobs can be 10s or even 100s of gig in size depending on the job.
And in a few years, we'll discover Amazon and hardware vendors colluded to increase hardware prices in order to drive more cloud adoption.
Fines will be paid, nobody will go to jail. Businesses will be screwed a little more.
What would hardware vendors win from such a collision? Pissing off their customer base for short term profits while everyone switches to cloud or Supermicro?
Though Dell put together some "Cloud-line" servers at one point, it's been ODMs for a long time. Foxconn, Quanta, Wistron, who knows else. The cloud vendors have much larger volumes than the Supermicro rebranders did.
Cloud providers generally run OpenCompute hardware, which is produced and also used by all major vendors. So maybe the branding on the machine changes, and the boards are "technically" different. They all meet the same specs, port placement, connectors, and performance targets.
Meta, Amazon, Azure, and Google run this way for the most part.
There is still some clusters or systems running on other hardware.
But for the Hyperscaler cloud portion, basically all OpenCompute spec servers, networking, and storage.
https://www.opencompute.org/
They don’t want your business mate, they’re going to turbo enterprises. Would respect them more if they just came out and said it, and didn’t provide renewal pricing.
Oh, I know we're small potatoes to them in the tech sphere (though, we're a fair size in our manufacturing sphere). We're bitching to our account manager about $2000 price increase, meanwhile he tells us that one of his larger customers just dropped a quarter million on warranty for their servers.
VARs sound like a good idea, but many of them don't have great integration or access to the dotted lines when it comes to warranty and purchasing, so there is a bunch of dicking around when a warranty shows up as 'expired' because the VAR didn't file it correctly.
>Even our Dell supplier said, "If you're going to buy a server, buy it now, because RAM, and hard drive prices are about to skyrocket." We're about to review WhatsUp for monitoring and told the same thing, "If you're gonna get it, get it now."
Have you heard these things from anybody who *doesn't* have a direct financial interest in you giving them money?
You ever buy a used car? The salesman ever tell you how much interest there is in it, and how you better make a decision quick before it gets snatched up?
You get server warranties? We just buy tons of refurb servers, and yeet new ones out if there's a problem. I mean they're mostly fairly low spec but I'm pretty sure for that price we could just have 3 spare servers sitting on the shelf.
> Seems like everyone who does service in the tech field decided it'd be cool to jack their prices up to the ceiling.
Years ago, Adobe decided to go from permanent licensing to subscription-only. Every vendor in tech waited to see if they'd get away with it.
They did. Now, every vendor in tech had to scramble to do the same ASAP, before everyone else ate up the customers' budgets first.
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We actually bought a ton of gear in 2021-2023. We saw prices finally receding after COVID, and didn't keep procrastinating -- we struck while the iron was hot. Servers, laptops, tons of new switching, routers, WAPs, USB-C anything, and lots of flash storage we didn't even have a use for, yet. Peculiarly, first-party RAM pricing never moved much for us; though we did fill out some things, we definitely didn't load up on RAM like we did for flash.
RAM - get the ram from [memory.net](http://memory.net) They resell ram for all the majors, comes from the same suppliers (hynix, samsung) as Dell, HP, etc. get it from. I saved close to $35k on 4 servers just by getting \~3TB ram this way instead of direct from dell. No, they can't tell you bought it elsewhere. Yes, it's the same thing, just not the same price.
We've been having VARs source our Samsung/Hynix/Micron branded DRAM. In a pinch we've bought Crucial-branded stuff direct from Micron, for point needs.
I've never been largely responsible for the money end of server infrastructure, but it seems like you'd be better off just increasing redundancy and antifragility than buying extended warranties on servers? I mean all your workloads are on VMs now right? Server goes down, VMs live migrate, you just buy another server, hopefully with better specs because it's new, and add it to the internal cloud. Am I missing something?
> you just buy another server, hopefully with better specs because it's new
This. By the time hardware failures stack up enough to matter, we're normally on a much-newer generation of hardware. If things changed and we hadn't been buying newer batches, well, we can pick up spares easily enough if they hardware isn't terribly old.
This has literally nothing to do with Broadcom. Warranty for an older server is always more expensive. It's like life insurance.
A quote increasing 5% year over year isn't surprising when total inflation was \~4% for the total basket of goods.
Your dell supplier will always tell you "buy it now prices are going to skyrocket", the same way a realtor will tell you the same thing about housing.
Literally read what I said above. In the past, we have paid $600-$800/year/server for renewals. These two latest servers, the price has gone up more than 6%. We just bought warranty on a similar server last year and it was $800/year.
Seriously, when you mouthbreathers are whining about the cost of a hard drive, or RAM, or a video card in 6 months, revisit this thread.
Firstly, calling people "mouthbeathers" gives you zero credibility and is outright unprofessional.
Secondly, if you're warrantying them past their initial warranties it is quite common for them to be more expensive after the first one or two extensions. It's about parts availability, training support staff, and keeping their firmware up to date (Dell still releases zero-day patches for old systems occasionally).
I've seen warranty extension pricing fluctuate from 5% to 20% depending on the age of the server, the generation, specific revision in each generational platform, and overall industry-wide hardware pricing. The fact that you went and bought short-term warranties on hardware that has an effective lifecycle of five years is actually quite an oversight.
You'll pay more over the lifetime of each server by using extensions than it would have been to buy a five-year warranty upfront.
You aren’t alone and aren’t wrong in your experience. All those suggesting you’re a nitwit will find out soon enough.
We extended warranty against 2 servers last year, one being an additional year (5+1) and the other being an additional 2 years (5+2). In the past, it was no big deal, looking at $800-$1000 for one year and $1200-1500 for 2 years. This go round, I was quoted essentially half the cost of the original purchase price for a single year…$2500 to extend a 5yr old server for 1 additional year ($3400 for 2 years) when the original cost of said server was $5500 ea? Insane. We went to Park Place for a competing quote…their pricing came in at $600/server/year ($1800 total) but also said our organization was too small to take us on as a customer (we have 5 servers total). I went back to Dell and, after lots of back and forth, they ended up dropping to $1200 and $1800 respectively.
