custom hw vs cots

Wed Aug 24 00:29:24 PDT 2005

hi ya

On Tue, 23 Aug 2005, Michael T. Halligan wrote:

> That's fair :) Excuse me if I come off confrontational

it's good, in my book, to have an strong opinion on what one
thinks is the "right way" for them

but, but, but it does NOT mean it's the right way for others 
to do the same way

> Interesting.  My approach would have been quite different, however. I'd
> have found a manufacturer who already made power supplies, give them

like i said...  there was NO 1U power supplies back than
and i went around to say 50 power supply manufacturers to find out
who's making a 1U sized ps
	- 3-6 mon's later, all hell broke loose w/ 1U rackmounts

the problem with big-boys in an 25 year reackmount market is that
they move slow, and they have their SBC ( single board coputers )
marked up to selling to telco and medical markets, so they
didn't need a new *.com market to tell them we need "1Us"

there was only 1 or 2 manufacturers of 1U chassis back than

> Until 3 years ago, Dell purchased their chassis from Synnex I believe.

dell outsources their specs and designs to outsiders, ( mechanical
designers ) and is manufactured/built/assembled offshore ( you can
guess where ) and they import it back to their hq and than ups' out 
to their customers

> IBM,  I'm pretty sure, still buys their chassis from an asian supplier..

i think they have their own chassis and they license others to use
it ( intel, dell, etc )

> I know a company
> that sells thousands IBM-equivalent servers without the IBM logo, that 

that's highly probable

> How could there possibly be any good reason to design your own blade 
> system?

it's a long and detailed story and reasoning and big gambles...
and customers ... and r/d budgets.. and forecasting ... blah .. blah

> I'm still not sold that Blades are a good idea. 

yup ... but i think it's gonna pick up speed .. 

> Power is expensive,
> very expensive.

blades uses no more power than 1Us and in fact, should be using
less power than 1Us of equivalent combined number of units

> Is gigE necessary? For what reasons? If it's throughput, then you should 
> look into Myrinet or Quadrics.

gigE is fast enough to keep up with disks ...

100Mbps is too slow for scsi/ide disks

myrinet/et.al are too expensive for the same price/performance/reliability

> 16 disks on one motherboard is a bad solution. 

bingo !!!

 Managed Jbods, or a SAN 
> with their own controllers are
> probably better ideas.

yup... so than who provides JBODs on their own controller and for that
matter own cpu/memory/gigE

> >- 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 > > 

> Really depends on the 100TB. Speed, reliability, or just space?

performance, costs, failure rates, etc ..

> Disk storage solutions might be one where
> building your own solution isn't too bad...

bingo !!

> Mainly after doing a lot of
> research on disk prices/margins. Still, you just answered your own
> question about marketing, sales, support, etc.

yup... so we minimize our marketing/sales/advertise/tradeshow budgets :-)

>  I'm sure you've realized
> that unless you sell N of these, your margins approach zero

my dumb rule ... we must be profitable on each sale/project

if the customers wants "1" ... they better have the budget for that "1"
or a damm good reason why they cannot buy from COTS ( dell/hp/ibm/etc )

> and you need to make it up with services or consulting.

we always make our $$$ on that ... that is where the $$$ is ...

parts costs is free by comparison

>  Perhaps partnering with
> a larger provider, and getting a good VAR discount

VAR/VAD has that 30year old mentality and want 90% discount
and net-90  ( 90/90 syndrome )

unfortunately, most major corp buyers have their favorite VAR/VADs
and we must wait till they get tired of their suppliers and find
alternative vendors and solutions

c ya
alvin