The question isn't the number of users so much as the number of processes and every workstation has at the very least the OS and a few applications running most of the time. E.g. I'm typing this on a dual-core machine which is currently running web browser, email, word processor, file browser, terminal sessions and several background file-transfer tasks. I pull up the CPU utilization though and it's pretty well distributed.
Having done some parallel programming in Fortran back in the mainframe days I have to agree, it's insanely difficult! The only "easy" solution I can think of is, as has been mentioned elsewhere, more intelligent compilers which can identify non-interdependent procedures. It won't be true parallel programming but it will be a lot more so than a purely linear approach.
That said, what the CPU and OS manufacturers have been doing lately does a pretty damn good job of parallelizing things as they stand. You take any heavily loaded multi-proc server, whether it's handling databases, files, web-sites etc. and the CPU utilization is surprisingly well balanced, all things considered. There's also the added advantage that if you do get a runaway process it's MUCH easier to regain control and kill it in a multi-proc system. Then of course there's the whole VM scene which is making things look more and more like a mainframe environment every day...
SuperMicro is probably the best whitebox server you can get these days. That said they are a little pricey, if you're so cash-strapped that you're considering whitebox servers you're probably better off with a DIY.
It has never taken us more than an hour on the phone to get a replacement
And that's where Dell falls down. An hour of my time is worth more than the cost of buying the part new. If I can call HP or Cisco or IBM and only spend 5 minutes getting the part sent out it actually costs less even in the short run, never mind the TVM equation...
Some support is outsourced to India. Much is right here in the US and Europe.
HP's Indian support only comes online for after-hours calls to their 24/7 support lines. And the nice thing is they are NOT glued to a damn script. I've actually called on a server that had 4-hour parts response at around 1am in the morning and the Indian call center picked up immediately. Even better, we didn't know exactly which hardware component was causing the problem and he said it was beyond him as well, so rather than force us to wait for upper level support to arrive here in the US he had the local parts depot just courier over one of everything that could possibly be causing the problem so we could at least get a leg up on it.
It's things like this that make us a huge fan of HP products even if there are cases where they aren't necessarily any better technically than some other co.
The keyword is "sometimes". We have several clients who have Dell corporate accounts and we are actually a Dell reseller, (though we haven't sold anything Dell for years), and I can tell you that even if you're spending the $$$ to have top notch support it's still lousy half the time. For the money they spend on Dell equipment they should have better product and better support. You call HP or Cisco you get a real live human being in just a couple of minutes who actually knows what they are talking about and gets things taken care of pronto. You call Dell support for anything and you can kiss the rest of your day goodbye.
Do you have some sort of source for what you're saying about their LCDs discarding color data? I had a little trouble following your summary of the issue.
I'm not able to find the article any more. It was a couple of years ago when 17in LCD monitors really started to drop in price and Acer suddenly came out with a low end model that was $50 cheaper than anybody else. I was looking for info on it at the time and found a review site that had done some color testing and weren't seeing what they expected to. Front panel controls didn't fix it so they decided to pop the back and see if there was just a bad connection or something. When they did that they noticed that several banks of RAM were missing from the display controller. (The board was laid out for them but it was just bare solder pads).
Now having half the memory layout be empty doesn't mean anything per se, most boards are set up to handle a variety of different density chips with just a couple of jumpers to change. However, when they looked up the part number for the chips that were on there they found that the total memory on the board was only enough for 16-bit color at the native resolution of the panel. That's not something you can say "oops, we had a bad production run, so sorry", you have to actually tweak the controller firmware to ignore the higher end bits of the color info.
Further investigation showed that the specs for the monitor were cleverly worded to say it would "accept" 32-bit color signal and Acer just evaded the question when they were called on it.
So yeah, maybe they just did that on their absolute cheapest low-end model figuring 90% of the population can't visually tell the difference anyway but I've always thought it was a pretty dirty trick. (I've also heard horror stories about their support but don't have any direct experience).
Yep, that would be the silver/white plastic gear, utter crap. And no, I wouldn't recommend NetGear unless budget was so tight you couldn't get anything better, in which case it's the best of the low end equipment. (And yes, I know that's calling the second fattest woman at the bar skinny:).
Sorry, but not Thinkpads either, Lenovo has cut quality on them so fast it'll make your head spin. We have a couple of clients who were standardized on IBM and they're reporting almost 100% failure rate of one sort or another, from bad RAM to loose keys to bad pixels to broken wireless switches. Not a pretty sight.