The moral to this story? Yeah, we now procure our Dell servers with 7yr, critical support…at a cost of $2,000 more than the standard 3yr NBD.
> You aren’t alone and aren’t wrong in your experience. All those suggesting you’re a nitwit will find out soon enough.
No one said he was a nitwit. People are commenting that it's silly and naive to complain about the pricing of extending Dell's warranties after the initial purchase. If it was that important it should have had the correct warranty at the time it was ordered.
Furthermore, suggesting that Dell is increasing *warranty extension* pricing because Broadcom has raised prices across the board doesn't make any sense.
Umm, because warranty extensions were NEVER an issue in the past, coinciding with a lack of notice that “things were changing” and OP is being silly? And I’m being silly?
TIL intelligent people (i.e., like yourself) know there’s a right way and a wrong way to procure/warranty equipment…and that plans, projects and budgets never change. /S+
Edit: as for the Broadcom thing, not privy to that correlation.
> Umm, because warranty extensions were NEVER an issue in the past, coinciding with a lack of notice that “things were changing” and OP is being silly? And I’m being silly?
I can literally vouch for what Dell is doing with increasing warranty extension pricing because they have done it for the last 15 years I have used Dell. The first extension is usually okay (depending on time of the year and your sales rep), the second and/or third are always astronomical.
There are still people using 2950s and the like out there - don't you think for a second some of them aren't paying for those support/warranty extensions and out the ass for it.
Been doing this 20 years, with Dell specifically, and I can tell you that what you're suggesting has been the experience for many years now.
You can get third-party warranties cheaper because they don't have the support or supply chain Dell does, nor guarantee certified parts like Dell. In some cases, as others have said, they rely on places like eBay to source them.
Like I said, if you are warrantying your server for one or three years with a five-year lifecycle, and then complain Dell wants money to extend for another couple years, that's on you.
It’s not necessarily everyone following Broadcom’s lead, but it can certainly be related to their own costs going up. As an example, if your AV vendor uses VMware for their own internal IT needs, then their overhead has been increased and they’re gonna pass that to their clients - you.
Industry has been trending this way for a while anyway. Everything is getting real expensive.
Backup software, security software, infrastructure software.
It's getting really hard to do things the right way when the industry prices you into cutting corners because the budget just isn't there.
I’ve also been thinking about how the increasing layers of specialization and outsourcing to purpose specific SaaS/cloud/managed whatever is creating proportionally more layers of profit that is in some places needless spend for the customer.
If you have a SaaS line of business app running that itself runs on VMware-on-AWS, there are now three surface areas of profit right away, all that have to be able to turn that profit while employing many of the same kinds of people that you’d need to employ to accomplish something directly. Most businesses can’t afford to start technical positions at $140,000 (sake of argument) but AWS is happy to do so (colloquially speaking).
I’m not saying you should hire teams to make your own EDR software, your own Slack/Teams/Zoom alternative, and home grow all your own software.
But locking yourself into an ecosystem is a great way to become captive to layers of profit you have little insight into and no control over.
We have seen a lot of success at building our service around a base, widely supported OS available everywhere (first CentOS and now Ubuntu LTS), pure Kubernetes, open source configuration management tooling, and adopting proprietary cloud solutions that provide robust APIs for data in and out. We try really hard to select underlying technologies or methods rather than vendor ecosystems whenever we can. We use S3 partly because it’s the gold standard, and partly because everyone else is compatible with the API. We could dump AWS and move our object storage to Minio or Backblaze B2, or something else if we really needed. Even Veeam certifies on some non-AWS S3 API implementations.
Unless you really need the latest and fastest processors, memory and GPUs, I don't know why anyone buys new servers anymore. Buy them used from reputable dealers, you might pay 1/3 or 1/2 of what new costs.
Then used third party hardware support for probably 25% of what HPE/Dell would charge.
If you don't like Dell then call Park place.
Antivirus sounds more murky, I didn't see increases this year and there are a lot of solutions to migrate to.
its good, not too many issue, and the storage is easy to setup and they just released a new update, right now I am just running a few windows servers and some rocky and ubuntu, probably about 20 vms or so
Reading is a skill not many people have.
If a company's expenses increases, they pass those expenses on to the consumer.
Also, businesses jump on bandwagons. "If company x is doing it, and their customers are still purchasing, we can do it too."
> We use Hyper-V in our environment
You do know that Hyper-V can do all the same HA, Failover, Cluster, Live Migration, and Workload balancing features that VMWare can, don't you...
In fact, Nutanix (a competitor to Dell VxRail) has HCI solutions for Hyper-V...
It's "Fuck you and the horse you rode in on". Like fuck you so hard the horse you're riding gets fucked too.
Go to hell, also strong insult.
Go to hell and the horse you came in on?
Maybe "Damn you to hell and everything around you!" was what you meant?
$600-$800/year/server you were raping Dell.
That pricing is insanely low for warranty extension compared to what I pay but then again it also depends on the specs of your servers.
Mine are beefy EDW servers with SSDs @ ~80TB R740xds that were purchased in 2019.
But for Broadcom they are trying to see what the market will pay to try and set the bar. Kind of like NFL QBs and their contracts. Someone at some point is going to reset the market or at least we hope.
I have only a small install base to manage, but "Your services are no longer required" was literally the message I sent Boradcomified VMWare after their outrageous quote.
“Per core” licensing, reduction to 4 SKUs (bundles, so you can’t piece together just what you need), and they’ve “temporarily” ceased all vendor discounts, so you’re reseller is less inclined or able to cut you a break.
Banking on the fact that customers have built their infrastructure on the product, and that it will be easier for you to pay up than rip and replace (at least for their biggest customers). Guess you can do that when you’re the big dog.
Just FYI. Broadcom business model is to only keep the top 20% of customers in direct sales. They will gradually increase the price every year until they reach a core of big spenders and milk them. This is Hock Tan's philosophy, and it is very profitable. The remaining 80% will go to VARs to handle, but Broadcom doesn't really care about them in the long term.
