custom hw vs cots

Tue Aug 23 18:50:08 PDT 2005

hi ya michael

- you're right in most things you're saying for
  cots vs reinventing the wheel

  but since i gave you the impression we prefer
  to "reinvent the wheel" and/or avoid dell/hp/ibm/metoo,
  here's some whacky background info for more
  poking and shaking of the fingers :-)


- in the days before *.com,  there were very few ( 2 )
  vendors of reasonable 1U chassis, so we made our own
  custom chassis per customer requests to solve
  the heat problem of p3-500 and AMD athlons and
  provide more than 1 disk

	- there were 2 very very bad 1u chassis
	from the industry standard rackmount vendors

	- there was NO 1U power supplies so we
	designed our own ... and of course, by 
	the time we finished the prelim designs,
	we could buy $150 prototype 1U power supplies
	which we did and placed orders for more 
	which dropped in price overnight

- now of course, everybody has rackmounts chassis
  and if you look closely, its mostly the same chassis
  re-branded as antoher "me too" vendor
	- there are those that make their own chassis
	( dell, tyan, mb-vendors, ibm, hp, etc )

- for tommorrow's market:

	- we're reinventing the wheel again, for blade
	boxes that will support 10 independent systems
	with 15TB in 4U of space or about 160TB per cabinet

	- i'm again, assuming we'd have to design our
	own custom 24port gigE switch since the budgets
	doesn't allow $$$ for fancy cots 24-port gigE switches

	but, that is the minor hangup for now ...
	where we do twiddle dee.. twiddle dah to see
	who comes up with a cheap 24-port gigE that has
	the sustained performance between any 2 nodes

	- i think plugging 16 disks into one motherboard
	will be serious bottleneck for managing 15TB of disks

- can you/we buy a 100TB system off the shelf ???

	- yes .. but its not cheap ...

	and we're way underpriced so we're hoping to
	get the hw contract

	add back in for the marketing/sales and tradeshow costs
	and we'd be in the same price point as
	everybody else ... ( 100x mark up of hw costs )

	- it's targeted for a major colo facility 

- than add "services" to the custom hardware and hopefully
  everybody are happy campers

c ya
alvin