And since this is about my third post correcting the misinformed I'll go ahead and lay out what we're recommending right now:
Servers = HP Workstations = "whitebox" (either build it yourself or have somebody local do it for you, either way choose quality components and you'll be okay) Laptops = Toshiba Tecra (only the Tecra series! The Satellites and Satellite Pros have dropped in quality the last couple of years and the Qosmio has too many bells and whistles that cause other problems).
Why don't we recommend HP for workstations or laptops? The workstations are not good value for the money (cheap components) and their laptop manufacturing is subcontracted out so while some of the models are great others really are not and there's no way to know which is which until long after they are out of production!
For firewalls we recommend Cisco (not Linksys) or WatchGuard (not the SOHO series though, those have a proprietary VPN client that doesn't play well with others) or if money is tight then Netgear (but not the plastic SOHO series, use the blue metal "business" series) or a "packaged" distro like pfSense or IPcop
For switches we recommend HP or if money is tight then Netgear (again, not the plastic SOHO series; and Cisco is fine too but not worth the cost)
For routers we recommend Cisco
Now, being a non-profit you actually have some different options, like: TechSoup where you can get full warranty Cisco gear for less than a quarter of the new price! Interconnection where you can get whiteboxes for free! nPower where you can get free or very cheap technical assistance with anything!
no company can make money selling quality components locally and compete with the Dell or HP model
That used to be true but Dell has gotten so greedy lately that you actually can build a decent quality white box for less, even allowing fo shipping, labor, time spent ordering parts etc. Now granted that's not if you're just buying from NewEgg or something, but if you're actually in the business and dealing with the distributors directly Dell really isn't a very good deal any more. Too bad really, they used to be hands down our #1 recommendation for machines but the last couple of years their quality (and support) has taken a major nose dive and the prices have gone up!
Even worse, I read an interview with a Dell exec a few months ago where he was asked what Dell planned to do about lagging sales and his response was that they were going to increase the number of options for the case styles and colors to appeal to younger buyers. WTF?!? Upper management obviously has a huge disconnect...
Rumor has it that Michael Dell may be coming back to turn things around but it'll be at least a couple of years before we're going to see any effect from that.
preformatted with FAT32 partitions is a minor problem that is easily fixed
No, it's not. XP installed directly as NTFS has most of the filesystem security set up properly by defult. If you install to FAT32 then convert to NTFS every single thing on the machine is defaulted to wide open file permissions.
And I'm sorry, but any company that decides to make their LCD monitors cheaper by silently removing half the onboard image memory and simply discarding the additional color bits that the video card sends is not a company I would trust. (If you've ever wondered why they color qulity is so poor on Acer LCDs now you know).
I'd rather have the cash. BMW is not what it used to be. I swear the only thing "special" about those cars now is the badge.
That is correct, and directly attributable to Ford Motor Company owning controlling interest for some years now. Same is true for Rover.
(Ironically Jaguar actually got better after Ford took them over.:)
If you want to reply offline using the email address above we can refer you to an industrial monitoring systems specialist who does work for, among other companies, Corning Glass.
box comes with a remote control that can be used to turn the computer off and on. It communicates with a USB receiver
A lot of motherboards have a BIOS option to wake from sleep on USB activity. It's not a true power on/off but pretty close.
(Now if MythTV could just use the other BIOS settings for scheduled power on that would be pretty cool!)
Er, is this a troll?:) How does VMWare solve the submitter's problem? Sure, you could run multiple instances of RDP, but you still have the problem of not having a separate keyboard, video and mouse for each user! Hello? McFly?
Is there some reason you can't just have all of the locks keyed the same?
A - they probably have different equipment in different locations, some of which they may not want everyone to have access to B - when somebody leaves the company they have to rekey every darn one of 'em!
(Yes, there are mastery key configurations which work around some of the above issues but the additional overhead probably makes it a wash in this case)
Back on topic: despite recently announced security flaws, HID actually makes decent card-key equipment. If you have a ton of money and the technical wherewithal to work around the (to my knowledge as-yet-unpatched) security issues their system will do exactly what you want.
Presumably the project maintainer is running the mailing list and (reasonably) moderates it.