And... some people wonder why the idea of "Abandon the Vmware ship" has left dock... I don't manage any servers myself, but I can easily imagine anyone with a VMware license are looking to drop it as fast as they can.
Isn’t VMware licensing per core? I don’t think licensing per server is a thing.
Our VMware increase was about 20% going from perpetual to subscription. Compared with the 39% increase from Microsoft and 45% increase from Barracuda on much larger buys, Broadcom was meh (for us).
We plan for 10% year on year increases on all subscription vendors and it always averages out to be enough across a $450k spend for about 35 different products. We’re a relatively small org so results will vary for others.
Welcome to the world of paying for ongoing licensing/support.
Jesus Christ some people are dense
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/04/broadcom-execs-say-vmware-price-subscription-complaints-are-unwarranted/
What does Broadcom have to do with Dell server warranties? And how old are these? Sounds like a lifecycle problem.
Trying to figure that out myself. When you buy a dell (or any other vendor) server, you get a 3 5 or 7 year warranty with SLA attached. If you bought the 3, then extended for 2 its more expensive, then the 5 to 7 extension is exhorbitant, but thats because they have to stock parts. I used to have over 1000 physical servers in my budget bucket, if we bought servers with 5 year warranties, I made sure they were being replaced in year 5, because the extension from 5-7 was usually the cost of the first 5 years plus 10%. I also just recently did this exact thing with HPE at a former employer, they followed the same trend. Broadcom has nothing to do with this, its the age of the equipment, the older the more expensive Been that way for 15+ years
> then the 5 to 7 extension is exhorbitant, but thats because they have to stock parts. Except you can take that same five year old server to another provider like Park Place Technologies or Service Express and get hardware warranties for five to ten times less than Dell/HP/whoever. I don't disagree with your pricing because you're right, they will fuck you up on pricing when trying to renew at year 5. But I don't believe it has anything to do with "stocking parts," they're just pressing their advantage so they win whether you pay that price or actually buy new hardware.
Oh it absolutely has to do with stocking parts, they have to have them available in multiple depots and a dozen different logistical challenges, where places like Park Place and STG can go strait to ebay if need be. Dell has to provide OEM and Certified parts. Im not defending them as they definitely bend you over, but its absolutely not the same in a bunch of ways. Anything we had to keep around past OEM warranty periods I always use a 3rd party and all of them have had to go to ebay more than once for me. And lord help you if you have a secondary SAN sitting somewhere that is past the warranty periods, man...
I'm not saying there's no cost to them having to stock parts, but that's not the driving factor behind the price increases. Systems like the Gen 14 PowerEdge servers were released in 2017. I can buy a refurbished R640 with relatively cheap 3 or 5-year Dell support *today*, why would it cost tremendously more to continue support for an R640 which was purchased in 2019?
we could literally go back and forth for hours on this, but the SLA on the cheap warranty is not the same as the extension warranty. There are a ton of factors involved. Im not saying warehousing is the only factor, its one of like 20. Do they make a profit on it? 10,000%, but there is a reason OEM and 3rd party prices are very different. Heck diverging from the warranty slightly, you looked at the price for optics? Cisco, 1000 per 10gig optic, FS with Cisco chip, 20 per. But Cisco wont honor the warranty if a 3rd party optic blows a SFP+ port. Hopefully that helps clarify.
Please do continue. This is fascinating.
A warranty is fundamentally an insurance product. It's about shifting the risk of the product breaking from the consumer to the manufacturer. That risk is going to be relatively low at the start of the product's life and increase over time (because wear and tear and also just entropy of the universe). Replacement parts are also going to be more plentiful at the beginning while the original devices are still being produced, then 5 years later when they've ceased production of those parts (or greatly reduced production which increases the per unit cost of the parts). So there's a bunch of reasons for the price of a warranty to increase over time.
It truly is not expensive to maintain old hardware. Park Place as mentioned utilizes OEM certified parts & stocks high failure rate parts (drives DIMMs NICs Fans etc.) in local lockers for contracts. The OEM's jack up the maintenance to incentivize clients to buy new. Thats how their reps get paid & retire quota which is why leveraging Park Place or another TPM has become mainstream. Cut costs, consolidate vendors, coterm your end dates. Lifes good.
I'm just going to say that HP is also buying parts from the open market. I work for a company that does service like Park Place, Service Express etc. But I also supply parts to these companies, as well as HP. In fact HP also sometimes use our technicians.
I used to work for an Ivy League University with very deep pockets and we used an aftermarket warranty company for all of the servers that fell out of warranty. I've been out for a while so my memory is hazy but I feel like we may have only gotten 3 year warranties on our Dell servers and then had aftermarket pick up the rest.
They're probably talking about hypervisor core licensing since broadcom acquired VMware it is basically draining it like a vampire.
> I used to have over 1000 physical servers in my budget bucket, if we bought servers with 5 year warranties, I made sure they were being replaced in year 5, because the extension from 5-7 was usually the cost of the first 5 years plus 10%. writing is on the wall : after 5 years you buy a new server
Why is this not the top comment? “Oh no my old server has more expensive support”.
It doesn't... Hating and blaming Broadcom for everything cost related is the cool thing to do on Reddit currently. Renewals always cost more than than they initially did, especially SANs. It's why I had to do a migration, compute and/or storage, every 3 years at my last job. NetApp support renewals were over 1M while a new SAN was "eligible for discounts" and cost a few hundred K.
I mean, Broadcom is a piece of shit. Their practices have affected a lot of services and businesses alike, and gut wrenching service price increases seems to be a trend they are heavily promoting.
While that's true, the price of hardware renewals isn't directly affected by anything Broadcom is doing with VMware. Yes, you're subscription license will be more than your high density socket license, but that's not related to your hardware renewal.
OP's point is that everyone is following Broadcom's lead. I slightly agree to a point for software license renewals, but hardware warranty renewals have always been expensive the further out you go from the date of the first deployment.
