I don't know if I've told you guys this story before but if I have feel free
to delete.
Back around 2006-2007 I was teaching at NBC News in 30 Rock. One of the guys I
was teaching was ex-Saturday Night Live staff and asked me if I wanted to eat
lunch on the SNL set. Well duh...After lunch we went and looked at the (then)
30 year archive of SNL which was on XServe RAID. I've got to hand it to Apple,
those old RAID chassis looked great, brushed aluminum and blue blinky lights,
great look.Anyway I'm being all positive about a competitor's storage "I bet
this thing is easy to use."To which they replied "Yeah, not so much."So I tried
"Well, I guess its really powerful."They replied "Not really."Okaaaay, "Well
it must have been really cheap.""Nope.""So there must be a lot of space?""Oh
no, theres more per chassis in your arrays."
"So why do you have it then?""Well, you guys don't support Mac." Which had been
true but had recently changed and I told them that.
"Great, this piece of *&^% is OUTTA HERE!"
So we sat down and mapped out what they needed to replace what they had with a
40 or 50% increase in space. We really did it up, figured out all the cables
and servers and UPS units, the whole bit. Turned out to be around $2 million,
give or take a bit.
At that time NBC had a deal for 50% off, no matter what our price was, they
paid half. Except I didn't know that so the quote I made was full price. They
took it to their sales guy and said "We want this (I'd even included part
numbers) and this is what we'll pay." with my prices which were, in fact MSRP.
About 6 months later I'm at a big work dinner at a trade show and somebody
calls out to me. A guy standing near me says "You're Curt Raymond?" I allowed
that I was "The guy who sold SNL their new storage?" I didn't sell it, I
architected it, but whatever. He says "I bought a boat on the commission from
that sale, let me buy you a drink."
He bought a boat, I got a beer...
-Curt
On Wednesday, March 18, 2020, 11:06:16 AM EDT, Dan Penoff via Mercedes
<mercedes@okiebenz.com> wrote:
I rarely hear my fans unless I’m rendering video, and even then not that much.
As Jim said, I hear my hard drives more than my fans.
There were rack mount versions sort of until 2010 - the Xserve products, but I
don’t think any of them were as powerful as the cheesegraters. At least not
past the 3,1.
I had a couple of these and an Xserve RAID in my garage some years back. They
were horribly inefficient and produced massive amounts of heat as one would
expect from an enterprise grade server. However, I did like the 14TBs of
storage on the Xserve RAID! That thing was a beast.
I retired them and sold them off. It was a silly exercise on my part,
fortunately, I got them cheap as working pulls from a local parochial school
that was upgrading their infrastructure so I didn’t lose any money in the deal.
-D
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