No, unfortunately he does not moderate reasonably. We have observed several times where a new user would post about a problem they were having, we would post the fact that it was a bug in SL and how to work around it and our post would simply never appear while others who were having the same problem would continue discussing the issue in confusion.
In fact, if you look at the archies for the SL mailing list you will find very, very few mentions of actual honest to goodness bugs, despite the fact that the product really has quite a few.
We had originally chosen SL a couple of years ago based in part on the rarity of bug complaints in the mailing list but we've slowly learned that this is a sham.:/ This, combined with Mr. Simader's unwillingness to ackowledge either the bugs or developers' attempts to submit patches for them, is costing him his userbase and prompting forks like LedgerSMB, (which we are in the process of evaluating now).
You'd love to believe that I dismissed Nagios without evaluating it, wouldn't you? Well, yes, actually, I do believe that. Or if you did evaluate it you didn't get far enough to even understand how it works.
Do you really really think that major financial corporations would spend money on software and services that they could get for free? Absolutely! I've been in this industry for twenty years and have consulted with many hundreds or organizations. That's hardly the stupidest move I've ever seen the IT department make...
Contrary to the groupthink attitudes of the basement-dwelling Linux Zealots that infest this site, "pointy headed bosses" are NOT the norm, and these corporations are making $$$s because their employees are smart enough to differentiate between immature "hobbyist" software and something robust that you could trust with your bottom line. Er, no, most corporations really don't give a damn about hardware or software. IT is simply a means to an end. You'd be amazed at some of the spit and bailing wire solutions that even Fortune 100 companies have in place as parts of their core business. But they frankly could care less as long as it gets the job done. Bosses in general are not pointy-headed, that's true, but they are also generally not IT geeks. They depend on IT people to determine the best solution-set and there are definitely a lot of pointy-headed IT people out there!
I have to account for every last cent I spend. Hmm, and you're also the evaluator. Lemme guess, you work for a small company, probably a few hundred employees or less, probably a slightly more complex than usual IT infrastructure that's been cobbled together over the years and is a bit unstable. You don't have the funds to buy something like OpenView but you desperately need something to help you manage the fires. Yep, people like you keep my company in business.:)
If Nagios could do what real enterprise monitoring software could do believe me, I would be using it. As it is, it is borderline unusable for all but the most trivial and simple monitoring tasks. Need some more detail here. Nagios can't do everything, but neither can any other application. But my guess is, again, you couldn't figure it out in the first place so you never got that far anyway. OSS is not like commercial software, it is very modular. I'm going to say you downloaded the basic installation package without doing any research on plugins or the available GUI front ends for it. So you're sitting there looking at a ton of configuration files going WTF is this?!? And you poked around at a couple of the samples, got one or two of them to work, but didn't get far enough in the documentation to understand the architecture so when you tried something more complex it didn't work.
Now if you'd been smart and downloaded a few things like that Groundwork Monitor GUI and maybe some plugins relevant to your environment like NRPE-NT (I'm going to be snippy here and assume it's all Windows), and heck, even read a HowTo if you didn't feel like digesting the full documentation then hey presto! It would have worked just fine. (Well, maybe, your posts above don't exactly generate a vote of confidence).
Get back to your basement and carry on with your blinkered 'open sores is best' outlook. Reality will catch up with you in the end... Funny you should mention that, my wife and I have been discussing redoing one end of the house and we were trying to decide whether or not to have a basement level...
Here's the thing, I do understand reality, and I do understand both OSS and commercial software. And about 90% of our clientbase is standardized on Windows and we regularly recommend and implement commercial monitoring systems like HP OpenView (we're an HP reseller so we do tend to be a little biased), but the fact remains that OSS has its place, and for a sufficiently savvy IT staff, or a sufficiently cost-co
would you really trust an open-sores solution in a mission critical environment where real money is at stake
Er, you really don't know anything about Nagios do you?
Try doing a little Googling on Nagios and then see if you can make the FUD a little more subtle next time.
Slashdot Mirror
far fewer simultaneous users than cores
The question isn't the number of users so much as the number of processes and every workstation has at the very least the OS and a few applications running most of the time. E.g. I'm typing this on a dual-core machine which is currently running web browser, email, word processor, file browser, terminal sessions and several background file-transfer tasks. I pull up the CPU utilization though and it's pretty well distributed.
It's the synchronisation.
