Musings on hardware prices

Fri Aug 19 03:41:12 PDT 2005

On Thu, Aug 18, 2005 at 10:31:23PM -0700, Alvin Oga wrote:
> 
> hi ya
> 
> On Thu, 18 Aug 2005, Michael T. Halligan wrote:
> 
> > Yeah, Dell is pretty miserable.
> 
> yup.. cheap but sometimes good .. sometimes bad ..
> 
> good for me, if they give up on dell and hireout somebody
> to come fix it for them .. after a few unisys folks just 
> show up and call home and dont(can't) fix anything
> 
> > The way I look at it, the cheap dell servers (sc1425s) are better 
> > quality than buying your own components
> 
> i rather use my own junk than dell ... 
> 	( own junk == stuff i buy from distributors ( not webstores ) )
> 
> > 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).
> 
> yup.. good pricing ..
> 
> > Back in the day, VALinux was great. Reasonable prices, quick 
> > turnarounds, and they were really interested in going the extra mile..
> 
> just penguin left from that era ...
> 
>  I liked to support them because they put so many 
> > great projects into the OSS world, alike SystemImager,
> 
> ez enuff to make
> 
> > and nfsroot boot.
> 
> ez enuff to create 
> 
> > For the most part, I don't deal with small shops, way too many 
> > headaches..
> 
> to me... big shops is bigger headaches ..
> 
> there's no "one shop has everything", just depends on what the part is
> and where you're accustomed to getting it
> 	- i need my parts within an 1hr of placing my orders
> 	and i can usually get it at still below retail pricing
> 
> 	- but fries rebate pricing is next to impossible to match,
> 	except, you have a 50/50 chance you dont get a rebate
> 
> anybody wanting 50 or 100 systems would need to walk in with
> a check in hand vs a PO in our world before we jump an inch
> 
> today's funky meeting was the standard, new kid on the block,
> ie big company wanting to create a biz unit and wants a 1,000
> systems per month on net 30 or net 60+ :-) and yet they're nickel
> and diming for the first 25 prototypes ...
> 	- umm .. what's wrong with this picture ??
> 
> 	( they're collecting part numbers and manufacturers )
> 
> c ya
> alvin

A bit more then 2 years ago I did some calculations, Supermicro against
HP. Supermicro comes just with a 1 year send-in warranty, while HP comes
with 3 years next business day on-site. Did pricing for some pure simple
compute server and the pricing of us at least was like HP being $300 more.
But then you look at service (3 years on-site) and technical options (man
I just LOVE iLO in the HPs), it was a no brainer to go all HP.

Nowadays it is pretty much all HP (http://www.alameda.net/~ulf/colo), we
got about a 100 machines in our two offices, main colocation in Fremont
and failover site in Phoenix.

-- 
Regards, Ulf.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Ulf Zimmermann, 1525 Pacific Ave., Alameda, CA-94501, #: 510-865-0204
You can find my resume at: http://seven.Alameda.net/~ulf/resume.html