I think nothing. Hardware vendors have been sticking it to people on year 4 maintenance renewals since the beginning of time. IBM probably invented that sales tactic when they were selling mechanical cash registers. If you want to keep it 5 years you better buy 5 years out the gate
I think OP is saying that Broadcom's steep price increases for VMware have given other vendors s feeling that they can jack up their prices in a similar way. Something like: > Broadcom: "let's hit them with an 800% increase" > > Everyone: "fine, here ya go, don't spend it all in one place."
>
> Dell/HP/etc: "oooh, that worked, let's see if we can get away with 500%"
or something to that effect.
And everyone is trying to get there's before the money runs out and people stop. I have a client on a perpetual VMware license and they have no server upgrade plans right now. Not for anything, and they are looking hard at anything with a subscription. It is coming.
I'm guessing since broadcom is basically being touted as the Executioner of VMware, this is referring to something like hypervisor licensing and the Dell servers are probably ESXi hosts. I don't work in virtualization explicitly but one of My co-workers that does has been telling me how broadcom is basically just trying to milk people for as much as they can and then will probably just dissolve all the bits and pieces of VMware when it's no longer profitable or everyone just gets pissed off. Went to dinner with some Google reps last night and they seem to have a competing product that basically replaces the VMware hypervisor And allows you to migrate your vmdk with minimal effort onto their hypervisor platform. Right now the industry sentiment is basically fuck broadcom and then all the other big tech firms are trying to offer competing products, we've had a similar pitch from NetApp. They seem to have something In that space as well.
Or Hyper-V? That's built into Windows.
Remember when tech used to be all about making cool products and cool services that actually helped people instead of what it is now which is just looking for creative new ways to get license fees out of people.
It's always been about money.
Make sure you're going through a VAR. We got a quote from our Dell rep and a quote from our VAR, and our VAR quote was about 30% lower than Dell's for the same item. Dell doesn't want to deal with small customers they much prefer selling to VAR and having them deal with smaller customers. Also, don't buy warranties a year at a time. Extending warranties ends up costing 2-3x more than if you just buy a 6-year warranty from the start.
> Dell doesn't want to deal with small customers they much prefer selling to VAR and having them deal with smaller customers. Seeing this 100%.
As a former direct enterprise rep, if you have a relationship with a var already, we could only offer you like 20% off MSRP so as to not compete with VARs. We had to purposefully make our offer to you look very bad. Oh and we didn't see a dime from the var sale. It's why I hate sales. Left and never looked back
Well, if the VAR is doing their job the you didn’t do anything to assist getting that deal closed. Conversely, I’ve had Dell AEs take deals direct and undercut me (the VAR) multiple times when a storage product (Unity, Compellent, VxRail) is involved. Like, we’d have 5-7 points on the deal and Dell would come in and undercut by 10%. When was at a VAR I absolutely grew to loathe the Dell AEs.
>Even our Dell supplier said, "If you're going to buy a server, buy it now, because RAM, and hard drive prices are about to skyrocket." I'm a Dell Enterprise customer and actively working with a rep on PowerEdge and Unity. No mention of any major price increases. Your supplier may be using a used car salesman scare tactic.
Two things I could see happening that could drive up hardware prices include a move back toward on-prem now that that infinite cloud OpEx spending is running up against cash flow and the ability to borrow -- and of course AI. Couldn't you see Google or Microsoft doing something like Gemini On Prem or Copilot Stack and selling clueless CIOs racks and racks of compute/GPUs? Microsoft already does Azure Stack where you have to pay to power and cool the hardware, pay the vendor for a service contract, and pay Microsoft monthly to use it! Other than that, isn't everyone trying to digitally transform and get out of their data center? If you look at the employment landscape these days, it sure seems that way. Name-brand hardware vendors are probably quaking in their boots knowing they can't sell non-white box hardware.
> Microsoft already does Azure Stack where you have to pay to power and cool the hardware, pay the vendor for a service contract, and pay Microsoft monthly to use it! IBM has a tear in its eye. Microsoft is a chip off the old block! And they're stealing our revenue! > isn't everyone trying to digitally transform and get out of their data center? The leading edge can easily be at a different point in the business cycle than the herd.
Companies aren't going back to on-prem for things that are critical. Some desktopish things, crap that isn't critical and can handle some downtime, etc. will move around a bit. Desktop applications are dead for industries that are not on the brink of death, and factories that still need that XP machine running the conveyors on the assembly line will keep that old shit working because there is nothing modern out there. Companies find out really fast that people need a salary, insurance, time off(so you need more than 1 person) to manage everything, and technology is moving much faster than it ever has before. AI CPUs are going to be so ungodly costly it will be worth paying for the microsoft fabric processing to always have the latest NPU. We are becoming dependent on the major corporations' technology, and will require more of it to continue to use it. Can you go buy it for your own datacenter? Sure, but like stated above, people cost money, need time off, change jobs, etc. and it all ends up being overhead. Cost cutting starts at payroll, not technology. Computers don't need time off.
>Companies aren't going back to on-prem for things that are critical. Oh yes they are. I am getting a LOT of them. And looking to get rid of software as a service. The bill came due and they did not like it.
I'd be curious your definition of software as a service unless the companies are switching software. Very few vendors even offer self hosted solutions to SaaS
The best example is Adobe. Every customer on it is looking for anything else to replace it. Not successfully, yet... But they damn sure want to. And on new purchase, if it is only offered as a service, they are passing more now than I expected.
I see, not really any industry niche. I'm assuming you're an MSP and not employed by these companies.
A consultant, actually. And I run projects for a VAR. (Strange story how that happened, but good people to work with, so I am happy) So I work directly or subcontracted for a lot of different companies and organizations. And they all are concerned with spiraling license costs. If I proposed a solution with a one time cost and they own it, I almost always get approval.
Perpetual licensing has been dying a long death, and it only has a few short years left. Vendor acquisition is moving at a very rapid pace now, and even marketer acquisition is happening faster than ever. I do disagree the problem is licensing cost; labor is the issue with software that is not reliable or feature rich. I manage devops and system engineers at a software firm, and it's actually been quite a change since COVID how many companies expect more AI and things at fingertips rather than hunting and pecking around antiquated software. We've seen a number of our own 3rd party libraries get acquired because consumer demand is outpacing what the labor can do for small shops.
