Meanwhile, in reality, you ignored the following tiny caveats:
* the average price of a 16kW solar PV rig will be around $72480
* 1/10 of that will buy you around 1812 gallons of gas (at $4/gallon)
* a good, fuel-efficient gasoline car with around 50 mpg will drive approximately 90600 miles on that
* at the average of 15000 miles driven per year this will last you around 6 years
* 72 months is easily above the average amount of time that owners hold on to cars (somewhere around 60 months)
Oh and lest we forget, during the day, when your solar rig is producing the most power, is also when you're most like to be out with your car, i.e. not charging it. This effect will be least problematic during the summer (longest day, lowest energy consumption by car), and most problematic during the winter (highest energy consumption by car, and a day most probably too short to get any sunlight on the panels while the car's in the driveway).
I priced the same machine, with 128 cores and 1TB RAM for something like $20K, but with faster components made for gaming use
These boards are nowhere near "components game for gaming use". Either you knew that, which would make you a liar, or you didn't, which would make you an uneducated amateur. Take your pick.
Ok, so desktops are worthless for anything that may rely on memory working. I'm glad no accountant ever does work on desktops. Or databases are ever run on desktops. Or developers never use desktops. In any of those circumstances, the memory randomly flipping bits would be horrible failures. Heck, with as much information that goes through your RAM, your machine must have crashed a dozen times while writing that response.
Red herring, ignored.
I've stood in a C-level meeting...
Shit happened, you had somebody to blame. Thanks for confirming my point.
Sub/IBM/Dell
Strawman, ignored.
In some instances where the budget was small,
I was talking about multi-million dollar projects, so you're strawmanning again. Good job.
Supermicro
Supermicro doesn't make gaming stuff. They're a serious enterprise-class HW vendor.
We failed over exactly as planned. The repairs fall within budget.
Good for you if failure/fail-over/repair is cheap. I wasn't talking about those cases. I was talking about cases where downtime costs many times the pennies you saved in your purchase.
So you can buy one. I can buy three, and (if the employer is good) shared the savings with staff at the end of the year in bonuses.
Look, you're obviously in a different market than the big-name vendors like Sun/Dell/HP/IBM target. You are also seemingly unaware of the deep discounts they can produce (to the point where they are barely more expensive than your manual Supermicro build is, which, mind you, still isn't "gaming" class hardware you were talking about before). Lastly, if you had been part of a large project, you'd know that software licensing costs usually dwarf the hardware (price out Oracle Enterprise for the rig above and you'll understand why the $200k vs $20k on the hardware was small change).
Now did I say I placed orders from no-name Chinese brands? No. You also haven't checked server memory. Better machines use Crucial. I've seen all kinds of crap shipped with servers directly from the manufacturer. The price for Crucial memory ordered from Crucial.com is less than through the vendor. Hell, unless there's a great sale at BestBuy/TigerDirect/etc, their prices are better.
No, you were talking about gaming-class non-ECC memory. You've shifted the goal post since the start quite a bit. First you were badmouthing ECC, now you're talking about buying server-class memory (doesn't matter from whom) for server-class mainboards.
Go play that stupid game with somebody else.
You obviously have never torn down a server. I've built thousands.
Bullshit and here's why:
The last place I was at paid over $300K for a Sun machine with 128 cores and 1TB RAM. I priced the same machine, with 128 cores and 1TB RAM for something like $20K, but with faster components made for gaming use.
This is such a load of crap it's hard to fathom you had anything to do with server procurement at any point at all. First, you can't (even today) build a 128-core/1TB RAM box using gaming components, so you're looking at a cluster of smaller boxes vs one big box. That impacts the software infrastructure in a big way. For example it's a vastly different affair to run one big DB instance vs a cluster of 12 little ones (not to speak of the extra money you'll spend on these extra instances). Clusters massively complicate administration, backup, replication, disaster recovery, etc.
RAM is different. It's claimed they use ECC for the safety of your data. In practice it's so you can't go to the local computer store to buy more.
Another reason you don't know what you're talking about. ECC absolutely *does* work and bits do flip in memory, which in the absence of ECC can result in data corruption or unplanned machine downtime. I've had the OS detect faulty memory sticks via ECC before.
Corps tend to buy from the manufacturer because "that's where we got the server, and it was expensive."
No, they do that because that way you have a valid support contract and can blame problems on a supplier if stuff goes down the drain (as it often does). Obviously you've never had to stand in front of top-brass and try to explain why your multi-million dollar project fell flat on its face because of a few bucks you've decided to save on some el-cheapo memory sticks.
Box? Well, rackmount for racks, desktop for not-racks. I've seen plenty of people ungracefully stack rackmount boxes on the floor of a corner office, and complain when they need to pull out the bottom one. That's not so different than racks. I've seen people rack mount where they put in a shelf, and then put 10 servers on top of it without ever putting in the rail kits.
It's not exactly the boxes fault when you guys are idiots and stack rack-mount servers.
With only a very few exceptions, they're the same chipsets, using the same technologies.
Have you *ever* had a server motherboard in your hands?
Hell, even the hard drives are gaming, or are making their way there. SCSI was the only way to go, even though SATA overtook the performance long ago. Then they started putting 2.5" SAS drives in, which are laptop SATA drives with a bigger pricetag.
I give up. How could this shit have been upvoted so much?
The performance gap between a 2.5'' server SAS drive vs a 2.5'' laptop SATA drive is *huge*. And that's before we get to the way these things tend to behave in failure scenarios in large-HDD storage arrays (do you even know how a freakin' JBOD works?)
