NC510C fan reliablity

[mastsrl]

Hello,
i've been looking at installing a couple of this NICs in a mission-critical scenario, upon reading the quickspecs i notice it features a -very cheap looking- 2-wire fancooler.

judging from my experiencies with small rimless fans on motherboard northbridges(busted after 1 year of 24x7 operation) and the importance of where this will be installed(after all, it's a server, so, 24x7 operation) i'm having concerns about the reliability and durability of said cooling-solution.

even worse, as it's 2-wire there's no fan speed sense/monitor or core processor temperature monitor that i can see in the driver so i'll never know if the fan went poof and the NIC is overheating until i begin experiencing network errors/data corruption.

can someone from HP shed light on this?

[Sylvain Gelinas 2]

Interesting thread...

Mission critical better use multiple NIC with teaming / failover and this one does not support it.

For me too, NIC with fan is a no go...

Comparing with Dell, 2950 server offer Intel 10g NIC that have heatsink without fan and support teaming /failover with Intel Proset driver...

[WCReinert]

I completely agree. For this level of reliability, you must have teamed nic's with alerting. The cooling on the entire system is mission critical. Use the best components you can get. I don't build my own, but I do specify everything I need. If you need financial justifications, proceed with the associated expenses with a failure.

wcreinert

[mastsrl]

the reliability will be provided by a 2-server cluster, component-level high-availability is not desired nor practical with this NIC (the server required to support 2 of theses NICs at full bus speed plus the other boards -requires 3 pcie x8 electrical- the solution needs is practically nonexistant or prohibitive.
Besides, putting 2 "wonky" parts in HA due to reliability concerns over one of them won't make a good solution as that's a simple stop-gap that doesn't solves the underlying problem(i.e: i have a device that has a MTBF of one month, so i put 2 of them to have failover. Which is not a solution as i need a device with a MTBF of 12 months)

So i'm back to my original question, ¿how reliable is the NC510C fan?, i want to hear from ppl that have been using them for months or more about how they cope with fan wear, grit(even in a clean datacenter grit forms in the fans), if they had any failures, etc