Having done some parallel programming in Fortran back in the mainframe days I have to agree, it's insanely difficult! The only "easy" solution I can think of is, as has been mentioned elsewhere, more intelligent compilers which can identify non-interdependent procedures. It won't be true parallel programming but it will be a lot more so than a purely linear approach.
That said, what the CPU and OS manufacturers have been doing lately does a pretty damn good job of parallelizing things as they stand. You take any heavily loaded multi-proc server, whether it's handling databases, files, web-sites etc. and the CPU utilization is surprisingly well balanced, all things considered. There's also the added advantage that if you do get a runaway process it's MUCH easier to regain control and kill it in a multi-proc system. Then of course there's the whole VM scene which is making things look more and more like a mainframe environment every day...
Are you talking about desktops or servers with that five minute call time?
Only servers, we don't use/recommend their desktops or laptops at all.
SuperMicro is probably the best whitebox server you can get these days. That said they are a little pricey, if you're so cash-strapped that you're considering whitebox servers you're probably better off with a DIY.
It has never taken us more than an hour on the phone to get a replacement
And that's where Dell falls down. An hour of my time is worth more than the cost of buying the part new. If I can call HP or Cisco or IBM and only spend 5 minutes getting the part sent out it actually costs less even in the short run, never mind the TVM equation...
Some support is outsourced to India. Much is right here in the US and Europe.
HP's Indian support only comes online for after-hours calls to their 24/7 support lines. And the nice thing is they are NOT glued to a damn script. I've actually called on a server that had 4-hour parts response at around 1am in the morning and the Indian call center picked up immediately. Even better, we didn't know exactly which hardware component was causing the problem and he said it was beyond him as well, so rather than force us to wait for upper level support to arrive here in the US he had the local parts depot just courier over one of everything that could possibly be causing the problem so we could at least get a leg up on it.
It's things like this that make us a huge fan of HP products even if there are cases where they aren't necessarily any better technically than some other co.
HP's switches are really nice
And they have a lifetime warranty! Something they really should play up to more in their marketing.
Looks like govliquidations.com belongs to a domain squatter...?
The keyword is "sometimes". We have several clients who have Dell corporate accounts and we are actually a Dell reseller, (though we haven't sold anything Dell for years), and I can tell you that even if you're spending the $$$ to have top notch support it's still lousy half the time. For the money they spend on Dell equipment they should have better product and better support. You call HP or Cisco you get a real live human being in just a couple of minutes who actually knows what they are talking about and gets things taken care of pronto. You call Dell support for anything and you can kiss the rest of your day goodbye.
Do you have some sort of source for what you're saying about their LCDs discarding color data? I had a little trouble following your summary of the issue.
I'm not able to find the article any more. It was a couple of years ago when 17in LCD monitors really started to drop in price and Acer suddenly came out with a low end model that was $50 cheaper than anybody else. I was looking for info on it at the time and found a review site that had done some color testing and weren't seeing what they expected to. Front panel controls didn't fix it so they decided to pop the back and see if there was just a bad connection or something. When they did that they noticed that several banks of RAM were missing from the display controller. (The board was laid out for them but it was just bare solder pads).
Now having half the memory layout be empty doesn't mean anything per se, most boards are set up to handle a variety of different density chips with just a couple of jumpers to change. However, when they looked up the part number for the chips that were on there they found that the total memory on the board was only enough for 16-bit color at the native resolution of the panel. That's not something you can say "oops, we had a bad production run, so sorry", you have to actually tweak the controller firmware to ignore the higher end bits of the color info.
Further investigation showed that the specs for the monitor were cleverly worded to say it would "accept" 32-bit color signal and Acer just evaded the question when they were called on it.
So yeah, maybe they just did that on their absolute cheapest low-end model figuring 90% of the population can't visually tell the difference anyway but I've always thought it was a pretty dirty trick. (I've also heard horror stories about their support but don't have any direct experience).
Yep, that would be the silver/white plastic gear, utter crap. And no, I wouldn't recommend NetGear unless budget was so tight you couldn't get anything better, in which case it's the best of the low end equipment. (And yes, I know that's calling the second fattest woman at the bar skinny :).
experience at 2 companies over the last 4 years with >200 systems per site
Ah, then you probably had a direct corporate account with them. Yes, if you spend enough money you can sometimes get halfway decent service from Dell.
