The cost of these (per CPU) is at least comparable, if not better. ~$1100 per blade (read machine). The idea here is to have most of the company desktops centrally managed. Even though initially the idea wasn't one of saving money, I think they've done a good job in making the pricing comparable to a desktop.
These things are great. I wouldn't replace my desktop box with one, but I bought a ton of them for our streaming/web clusters at work. Since we colo our equipment, rackspace costs can get really high. With the clearcubes we fit 8 streaming/web boxes in 3U worth of space. With the cost of each CC blade running between $900 and $1200 you can throw tons of these behind a load balancer without killing your budget.
They do have some issues though:
No redundant power supplies.
They're rumored to have a field installable hack that changes the Cat5 C-Port port (the C-Port is the thing your monitor/mouse/etc connect to) into an additional NIC, but by doing so, you disable console access.
You have to have the CC cage (it houses the blades) to do a non-network OS install.
You have to use USB to get a CD or floppy drive.
For OS installs you have to either ghost an OS to the HD, or use PXE and ghost to do a network install.
I've asked them if they would do a pseudo-server class version of the ClearCube. Even if they take up 2 blade slots for a server version you can still get a higher density (there are 8 blade slots in each chassis) in 3U than you could
with 1U servers.
If they could give me a dual NIC version that still had the console port on it I would be very happy.
If they integrated an Outlook box into the cage (or at least a C-Port to KVM dongle) I would be ecstatic.
If they did a (2 blade sized) server version with dual procs, dual nics, lots-'o-ram, scsi and a pci slot (or PCI to Fibre port) I would switch over just about everything in my streaming architectures to them.
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The cost of these (per CPU) is at least comparable, if not better. ~$1100 per blade (read machine). The idea here is to have most of the company desktops centrally managed. Even though initially the idea wasn't one of saving money, I think they've done a good job in making the pricing comparable to a desktop.
Oh yeah, they also support Linux too!
These things are great. I wouldn't replace my desktop box with one, but I bought a ton of them for our streaming/web clusters at work. Since we colo our equipment, rackspace costs can get really high. With the clearcubes we fit 8 streaming/web boxes in 3U worth of space. With the cost of each CC blade running between $900 and $1200 you can throw tons of these behind a load balancer without killing your budget.
They do have some issues though:
No redundant power supplies.
They're rumored to have a field installable hack that changes the Cat5 C-Port port (the C-Port is the thing your monitor/mouse/etc connect to) into an additional NIC, but by doing so, you disable console access.
You have to have the CC cage (it houses the blades) to do a non-network OS install.
You have to use USB to get a CD or floppy drive.
For OS installs you have to either ghost an OS to the HD, or use PXE and ghost to do a network install.
I've asked them if they would do a pseudo-server class version of the ClearCube. Even if they take up 2 blade slots for a server version you can still get a higher density (there are 8 blade slots in each chassis) in 3U than you could with 1U servers.
If they could give me a dual NIC version that still had the console port on it I would be very happy.
If they integrated an Outlook box into the cage (or at least a C-Port to KVM dongle) I would be ecstatic.
If they did a (2 blade sized) server version with dual procs, dual nics, lots-'o-ram, scsi and a pci slot (or PCI to Fibre port) I would switch over just about everything in my streaming architectures to them.