I love this thread because it reminds me of the rollicking glory days of Usenet.
Look I offer my perspective on the pricing thing, since I buy a fair amount of Unix servers for my company and one of my office mates buys all the HP/Dell crap for the Windows team - sometimes those of us in big fat bloated Fortune 500s don't have time to chase after the last $250 in "slop" of overpriced RAM or harddisks. I'm working on a deal to buy 20 ultra24s for my site, because some of these fools use Ultra 1s and Ultra 5s for about 10 years now and that makes me cry. I don't have (any) control over the purchasing cycle so all I can say is "buy this Sun HW" and hope they don't deliver the wrong spec. If I bought "white box" desktops, I wouldn't have any control over the outcome. Maybe you have the time to sit on top of pricegrabber.com and find that one vendor that's offering it for x amount cheaper (egghead.com is cool). But consider some have more money than time, so companies like Big Blue get "exclusive supplier deals" and then charge $2000 for 2GB SCSI disks that go into their RS/6000s. Yes my friends, for-profit companies do things like this all day long, and I've heard from friends that big wall street companies run their business on creaky old boxes that most of us would laugh at if we saw them posted on craigslist.org or ebay.com In my personal life, yes I am looking for that 4-socket, dual/quad core Tyan motherboard to run my home x86 opensolaris box when the price is right. But if you cry about the difference between pricing in "enterprise hardware" and "commodity hardware" on sale at Frys, that lets me know you don't purchase that much enterprise hardware in the course of a year. I hope your company lets you buy from whoever you chose, and you succeed in getting praise and a raise for your wisdom. And those of you who love Ultra 10s, right now there is someone on craigslist who can help you out. That 1GB max RAM is a deal-breaker for me. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