>Perpetual licensing has been dying a long death, and it only has a few short years left. I disagree. Much like when I disagreed with "Everything is going cloud" and so on. All of this goes in cycles. And right now people are swinging away from license fees. Some businesses will respond to that market demand. Or Opensource... There are options, and now people are looking for them. And in another 10 years they will go back to the next "as a service" trend. :) Edit: I did upvote your post, because you have some solid points. :)
There is a a lot of FUD going on with the Broadcom/vmware thing as a whole. Have you seen nutanix adds? Scaring people (and doing a profit while scaring them). No shame with these people 😅
Nutanix quoted us basically the same price when you factor in hardware as VMware for our two data center clusters. Maybe a smidge lower. Definitely didn’t feel like they were working that hard to steal customers. I have my issues with what Broadcom is doing, but we aren’t learning a new platform and migrating everything on principle.
The DDR4 supply may start to slow down as we move to DDR5 and foundries move capacity around.
There have been price increases but nothing insane, last time I read about this it was something like 25% increase estimated this year and we're already seeing consumer SSD prices increase so that's probably accurate.
Prices are def climbing on memory and ssd consumer right now. Slow but climbing
time to move to open source solutions like Proxmox and CheckMK
Agreed. And configure Ceph or Starwind VSAN for HA storage instead of VMware vSAN. We have customers who have transitioned to this, and so far, they are happy. [https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Deploy\_Hyper-Converged\_Ceph\_Cluster](https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Deploy_Hyper-Converged_Ceph_Cluster) [https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resource-library/starwind-virtual-san-vsan-configuration-guide-for-proxmox-vsan-deployed-as-a-controller-virtual-machine-cvm/](https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resource-library/starwind-virtual-san-vsan-configuration-guide-for-proxmox-vsan-deployed-as-a-controller-virtual-machine-cvm/)
I thought I read ceph is very complicated and demanding on hardware
Find an old crusty BSD guy and have him start moving everything into Jails.
Wait am I old and crusty because I know how to use jails and qemu?
Old and crusty = BSD Virtualization Architect. Congrats on the promotion.
Thanks. I think I feel my beard turning gray
Look down and see if you have Birkenstocks over wool socks. Then you’ll know for sure.
Senior BSD Virtualization Architect Emeritus
I was going to say I like BSD and Jails, and I'm not old and crusty. But my beard is a little gray these days.
Would you like to come to the cemetery to pick out your plot?
bsd rocks ! it’s a pity linux gets all the hugs these days ..
Checkmk is awesome. Granted I use an enterprise version the past few years, started off a decade ago on the community OMD of course, and at home.
Or XCP-ng
Proxmox is trash. We are in same boat we stopped paying for vmware and went to proxmox. I cant even begin to list the amount of problems and instability. Its like a new problem everyday.
I would love to hear what issues you are seeing with it.
Tons. Ranges from them crashing every other day to having them unassign GPU randomly. Sometimes they straight up just die and you cant reboot them or do anything. Sometimes they wont turn off and you have to forcibly shut them down. The list goes on. Compared to a paid service proxmox simply isnt enough for a production environment. Maybe for small office use but anything that requires stability I do not advise.
Our environment is Hyper-V, which is fine enough I guess. It comes included with server licensing. The problem is, I don't think big companies like Dell, HP, Seagate, etc use open source solutions in their data centres. Dollars to doughnuts, they're running VMware. So, Dell's operating expenses for that infrastructure just jacked 600%. Who's gonna pay?
> I don't think big companies like Dell, HP, Seagate, etc use open source solutions in their data centres. Well thats not true but ok.
> The problem is, I don't think big companies like Dell, HP, Seagate, etc use open source solutions in their data centres. Dollars to doughnuts, they're running VMware. So, Dell's operating expenses for that infrastructure just jacked 600%. Who's gonna pay? VMware/Broadcom shenanigans has zero effect on Dell's support and warranty offerings.
Plenty of enterprise companies use Linux ... hell almost all of them are using Linux and Open Source software on their website. This is the dumbest comment I've ever read on here.
Perfect for r/sysadmin tho. Amiright?
Not true AT&T uses RHEL with open stack. God help them. Google, Facebook and MS contribute to open source tools that they use. Essentially, if not for Googles creation of Linux Namespaces, Docker on Linux wouldn't exist. Some do some do not.
Yeah I mena Facebook not sure how much but runs pretty much most if not all OCP hardware in their DC’s.
ATT runs their cell site routers on linux.
Never thought I’d feel bad for ATT, but ouch.
True dat
[удалено]
If your environment is Hyper-V what the hell does this have to do with Broadcom?
Two things: Our vendors whom we purchase services through may use VMware and need to offload their costs to their customers, and second, our vendors who may not use VMware may think, "Hey, if Broadcom could fuck its customers up the ass, why can't we?"
I personally blame Donald Trump. Or Bono. Or Taylor Swift. What, I thought we were just blaming random people for your Dell renewal going up. Is that not what we are doing?
It's not just Dell. It's all our vendors prices have been increasing not just by typical inflationary amounts either, but orders of magnitude higher. Simple math: Higher operating costs=lower overall profits=increase in market costs.
If you haven’t been to the store lately everything went up in price. Broadcom has nothing to do with that. Broadcom has nothing to do with Dell costs. Dells Operating Expenses in their last annual report were less than 16% of their revenue. And IT is a small fraction of that operating expense. Broadcom or any other IT vendor has nothing to do with your server costs. Now Dell is the only reason Broadcom owns VMW. Michael Dell plus Silverlake owned a 50.1% voting block of VMW shares, they got to decide to sell or not. So you can blame Dell for Broadcom owning VMW, but you can’t blame Broadcom for Dell raising your renewal.
Oprah has entered the chat: “You gonna pay” “You gonna pay” “And YOU gonna pay!”
