Musings on hardware prices

Thu Aug 18 21:54:24 PDT 2005

Alvin Oga wrote:

>On Thu, 18 Aug 2005, Michael T. Halligan wrote:
>
>  
>
>>>$200	generic 2U rackmount case
>>>$250	generic dual-xeon mb
>>>$300	2x Xeon-2G	( Xeon-2.8 @ $250 )
>>>$280	2GB DDR ecc
>>>$600	seagate 300GB sata 
>>>$100	misc fanc
>>>-----
>>>$1730  ( cheaper for them to buy hw and rent the fractional ds-3 ?? )
>>>	- add additional custom widget costs as needed
>>> 
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>Ahh, typos and unclear statements on my part.   The processors are 
>>actually Dual Xeon 3ghz procs with 2mb cache.
>>
>>The $1200 per month is our base cost for leasing all 10 servers from 
>>(cough) dell, with a $1 buyout,
>>    
>>
>
>that's not too bad costwise, but its dell, and if something goes wrong,
>its cheaper/faster to get a new box than it is to get dell warranty to
>replace the bad part ... 
>  
>

Yeah, Dell is pretty miserable.  I never buy any spiffy warranties from 
Dell except for when somebody
made the mistake of buying Dell storage products, and in general buy 
10-15% more than we need for
that reason.  When you pay for the 4 hour response-time, they (Unisys) 
tends to be pretty good.
Unfortunately, everything before means some jerk with a 20 page long 
scripts as to why you shouldnt'
get a replacement.

The way I look at it, the cheap dell servers (sc1425s) are better 
quality than buying your own components
(which really, really sucks to do.. especially if you have to do a lot 
of them)  and building your own whitebox..
At surprisingly much better prices.

>>including rack-space, power, and 
>>"extras" (fractional
>>switch, console server, remote PDU, etc costs).
>>    
>>
>
>if they include that with the costs ... thats nice but i guess it'd depend
>on which colo where its located
>
>hard to beat dell's pricing ... ( a semi-monopoly w/ the big 3 boyz )
>
>  
>
Well, what I'm saying, is that price of $1200 per month includes my 
costs for the datacenter & related
gear (I host a few racks @ a couple of datacenters). That's also before 
a fair mark-up, any setup fees, and
management contracts, etc.

>>I'm not so sure about that. 5 years ago I purchased 200 valinux servers, 
>>really haggling on the price.
>>    
>>
>
>they expensive for its time .. now, every tom-dick-n-harry-pc-shop has 
>the same parts for cheaper than their cousin
>

Back in the day, VALinux was great. Reasonable prices, quick 
turnarounds, and they were really interested in
going the extra mile.. I liked to support them because they put so many 
great projects into the OSS world, alike SystemImager,
and nfsroot boot. Nowadays, though, as california digital, they're in a 
different (and more viable) niche.

For the most part, I don't deal with small shops, way too many 
headaches.. It's fun to go into small shop that happens
to build rackservers, and say "I need 50 servers with these specs, what 
kind of a price can you give me?" and have them
show you their price sheet and multiply by 100. I do deal with one local 
smaller vendor, monkeybrains (they're GREAT for
very quick emergency requirements).