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A Quarter-Million Dollar Box For A Free OS
popeyethesailor writes: "According to a CNET story, the server startup Egenera will be debut its high end Linux servers for financial services customers, running Red Hat Linux.
An earlier CNETstory details their design." That's a hefty pricetag, but the companies they hope to sell to ("market--financial-services companies and service providers") aren't shy about investing in tools. Of course, an S/390 isn't cheap either, no matter how many GNU/Linux images it's running ;)
Could somebody please explain to me where the $250,000 value is? Is this just another case of bad allocation of venture capital? The $250,000 is the BASE price of a system that can hold up to 24 cpu boards that CAN be connected to a network or CAN be connected to a drive array. The stated purpose in the article is to provide redundancy for failover. The only cool thing I can see is that if a cpu fails, another cpu will assume its name, characteristics and storage space. What wasn't clear was whether or not all 24 CPU boards were redundant, or whether you could have several redundant machines within the same "cabinet." But there wasn't anything really magical going on here. These boards would contain either 2 or 4 high-end processors (just over 1 GHz). I can see a price tag of maybe $40,000 or something, but certainly nowhere near the order they are asking. Anybody have any insight on this?
GreyPoopon
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Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
Actually it's more like a really dense server farm.
Possible markets? The only thing that really comes to mind for me is ISPs. This could replace racks of essentially standalone machines quite nicely. But of course that's not the best market to go after right now.
I'm wondering if more conventional companies would go for this. There are lots of companies that have a ridiculous number of little servers floating around. If they had been deployed on a beast like this from the start then they could have saved a lot of money. But now that they have all these little servers, it's hard to imagine them throwing them all out and replacing them with one box.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
This is a verry good trend when you stop to think about it.
One of the key issue technical column writers have been b!tching about is that Linux lacks enterprise server credibility.
With Linux driving mainframes and massive Credit Card / insurance company type machines who could complain about Linux's capabilities to handle their buisness demands. (if it can balance the budget for a fortune 500, it can host your stupid ASP/Intranet/fileserver/DB)
Think about the (Ugh! I'm gonna be sick) marketing angle... the average small buisness, or even home user, can have access to the same toys as multi-billion dollar corporations and goverments. (barring the obvious memmory and other hardware limits, this is about perception after all)
And it's not about a free OS. It's about the ability to develop the app on a PC and recompile it to run on a computer that makes Deep Thought look like Rain Man. And on top of all that the big system will work just like any other linux box running X. So it's easy to administer (wow! Who would have thought to say that about Linux!!)
I would rather be ashes than dust!
The labor component of TCO (the biggest) is inversely proportional to the population of people who know about and can support the system. As more and more programmers/sysadmin get "on board" with Linux, TCO goes down.
This is also called "lock-in", the primary value of a software product is not intrinsic, it's how many people know about and use your system. It works very much like rock music... the more well known it is, the more popular it becomes (even if it is god awful). Of course, in software it's double powerful beacuse people familar with the software make other software that is dependent on the base software, thus creating a multiplier to this effect which is so very powerful.
NT and Office have a "low" TCO, since one can *hire* people off the streets to administer and use these products without additional raining. Hopefully Linux will be the TCO leader by saturating the sysadmin market from the bottom up. If sysadmins perfer Linux over NT, then Linux will eventually have the lower labor component of the TCO.
Much of my training was on Linux at home on Redhat5.1 and I have a job as an admin on Solaris. What is your point? If I did that on Windows I would have had to buy NT + C++ and VB compilers and Access, and SQL server on a modern machine. I did this on a 166Mz. Training costs on Linux are nil as I created a training environment for myself on Linux. Apache C and Postgres. Do you find it surprising I can do Solaris and Informix(and this is just similar)? Even a $1000 hit at the training stage raises labor cost a bunch. Free software lowers the cost all the way from traing to production as well as licence management overhead that bits us in the ass every year. It just goes to show you do not know the implications
If software prices are trivial why don't vendors just raise the price? If I were a stock holder.......
How much horsepower does each of those virtual servers get? It can't be that much. $500/server would be too much if it was only 100 MIPS.