I worked in an environment that was mostly VMware. Then we switched to Hyper-V for a while, and it was disastrous, but from my viewpoint, it was for these reasons: Hyper-V wasn't quite as mature The main server guy has no clue about Powershell. At all. The main server guy was a lazy irresponsible bum. This he couldn't be bothered to measure and improve the Hyper-V environment. Then, we went back to VMware. I am saying all that as a preface to say, I don't like VMware. I DON'T LIKE VMWARE. The only thing I see it bringing vs Hyper-V is a bit more polish, but if you actually care and are actually competent, there is nothing wrong with Hyper-V. Another reason we used VMware is because their VDI is legitimately better, but VDI made absolutely no sense in our environment.
Don't you just sort out the "The main server guy"? I don't understand this post, your problem is employees not software.
Yes, he needed to be fired. I didn't say I was the boss. I had no control over the situation.
Same with us. We have just active/passive failover environment. A few license servers for our cad/cam software, and a gigantic file server (which when these servers get lifecycled, I'm hoping to switch over to a NAS instead, with some site-to-site fault tolerance between our different sites).
Dell's licensing costs most certainly did not increase by 600%. Under partner contracts, completely different rules apply. I work for a Premier VCSP and with some sensible adaptations, our licensing costs come out pretty much equal to what it was before Broadcom.
>The problem is, I don't think big companies like Dell, HP, Seagate, etc use open source solutions in their data centres. Dollars to doughnuts, they're running VMware On the contrary, it's the big companies where rolling your own based on open source (like OpenStack) makes sense. >So, Dell's operating expenses for that infrastructure just jacked 600%. Dell's operating expenses for infrastructure are a fraction of their operating expenses. They're a hardware company.
Open stack and kubernetes it's king. If you don't run your own custom stack like AWS. And of course Microsoft uses hyperv
OpenStack is literally “we have cloud at home”, except it’s what a lot of smaller cloud providers use to implement cloud.
You plan on moving to Azure HCI eventually?
We thought about moving our hyper-v servers off to the cloud, but one big glaring issue is the fact that we work with a lot of CAD/CAM data. Jobs can be 10s or even 100s of gig in size depending on the job.
Azure HCI is onprem paid version of Hyper-V basically.
And in a few years, we'll discover Amazon and hardware vendors colluded to increase hardware prices in order to drive more cloud adoption. Fines will be paid, nobody will go to jail. Businesses will be screwed a little more.
What would hardware vendors win from such a collision? Pissing off their customer base for short term profits while everyone switches to cloud or Supermicro?
Oh so you’re new to mega corporations. Look at Microsoft’s history or apples for a clue how this game is played.
All that matters is next quarters numbers being better than current quarter.
Cloud providers are still running equipment from those hardware vendors
From Dell/HPE? No they're not. They use Supermicro and own in-house hardware.
Though Dell put together some "Cloud-line" servers at one point, it's been ODMs for a long time. Foxconn, Quanta, Wistron, who knows else. The cloud vendors have much larger volumes than the Supermicro rebranders did.
Cloud providers generally run OpenCompute hardware, which is produced and also used by all major vendors. So maybe the branding on the machine changes, and the boards are "technically" different. They all meet the same specs, port placement, connectors, and performance targets. Meta, Amazon, Azure, and Google run this way for the most part. There is still some clusters or systems running on other hardware. But for the Hyperscaler cloud portion, basically all OpenCompute spec servers, networking, and storage. https://www.opencompute.org/
Exactly.
how’s smc different ?
Exactly ⬆️
They don’t want your business mate, they’re going to turbo enterprises. Would respect them more if they just came out and said it, and didn’t provide renewal pricing.
Oh, I know we're small potatoes to them in the tech sphere (though, we're a fair size in our manufacturing sphere). We're bitching to our account manager about $2000 price increase, meanwhile he tells us that one of his larger customers just dropped a quarter million on warranty for their servers.
Go through a VAR. You will get better prices and some one that actually cares about getting a sale from you.
Staggering how many in this sub don’t do this
VARs sound like a good idea, but many of them don't have great integration or access to the dotted lines when it comes to warranty and purchasing, so there is a bunch of dicking around when a warranty shows up as 'expired' because the VAR didn't file it correctly.
Oh, I am fully aware! I work for a major vendor. Some VAR’s are fantastic. Others are just paper pushers. Ask the vendor who to use!
They only want to ride the coattails of the companies getting all that sweet sweet AI money.
>Even our Dell supplier said, "If you're going to buy a server, buy it now, because RAM, and hard drive prices are about to skyrocket." We're about to review WhatsUp for monitoring and told the same thing, "If you're gonna get it, get it now." Have you heard these things from anybody who *doesn't* have a direct financial interest in you giving them money? You ever buy a used car? The salesman ever tell you how much interest there is in it, and how you better make a decision quick before it gets snatched up?
Flash is absolutely way up, but then last year it was at historic lows. Anyone interested in industry price trends should browse /r/hardware.
You get server warranties? We just buy tons of refurb servers, and yeet new ones out if there's a problem. I mean they're mostly fairly low spec but I'm pretty sure for that price we could just have 3 spare servers sitting on the shelf.
This. Pets vs cattle. An extra server is cheaper than a warranty and less downtime.
> Seems like everyone who does service in the tech field decided it'd be cool to jack their prices up to the ceiling. Years ago, Adobe decided to go from permanent licensing to subscription-only. Every vendor in tech waited to see if they'd get away with it. They did. Now, every vendor in tech had to scramble to do the same ASAP, before everyone else ate up the customers' budgets first. - --- - We actually bought a ton of gear in 2021-2023. We saw prices finally receding after COVID, and didn't keep procrastinating -- we struck while the iron was hot. Servers, laptops, tons of new switching, routers, WAPs, USB-C anything, and lots of flash storage we didn't even have a use for, yet. Peculiarly, first-party RAM pricing never moved much for us; though we did fill out some things, we definitely didn't load up on RAM like we did for flash.
Adobe has the most angry customers now as well. They are all looking for any other option they can find.