Slashdot Mirror
Meanwhile, in reality, you ignored the following tiny caveats:
* the average price of a 16kW solar PV rig will be around $72480
* 1/10 of that will buy you around 1812 gallons of gas (at $4/gallon)
* a good, fuel-efficient gasoline car with around 50 mpg will drive approximately 90600 miles on that
* at the average of 15000 miles driven per year this will last you around 6 years
* 72 months is easily above the average amount of time that owners hold on to cars (somewhere around 60 months)
Oh and lest we forget, during the day, when your solar rig is producing the most power, is also when you're most like to be out with your car, i.e. not charging it. This effect will be least problematic during the summer (longest day, lowest energy consumption by car), and most problematic during the winter (highest energy consumption by car, and a day most probably too short to get any sunlight on the panels while the car's in the driveway).
You originally wrote:
I priced the same machine, with 128 cores and 1TB RAM for something like $20K, but with faster components made for gaming use
These boards are nowhere near "components game for gaming use". Either you knew that, which would make you a liar, or you didn't, which would make you an uneducated amateur. Take your pick.
Ok, so desktops are worthless for anything that may rely on memory working. I'm glad no accountant ever does work on desktops. Or databases are ever run on desktops. Or developers never use desktops. In any of those circumstances, the memory randomly flipping bits would be horrible failures. Heck, with as much information that goes through your RAM, your machine must have crashed a dozen times while writing that response.
Red herring, ignored.
I've stood in a C-level meeting...
Shit happened, you had somebody to blame. Thanks for confirming my point.
Sub/IBM/Dell
Strawman, ignored.
In some instances where the budget was small,
I was talking about multi-million dollar projects, so you're strawmanning again. Good job.
Supermicro
Supermicro doesn't make gaming stuff. They're a serious enterprise-class HW vendor.
We failed over exactly as planned. The repairs fall within budget.
Good for you if failure/fail-over/repair is cheap. I wasn't talking about those cases. I was talking about cases where downtime costs many times the pennies you saved in your purchase.
So you can buy one. I can buy three, and (if the employer is good) shared the savings with staff at the end of the year in bonuses.
Look, you're obviously in a different market than the big-name vendors like Sun/Dell/HP/IBM target. You are also seemingly unaware of the deep discounts they can produce (to the point where they are barely more expensive than your manual Supermicro build is, which, mind you, still isn't "gaming" class hardware you were talking about before). Lastly, if you had been part of a large project, you'd know that software licensing costs usually dwarf the hardware (price out Oracle Enterprise for the rig above and you'll understand why the $200k vs $20k on the hardware was small change).
Now did I say I placed orders from no-name Chinese brands? No. You also haven't checked server memory. Better machines use Crucial. I've seen all kinds of crap shipped with servers directly from the manufacturer. The price for Crucial memory ordered from Crucial.com is less than through the vendor. Hell, unless there's a great sale at BestBuy/TigerDirect/etc, their prices are better.
No, you were talking about gaming-class non-ECC memory. You've shifted the goal post since the start quite a bit. First you were badmouthing ECC, now you're talking about buying server-class memory (doesn't matter from whom) for server-class mainboards. Go play that stupid game with somebody else.
You obviously have never torn down a server. I've built thousands.
Bullshit and here's why:
The last place I was at paid over $300K for a Sun machine with 128 cores and 1TB RAM. I priced the same machine, with 128 cores and 1TB RAM for something like $20K, but with faster components made for gaming use.
This is such a load of crap it's hard to fathom you had anything to do with server procurement at any point at all. First, you can't (even today) build a 128-core/1TB RAM box using gaming components, so you're looking at a cluster of smaller boxes vs one big box. That impacts the software infrastructure in a big way. For example it's a vastly different affair to run one big DB instance vs a cluster of 12 little ones (not to speak of the extra money you'll spend on these extra instances). Clusters massively complicate administration, backup, replication, disaster recovery, etc.
RAM is different. It's claimed they use ECC for the safety of your data. In practice it's so you can't go to the local computer store to buy more.
Another reason you don't know what you're talking about. ECC absolutely *does* work and bits do flip in memory, which in the absence of ECC can result in data corruption or unplanned machine downtime. I've had the OS detect faulty memory sticks via ECC before.
Corps tend to buy from the manufacturer because "that's where we got the server, and it was expensive."
No, they do that because that way you have a valid support contract and can blame problems on a supplier if stuff goes down the drain (as it often does). Obviously you've never had to stand in front of top-brass and try to explain why your multi-million dollar project fell flat on its face because of a few bucks you've decided to save on some el-cheapo memory sticks.
Box? Well, rackmount for racks, desktop for not-racks. I've seen plenty of people ungracefully stack rackmount boxes on the floor of a corner office, and complain when they need to pull out the bottom one. That's not so different than racks. I've seen people rack mount where they put in a shelf, and then put 10 servers on top of it without ever putting in the rail kits.
It's not exactly the boxes fault when you guys are idiots and stack rack-mount servers.
With only a very few exceptions, they're the same chipsets, using the same technologies.
Have you *ever* had a server motherboard in your hands?
Hell, even the hard drives are gaming, or are making their way there. SCSI was the only way to go, even though SATA overtook the performance long ago. Then they started putting 2.5" SAS drives in, which are laptop SATA drives with a bigger pricetag.
I give up. How could this shit have been upvoted so much? The performance gap between a 2.5'' server SAS drive vs a 2.5'' laptop SATA drive is *huge*. And that's before we get to the way these things tend to behave in failure scenarios in large-HDD storage arrays (do you even know how a freakin' JBOD works?)