Re: Quotes
How so? I have nothing agaist Supermicro per se. I only object your adulation of Supermicro.
Which is entirely my point. I don't elevate Supermicro above where they belong. I point out their flaws as well as their benefits. But I don't, like some, pretend they don't exist. They have become an important vendor in the past few years and I won't pretend that isn't the case. That this bothers you indicates to me a bias against them on your behalf.
It was an honest question. How would you formulate it then? It should be stated if you are given stuff permanently or on a loan basis when you are reviewing them on this site. If you are handling your own or your clients devices then fine - I'd have absolutely nothing against that.
Quite simply, I would be asking about access to review sources rather than who gets to keep what.
The big reason for this is that if I am being perfectly honest free stuff doesn't matter. After you've been doing reviews for even a little while you have so much technowhosits that free stuff isn't a benefit that makes you like the vendor it becomes a burden.
Where do I put all the junk I get sent, hmm? How do I power it? I probably have a half-million dollars worth of gear in my house and I can't have more than 10% of it on at any given time or the house overheats. How many VMs do I really need to run? How much testing can I really do? But there is an unlimited supply of this stuff, and demand from vendors as well as readers to write reviews.
Understand me when I say that writing reviews is not profitable. Not in the least. It takes days to properly test most equipment. Weeks or months for enterprise grade stuff. If the equipment is shipped to me I usually end up paying hundreds of dollars in customs or shipping fees and there are tax implications if the equipment is kept for more than a year.
Shipping it back to a vendor costs money - hundreds of dollars, usually - so no matter which way I play this I probably end up paying at least $1000 for a switch or server and $2500 for a largeish storage unit and get paid a fraction of that for the article I write. All for equipment that is typically too power hungry and/or loud to actually use.
And yet, you phrase your question as though I am somehow going to be biased because a vendor sends me equipment to keep. What?!?
You betray your ignorance of how the review scene works, sir.
I would also hope that reviewers are willing to work with samples provided by vendors in addition to merely reviewing those items that they/their customers deploy in the field.
This is called expanding one's horizons. It's important. It's part of begin a good technician and a good reviewer. By all means, try to put production workloads on whatever you test, but don't restrict yourself to the narrow field of view that has been your traditional comfort zone. That's not only how biases start, that's where brand tribalism comes from. And brand tribalism is very, very bad.
That said, a reviewer can only review the equipment he or she has access to. Even then, many reviewers have to turn down a lot of reviews because reviews are normally a net negative and thus we can only afford to subsidize so many of these things per year. If you don't like that fact, start funding reviewers.
If the D-Link switches would just keep on trucking like all those 3Coms and HPs all the way from the 1990s I'd really wouldn't have such a big beef with them.
I did a count the other day. Across my supported base there are a total of 1850 d-link switches. Of those, around 350 are over ten years old. Over 1000 are at least six years old. I've taken some time to talk to other MSPs for the SMB scene and am seeing similar survival rates. So I would have to say that your personal experiences do not match the broader statistics.
You also bring up a bunch of stuff about D-Link that is completely irrelevant to the hardware. Are they perfectly valid reasons to not use D-Link? Yes, but that isn't related to the survivability of the hardware at all.
Nowhere did I say I like D-Link. Nowhere did I recommend D-Link. Truth be told, I wouldn't put new D-Link switches into any of my installs today, mostly for non-hardware related reasons, some of which you highlighted.
You seem unable to disconnect objective discussion of a vendor or product from endorsement of that vendor or product. It seems to me that your worldview is such that unless a vendor or product is actively being slated you feel that a vendor or product is actively being endorsed.
That would be an incorrect assessment of reality on your part.