I think if you have a well thought out Network Policy (ie the 'Acceptable Use' guidelines) and make a good faith effort to get security info to your user community then you can justify bringing out the big guns to deal with potential problems...if you control the switches and routers in your organization then maybe think about a policy of blocking or turning off ports belonging to systems that fail your basic published security guidelines.
The kicker of course is making a good faith effort at getting timely info out, having a sensible & legible definition of what your security requirements are going to be, etc. Someone needs to decide when something is problematic enough that blocking it from your network is the safest thing to do given the needs of the at large community...this has to be balanced against being too heavy handed.
Any IT manager worth their salt is going to get the system that best solves their problem.
this "vendor's stepchild architecture" happens to be the best platform for doing hardcore computational biology and high-throughput bioinformatics. Sun? too slow. HP? no software. SGI? good but expensive and I don't need floating point performance. Linux? cool and has potential but I want a system that can handle 12GB RAM.
I'm a huge fan of Digital Unix on alpha. Fast, easy to maintain/admin and not super expensive. I've bought $1M+ worth of their stuff for my group every year for the past several years.
It's all relative though. I know my systems are going to be replaced frequently as faster systems come on the market. Who knows what kind of systems I'll be using a year or two from now...I'll go with the best stuff available at the time. You raise a valid point though-- If I was planning on larger scale purchases with longer expected service times I'd really want to be sure of Compaq's support for the platform. That said though, the more Merced gets delayed, the better Alpha looks.
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I think if you have a well thought out Network Policy (ie the 'Acceptable Use' guidelines) and make a good faith effort to get security info to your user community then you can justify bringing out the big guns to deal with potential problems...if you control the switches and routers in your organization then maybe think about a policy of blocking or turning off ports belonging to systems that fail your basic published security guidelines.
The kicker of course is making a good faith effort at getting timely info out, having a sensible & legible definition of what your security requirements are going to be, etc. Someone needs to decide when something is problematic enough that blocking it from your network is the safest thing to do given the needs of the at large community...this has to be balanced against being too heavy handed.
Any IT manager worth their salt is going to get
the system that best solves their problem.
this "vendor's stepchild architecture" happens to be the best platform for doing hardcore computational biology and high-throughput bioinformatics. Sun? too slow. HP? no software.
SGI? good but expensive and I don't need floating point performance. Linux? cool and has potential but I want a system that can handle 12GB RAM.
I'm a huge fan of Digital Unix on alpha. Fast, easy to maintain/admin and not super expensive. I've bought $1M+ worth of their stuff for my group every year for the past several years.
It's all relative though. I know my systems are going to be replaced frequently as faster systems come on the market. Who knows what kind of systems I'll be using a year or two from now...I'll go with the best stuff available at the time. You raise a valid point though-- If I was planning on larger scale purchases with longer expected service times I'd really want to be sure of Compaq's support for the platform. That said though, the more Merced gets delayed, the better Alpha looks.
-chris