I have had experiences with tens of Dell servers with the same model NIC having the same fault. The servers were absolutely under maintenance. I fought with tech support for weeks before I was finally told it was a driver/firmware issue and that I had to work around it (and lose performance for the sake of reliability).
Maybe if I had hundreds of servers Dell would have helped me out. At the scale of tens they told me to take what I got. The Customer got a lower performance solution and nobody anywhere could help them for any amount of money, short of replacing the gear.
That's just a performance issue. I've heard horror stories about reliability-- All the way down to disk firmware and RAID controllers. I consider myself lucky.
But how much effort (or money) do you think it would have taken to fix this issue if the NIC firmware was open source?
And with standard hardware, depending on the model, you might have had the option to add dedicated PCIe NICs for example. Not great, but at least something. Now try that with something proprietary (as in non-standard) like this Oxide system.
Maybe if I had hundreds of servers Dell would have helped me out. At the scale of tens they told me to take what I got. The Customer got a lower performance solution and nobody anywhere could help them for any amount of money, short of replacing the gear.
That's just a performance issue. I've heard horror stories about reliability-- All the way down to disk firmware and RAID controllers. I consider myself lucky.