Sorry, but not Thinkpads either, Lenovo has cut quality on them so fast it'll make your head spin. We have a couple of clients who were standardized on IBM and they're reporting almost 100% failure rate of one sort or another, from bad RAM to loose keys to bad pixels to broken wireless switches. Not a pretty sight.
And since this is about my third post correcting the misinformed I'll go ahead and lay out what we're recommending right now:
Servers = HP
Workstations = "whitebox" (either build it yourself or have somebody local do it for you, either way choose quality components and you'll be okay)
Laptops = Toshiba Tecra (only the Tecra series! The Satellites and Satellite Pros have dropped in quality the last couple of years and the Qosmio has too many bells and whistles that cause other problems).
Why don't we recommend HP for workstations or laptops? The workstations are not good value for the money (cheap components) and their laptop manufacturing is subcontracted out so while some of the models are great others really are not and there's no way to know which is which until long after they are out of production!
For firewalls we recommend Cisco (not Linksys) or WatchGuard (not the SOHO series though, those have a proprietary VPN client that doesn't play well with others) or if money is tight then Netgear (but not the plastic SOHO series, use the blue metal "business" series) or a "packaged" distro like pfSense or IPcop
For switches we recommend HP or if money is tight then Netgear (again, not the plastic SOHO series; and Cisco is fine too but not worth the cost)
For routers we recommend Cisco
Now, being a non-profit you actually have some different options, like:
TechSoup where you can get full warranty Cisco gear for less than a quarter of the new price!
Interconnection where you can get whiteboxes for free!
nPower where you can get free or very cheap technical assistance with anything!
no company can make money selling quality components locally and compete with the Dell or HP model
That used to be true but Dell has gotten so greedy lately that you actually can build a decent quality white box for less, even allowing fo shipping, labor, time spent ordering parts etc. Now granted that's not if you're just buying from NewEgg or something, but if you're actually in the business and dealing with the distributors directly Dell really isn't a very good deal any more. Too bad really, they used to be hands down our #1 recommendation for machines but the last couple of years their quality (and support) has taken a major nose dive and the prices have gone up!
Even worse, I read an interview with a Dell exec a few months ago where he was asked what Dell planned to do about lagging sales and his response was that they were going to increase the number of options for the case styles and colors to appeal to younger buyers. WTF?!? Upper management obviously has a huge disconnect...
Rumor has it that Michael Dell may be coming back to turn things around but it'll be at least a couple of years before we're going to see any effect from that.
Dell sends a technician to your site the next day. Next day service is just as good as you would get from a local shop
:)
Hehhehhehheh, good one! Are you employed by Dell or something?
preformatted with FAT32 partitions is a minor problem that is easily fixed
No, it's not. XP installed directly as NTFS has most of the filesystem security set up properly by defult. If you install to FAT32 then convert to NTFS every single thing on the machine is defaulted to wide open file permissions.
And I'm sorry, but any company that decides to make their LCD monitors cheaper by silently removing half the onboard image memory and simply discarding the additional color bits that the video card sends is not a company I would trust. (If you've ever wondered why they color qulity is so poor on Acer LCDs now you know).
I'd rather have the cash. BMW is not what it used to be. I swear the only thing "special" about those cars now is the badge.
:)
That is correct, and directly attributable to Ford Motor Company owning controlling interest for some years now. Same is true for Rover.
(Ironically Jaguar actually got better after Ford took them over.
If you want to reply offline using the email address above we can refer you to an industrial monitoring systems specialist who does work for, among other companies, Corning Glass.
box comes with a remote control that can be used to turn the computer off and on. It communicates with a USB receiver
A lot of motherboards have a BIOS option to wake from sleep on USB activity. It's not a true power on/off but pretty close.
(Now if MythTV could just use the other BIOS settings for scheduled power on that would be pretty cool!)
VMWare
:) How does VMWare solve the submitter's problem? Sure, you could run multiple instances of RDP, but you still have the problem of not having a separate keyboard, video and mouse for each user! Hello? McFly?
Er, is this a troll?
Try XRDP
:)
Try RTFA
XRDP still needs one box per user and that's what the submitter is trying to avoid.
Is there some reason you can't just have all of the locks keyed the same?
A - they probably have different equipment in different locations, some of which they may not want everyone to have access to
B - when somebody leaves the company they have to rekey every darn one of 'em!
