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They take all that commodity hardware and figured out how to make nice high-density systems for you. Stop trying to figure out how to do it yourself. They've done the hard work and (in my personal opinion) have absolutely outstanding support (before and after the sale). I'm just a happy customer.

Why buy Linux from a traditionally Windows-only integrator with little Linux experience? There's plenty of very skilled Linux hardware integrators out there. I'm a shill for my favorite, Silicon Mechanics.

Absolutely none of that explains why they can't refund you the cost of the license if you wipe the drive.

Duh, it's because it's a pain in the ass and only about 17 people in the whole freaking country would want to do so and get the refund. PC manufacturers have no obligation to set up a special process to attend to the desires of the vanishingly small % of the population that wants a bare metal PC. For the segment that actually has a significant number of users that want bare metal machines, the server market, there are plenty of machines available. See my favorite white box provider, here for an example.

It's not free for a company to process refunds. Companies have clearly decided there is no money in offering bare metal machines. The segment of the market that actually cares about not paying the windows tax is small enough that it can be ignored. If it wasn't, you'd be able to buy bare metal machines, because someone would think they can make money doing so.

Sorry, but it's just a reality that there aren't that many people who care about this issue.

but their ability to exert lock-in in the medium term is pretty weak

Which is related to their strength, for me. I use them precisely because of the short term availability. We ran a test job just today on their service to test the scalability of a routine. Bought 20 2 core machines for 4 hours for I think $64 or so. I'd have to have at least 4 big multi-core servers lying around idle to have that available for a test bed, best case about $12,000 for the bunch (I've priced them in the last month, this is the best choice I found. That's 4 separate servers in a single 2U chassis. I have several boxes from these guys, they are very solid, are 2/3 the price of Dell, and don't need a blade cabinet.)

I wouldn't use EC2 for long term use, but for short term, or speculative use, it's a pretty good deal. I've found them to be pretty stable and easy to use.

Yup. If you want to make your dollar go further, strongly consider these guys. I have foudn there gear to be as good as Dell's, and their techs more knowledgable. For an office solution, possibly one or two of these would be a great way to start.

Yup. If you want to make your dollar go further, strongly consider these guys. I have foudn there gear to be as good as Dell's, and their techs more knowledgable. For an office solution, possibly one or two of these would be a great way to start.

Sounds like it's time for a new third party vendor. I heard about Silicon Mechanics at OSCon; I don't know if they have what your clients need at prices they'll be happy with, but they'll never push Windows!

(I have no experience with the company, they just sound good to me.)

The one thing I will note about rackmount servers is that they are all very noisy. For home installation, a desktop chassis will nearly always fit your needs and will be much quieter and more power-efficient than a rackmount. I recently replaced my home server with about $850 in parts from newegg. If you're interested in making a quiet desktop, take a look at SilentPCReview.

If you're set on a rackmount server, I've been very happy with Silicon Mechanics, but their cheapest machine is still ~$1000.

Well, universitys should start buying things that will help their students do exactly that. SanForms are just one option. There are many and it's a benifit that any place with many desktop users (schools, companys and the like) should invest in. Being able to have server side snapshots (the snapshot package does all the revision control automagically) can save tons of time and money and can pay for itself.

Brad at LiveJournal recommends Silicon Mechanics. I know other people who have been very happy with them as well. Their hardware is reliable, their prices are great, and so is their support.

Check out this thread on his blog for more commentary.

I'm pretty sure LiveJournal handles more load than most web sites run by the average slashdotter.

shoe

I think too that the end is near for Sun... They're too top-heavy, too many competitors in the market they're in who have been doing this for a while.

If you want cheap rackmounts: http://rackmountsetc.com/
if you want good rackmounts: http://www.siliconmechanics.com/ (wikimedia bought their latest servers from there)
(check out these little bastards: http://www.siliconmechanics.com/c316/dual-opteron. php )

Yes, from webhostingtalk.com

Let's not forget, however, that the kids who buy dedicated machines to colo are usually the same kids who run business services for the local mom and pops, and who, as a whole, have been a large community of dell 1U buyers.