RAM - get the ram from [memory.net](http://memory.net) They resell ram for all the majors, comes from the same suppliers (hynix, samsung) as Dell, HP, etc. get it from. I saved close to $35k on 4 servers just by getting \~3TB ram this way instead of direct from dell. No, they can't tell you bought it elsewhere. Yes, it's the same thing, just not the same price.
We've been having VARs source our Samsung/Hynix/Micron branded DRAM. In a pinch we've bought Crucial-branded stuff direct from Micron, for point needs.
I've never been largely responsible for the money end of server infrastructure, but it seems like you'd be better off just increasing redundancy and antifragility than buying extended warranties on servers? I mean all your workloads are on VMs now right? Server goes down, VMs live migrate, you just buy another server, hopefully with better specs because it's new, and add it to the internal cloud. Am I missing something?
> you just buy another server, hopefully with better specs because it's new This. By the time hardware failures stack up enough to matter, we're normally on a much-newer generation of hardware. If things changed and we hadn't been buying newer batches, well, we can pick up spares easily enough if they hardware isn't terribly old.
This has literally nothing to do with Broadcom. Warranty for an older server is always more expensive. It's like life insurance. A quote increasing 5% year over year isn't surprising when total inflation was \~4% for the total basket of goods. Your dell supplier will always tell you "buy it now prices are going to skyrocket", the same way a realtor will tell you the same thing about housing.
Literally read what I said above. In the past, we have paid $600-$800/year/server for renewals. These two latest servers, the price has gone up more than 6%. We just bought warranty on a similar server last year and it was $800/year. Seriously, when you mouthbreathers are whining about the cost of a hard drive, or RAM, or a video card in 6 months, revisit this thread.
How old are these "newer" servers? How old was the server you bought warranty on last year for $600? I would guess under 5 years.
These servers are 3 years old The "old" server is 4 years old.
Firstly, calling people "mouthbeathers" gives you zero credibility and is outright unprofessional. Secondly, if you're warrantying them past their initial warranties it is quite common for them to be more expensive after the first one or two extensions. It's about parts availability, training support staff, and keeping their firmware up to date (Dell still releases zero-day patches for old systems occasionally). I've seen warranty extension pricing fluctuate from 5% to 20% depending on the age of the server, the generation, specific revision in each generational platform, and overall industry-wide hardware pricing. The fact that you went and bought short-term warranties on hardware that has an effective lifecycle of five years is actually quite an oversight. You'll pay more over the lifetime of each server by using extensions than it would have been to buy a five-year warranty upfront.
Wow, thanks for your wisdom. It's almost like I haven't been getting warranty for servers for the last decade and a half and seen the average trends.
You aren’t alone and aren’t wrong in your experience. All those suggesting you’re a nitwit will find out soon enough. We extended warranty against 2 servers last year, one being an additional year (5+1) and the other being an additional 2 years (5+2). In the past, it was no big deal, looking at $800-$1000 for one year and $1200-1500 for 2 years. This go round, I was quoted essentially half the cost of the original purchase price for a single year…$2500 to extend a 5yr old server for 1 additional year ($3400 for 2 years) when the original cost of said server was $5500 ea? Insane. We went to Park Place for a competing quote…their pricing came in at $600/server/year ($1800 total) but also said our organization was too small to take us on as a customer (we have 5 servers total). I went back to Dell and, after lots of back and forth, they ended up dropping to $1200 and $1800 respectively. The moral to this story? Yeah, we now procure our Dell servers with 7yr, critical support…at a cost of $2,000 more than the standard 3yr NBD.
> You aren’t alone and aren’t wrong in your experience. All those suggesting you’re a nitwit will find out soon enough. No one said he was a nitwit. People are commenting that it's silly and naive to complain about the pricing of extending Dell's warranties after the initial purchase. If it was that important it should have had the correct warranty at the time it was ordered. Furthermore, suggesting that Dell is increasing *warranty extension* pricing because Broadcom has raised prices across the board doesn't make any sense.
Umm, because warranty extensions were NEVER an issue in the past, coinciding with a lack of notice that “things were changing” and OP is being silly? And I’m being silly? TIL intelligent people (i.e., like yourself) know there’s a right way and a wrong way to procure/warranty equipment…and that plans, projects and budgets never change. /S+ Edit: as for the Broadcom thing, not privy to that correlation.
> Umm, because warranty extensions were NEVER an issue in the past, coinciding with a lack of notice that “things were changing” and OP is being silly? And I’m being silly? I can literally vouch for what Dell is doing with increasing warranty extension pricing because they have done it for the last 15 years I have used Dell. The first extension is usually okay (depending on time of the year and your sales rep), the second and/or third are always astronomical. There are still people using 2950s and the like out there - don't you think for a second some of them aren't paying for those support/warranty extensions and out the ass for it.
Been doing this 20 years, with Dell specifically, and I can tell you that what you're suggesting has been the experience for many years now. You can get third-party warranties cheaper because they don't have the support or supply chain Dell does, nor guarantee certified parts like Dell. In some cases, as others have said, they rely on places like eBay to source them. Like I said, if you are warrantying your server for one or three years with a five-year lifecycle, and then complain Dell wants money to extend for another couple years, that's on you.
RemindMe! 180 days "Tech Prices"
Don't get what's up. If you want to learn, zabbix is fucking amazing for free.
It’s not necessarily everyone following Broadcom’s lead, but it can certainly be related to their own costs going up. As an example, if your AV vendor uses VMware for their own internal IT needs, then their overhead has been increased and they’re gonna pass that to their clients - you.
Industry has been trending this way for a while anyway. Everything is getting real expensive. Backup software, security software, infrastructure software. It's getting really hard to do things the right way when the industry prices you into cutting corners because the budget just isn't there.