(Yes, there are mastery key configurations which work around some of the above issues but the additional overhead probably makes it a wash in this case)
Back on topic: despite recently announced security flaws, HID actually makes decent card-key equipment. If you have a ton of money and the technical wherewithal to work around the (to my knowledge as-yet-unpatched) security issues their system will do exactly what you want.
Presumably the project maintainer is running the mailing list and (reasonably) moderates it.
:/ This, combined with Mr. Simader's unwillingness to ackowledge either the bugs or developers' attempts to submit patches for them, is costing him his userbase and prompting forks like LedgerSMB, (which we are in the process of evaluating now).
No, unfortunately he does not moderate reasonably. We have observed several times where a new user would post about a problem they were having, we would post the fact that it was a bug in SL and how to work around it and our post would simply never appear while others who were having the same problem would continue discussing the issue in confusion.
In fact, if you look at the archies for the SL mailing list you will find very, very few mentions of actual honest to goodness bugs, despite the fact that the product really has quite a few.
We had originally chosen SL a couple of years ago based in part on the rarity of bug complaints in the mailing list but we've slowly learned that this is a sham.
You'd love to believe that I dismissed Nagios without evaluating it, wouldn't you?
:)
Well, yes, actually, I do believe that. Or if you did evaluate it you didn't get far enough to even understand how it works.
Do you really really think that major financial corporations would spend money on software and services that they could get for free?
Absolutely! I've been in this industry for twenty years and have consulted with many hundreds or organizations. That's hardly the stupidest move I've ever seen the IT department make...
Contrary to the groupthink attitudes of the basement-dwelling Linux Zealots that infest this site, "pointy headed bosses" are NOT the norm, and these corporations are making $$$s because their employees are smart enough to differentiate between immature "hobbyist" software and something robust that you could trust with your bottom line.
Er, no, most corporations really don't give a damn about hardware or software. IT is simply a means to an end. You'd be amazed at some of the spit and bailing wire solutions that even Fortune 100 companies have in place as parts of their core business. But they frankly could care less as long as it gets the job done. Bosses in general are not pointy-headed, that's true, but they are also generally not IT geeks. They depend on IT people to determine the best solution-set and there are definitely a lot of pointy-headed IT people out there!
I have to account for every last cent I spend.
Hmm, and you're also the evaluator. Lemme guess, you work for a small company, probably a few hundred employees or less, probably a slightly more complex than usual IT infrastructure that's been cobbled together over the years and is a bit unstable. You don't have the funds to buy something like OpenView but you desperately need something to help you manage the fires. Yep, people like you keep my company in business.
If Nagios could do what real enterprise monitoring software could do believe me, I would be using it.
As it is, it is borderline unusable for all but the most trivial and simple monitoring tasks.
Need some more detail here. Nagios can't do everything, but neither can any other application. But my guess is, again, you couldn't figure it out in the first place so you never got that far anyway. OSS is not like commercial software, it is very modular. I'm going to say you downloaded the basic installation package without doing any research on plugins or the available GUI front ends for it. So you're sitting there looking at a ton of configuration files going WTF is this?!? And you poked around at a couple of the samples, got one or two of them to work, but didn't get far enough in the documentation to understand the architecture so when you tried something more complex it didn't work.
Now if you'd been smart and downloaded a few things like that Groundwork Monitor GUI and maybe some plugins relevant to your environment like NRPE-NT (I'm going to be snippy here and assume it's all Windows), and heck, even read a HowTo if you didn't feel like digesting the full documentation then hey presto! It would have worked just fine. (Well, maybe, your posts above don't exactly generate a vote of confidence).
Get back to your basement and carry on with your blinkered 'open sores is best' outlook. Reality will catch up with you in the end...
Funny you should mention that, my wife and I have been discussing redoing one end of the house and we were trying to decide whether or not to have a basement level...
Here's the thing, I do understand reality, and I do understand both OSS and commercial software. And about 90% of our clientbase is standardized on Windows and we regularly recommend and implement commercial monitoring systems like HP OpenView (we're an HP reseller so we do tend to be a little biased), but the fact remains that OSS has its place, and for a sufficiently savvy IT staff, or a sufficiently cost-co
would you really trust an open-sores solution in a mission critical environment where real money is at stake
Er, you really don't know anything about Nagios do you?
Try doing a little Googling on Nagios and then see if you can make the FUD a little more subtle next time.