So I give it to Sun to actually recognize their market.

An advice for Sun:

Jonathan, if you want the geeks to take you seriously, come and open a slashdot account and post here. You'll get your boots dirty, but at least you'll know what it feels like in the trenches.

I think too that the end is near for Sun... They're too top-heavy, too many competitors in the market they're in who have been doing this for a while.

If you want cheap rackmounts: http://rackmountsetc.com/
if you want good rackmounts: http://www.siliconmechanics.com/ (wikimedia bought their latest servers from there)
(check out these little bastards: http://www.siliconmechanics.com/c316/dual-opteron. php )

Yes, from webhostingtalk.com

Let's not forget, however, that the kids who buy dedicated machines to colo are usually the same kids who run business services for the local mom and pops, and who, as a whole, have been a large community of dell 1U buyers.

So I give it to Sun to actually recognize their market.

An advice for Sun:

Jonathan, if you want the geeks to take you seriously, come and open a slashdot account and post here. You'll get your boots dirty, but at least you'll know what it feels like in the trenches.

Single processor itaniums for under 3000$
http://www.siliconmechanics.com/i2190/itanium-serv er.php?cat=352

Montecito, coming in 6 months. Running 2 cores >2Ghz frequency, AND adds multithreading to micture at sametime, takes the itaniums worst performance hurdle in those integer apps that itanium cares about by making a dedicated 1MB L2 instruction cache for each cores.

Now I'm doing some code generation stuff. Itanium is great for code generation target it has lots of facilities to get great performance out of it. However, there exists a LOT of ugly spagetti code that is given to compiler and say compile this and give us performance. The ugly spagetti is slower that properly designed code on *ALL* platforms however it hurts itanium most by not being able to guess and do out of order execution, and lower clockspeed. And based on what I've seen on university students coding I can say that the problem is growing all the time...

Now I've found that Itanium is great target for the stuff that I make a code generator for.

Silicon Mechanics sells the same box as well under the nServ A400 name.

Silicon Mechanics sells the same box as well under the nServ A400 name.

On the note of full machines (and yes, this is somewhat of a shameless plug for silicon mechanics), most of our customers come back because of the quality of service. Our prices tend to be reasonable, but every one of our customers (especially the small ones like wikimedia and livejournal) will tell you that customer service and support is what keeps them coming back. If you're not building machines in-house, no matter where you buy your machines, as a business, a large part of the equation must include the quality of support you get if/when something goes wrong (because something will always eventually go wrong if you have enough hardware).

As someone else said earlier, smaller companies tend to be willing to go the extra mile to keep their customers happy, and that's worth a lot.

We've been getting disk arrays like the DS6000 for months now... for example:

RocketSTOR R2221
or
Silicon Mechanics SM-316RX

Anyway, Silicon Mechanics is a small-but-growing systems integrator (with some pretty large-name clients, but I won't drop names at the moment). We're (very) linux friendly (but sell plenty of Windows-based machines, too), specialize in 1u servers and our clients tend to think we offer the best support in the business. We're also pretty competitive price-wise (although there's no way we can compete with a build-it-yourself project, you do get what you pay for).

So we've focused on a different market. There is no "Dell or Compaq" in the server market - sure they sell rackmount machines, but they can't get the same discounts on them as they do on desktop hardware, so small companies like us can compete with the "big guys" (and we usually come out below their prices). We also offer better quality workmanship and customized modifications (something that can't always be said of our competitors) - the case manufacturers don't always understand that 1/16 of an inch tall or wide can make a difference between "fits" and "doesn't fit" in a rack, or that certain pieces of metal sticking up might short out certain motherboards.

Blades? Lots of them out now:

Sun
RLX
Silicon Mechanics
HP
Dell
IBM