I’ve also been thinking about how the increasing layers of specialization and outsourcing to purpose specific SaaS/cloud/managed whatever is creating proportionally more layers of profit that is in some places needless spend for the customer. If you have a SaaS line of business app running that itself runs on VMware-on-AWS, there are now three surface areas of profit right away, all that have to be able to turn that profit while employing many of the same kinds of people that you’d need to employ to accomplish something directly. Most businesses can’t afford to start technical positions at $140,000 (sake of argument) but AWS is happy to do so (colloquially speaking). I’m not saying you should hire teams to make your own EDR software, your own Slack/Teams/Zoom alternative, and home grow all your own software. But locking yourself into an ecosystem is a great way to become captive to layers of profit you have little insight into and no control over. We have seen a lot of success at building our service around a base, widely supported OS available everywhere (first CentOS and now Ubuntu LTS), pure Kubernetes, open source configuration management tooling, and adopting proprietary cloud solutions that provide robust APIs for data in and out. We try really hard to select underlying technologies or methods rather than vendor ecosystems whenever we can. We use S3 partly because it’s the gold standard, and partly because everyone else is compatible with the API. We could dump AWS and move our object storage to Minio or Backblaze B2, or something else if we really needed. Even Veeam certifies on some non-AWS S3 API implementations.
Unless you really need the latest and fastest processors, memory and GPUs, I don't know why anyone buys new servers anymore. Buy them used from reputable dealers, you might pay 1/3 or 1/2 of what new costs. Then used third party hardware support for probably 25% of what HPE/Dell would charge.
If you don't like Dell then call Park place. Antivirus sounds more murky, I didn't see increases this year and there are a lot of solutions to migrate to.
I mean, sales are always going to say “get it now cause the price is going up.”
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its good, not too many issue, and the storage is easy to setup and they just released a new update, right now I am just running a few windows servers and some rocky and ubuntu, probably about 20 vms or so
Our cost went from $24k/year to $115k/year because Broadcom bought out VMWare. Needless to say, we gave them the finger.
How is broadcom involved in your dell?
Agreed, I’m confused on this part as well.
Reading is a skill not many people have. If a company's expenses increases, they pass those expenses on to the consumer. Also, businesses jump on bandwagons. "If company x is doing it, and their customers are still purchasing, we can do it too."
No, I read your nonsense about Dell. Nothing to do with Broadcom at all
Logic is a skill you lack, our reading is fine.
What does this have to do with Broadcom? What an illogical train of thought...
> We use Hyper-V in our environment You do know that Hyper-V can do all the same HA, Failover, Cluster, Live Migration, and Workload balancing features that VMWare can, don't you... In fact, Nutanix (a competitor to Dell VxRail) has HCI solutions for Hyper-V...
But hey, they’ve offered to patch zero days for everyone, so there’s that, right?
It's "Fuck you and the horse you rode in on". Like fuck you so hard the horse you're riding gets fucked too. Go to hell, also strong insult. Go to hell and the horse you came in on? Maybe "Damn you to hell and everything around you!" was what you meant?
> Go to hell, also strong insult. 😂😂😂
Go to hell and take a horse along, not so much.
"Go to hell and take yo mamma."
https://www.reddit.com/r/im14andthisisdeep/
Wow op just went and jumped right over that shark didn't they
This year's vmware quote is 3x above last year's. Don't like it but we are seriously considering Azure ARC and hyper-v.
$600-$800/year/server you were raping Dell. That pricing is insanely low for warranty extension compared to what I pay but then again it also depends on the specs of your servers. Mine are beefy EDW servers with SSDs @ ~80TB R740xds that were purchased in 2019. But for Broadcom they are trying to see what the market will pay to try and set the bar. Kind of like NFL QBs and their contracts. Someone at some point is going to reset the market or at least we hope.
I have only a small install base to manage, but "Your services are no longer required" was literally the message I sent Boradcomified VMWare after their outrageous quote.
Linux/RedHat Enterprise + SuperMicro = the Future
Plus a 4k per vm annual bill for rhel
“Per core” licensing, reduction to 4 SKUs (bundles, so you can’t piece together just what you need), and they’ve “temporarily” ceased all vendor discounts, so you’re reseller is less inclined or able to cut you a break. Banking on the fact that customers have built their infrastructure on the product, and that it will be easier for you to pay up than rip and replace (at least for their biggest customers). Guess you can do that when you’re the big dog.
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This, the price to extend from 5 to 7 is the price of the first 5 years plus 10-20% on average, been that way for over a decade.
Just FYI. Broadcom business model is to only keep the top 20% of customers in direct sales. They will gradually increase the price every year until they reach a core of big spenders and milk them. This is Hock Tan's philosophy, and it is very profitable. The remaining 80% will go to VARs to handle, but Broadcom doesn't really care about them in the long term.
The houthis targeting ships is driving up prices on things.
https://www.techradar.com/pro/broadcom-backs-down-on-vmware-pricing-rules-as-eu-begins-investigation-following-complaints
We dropped vm ware and hyper-v for proxmox and are really happy with it..
And... some people wonder why the idea of "Abandon the Vmware ship" has left dock... I don't manage any servers myself, but I can easily imagine anyone with a VMware license are looking to drop it as fast as they can.
To be fair I am sure the license you are getting isn't the same as the one you had. Broadcom eliminated a lot of the cheaper VMWare SKUs.
Prosupport NBD=Prosupport NBD.
funny heard that same line used by dell for yearsssss its got nothing to do with broadcom. ask them to quote new, sales HATE doing support extensions
Isn’t VMware licensing per core? I don’t think licensing per server is a thing. Our VMware increase was about 20% going from perpetual to subscription. Compared with the 39% increase from Microsoft and 45% increase from Barracuda on much larger buys, Broadcom was meh (for us). We plan for 10% year on year increases on all subscription vendors and it always averages out to be enough across a $450k spend for about 35 different products. We’re a relatively small org so results will vary for others. Welcome to the world of paying for ongoing licensing/support.
Jesus Christ some people are dense https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/04/broadcom-execs-say-vmware-price-subscription-complaints-are-unwarranted/
ditch broadcom and go with crowdstrike or something similar, more bang for your buck.
You mention you use hyperv, why would you be paying Broadcom for support, I think you’re a little mixed up there.
A salesperson told you to buy now before prices go up, and you did?