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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!feed1.news.erols.com!cpk-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!cam-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!howland.erols.net!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news.easystreet.com!not-for-mail From: tedm@agora.rdrop.com (Ted Mittelstaedt) Newsgroups: comp.unix.sco.misc,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.sys.sgi.misc, Subject: Re: no such thing as a "general user community" Date: 5 Mar 1997 07:50:11 GMT Organization: Cool Dudes Inc. Lines: 82 Message-ID: <5fj8jj$sjg$1@easystreet03> References: <331BB7DD.28EC@net5.net> <5fhkv5$8vj$1@halcyon.com> <5fhugj$4q2@paperboy.ids.net> <331CE677.46F5@net5.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: sunnet.portsoft.com X-Newsreader: WinVN 0.92.6+ Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.sco.misc:36000 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:36574 comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:6208 comp.sys.sgi.misc:28847 In article <331CE677.46F5@net5.net>, N Shaw <admin@net5.net> says: > > >We love everything about the SGI's except mainly the price. > This is the $64 question > >We are under contract with SGI for all hardware and software issues and >we are happy. > So, how much troubleshooting do you do in house? Or, if something breaks is it an immediate call to SGI. > >I feel that I am not giving UNIX OS's for Intel because all I have ever >used is SGI and SUN and I'm biased. >-- This is actually not a technical question, although you have framed it as such. This is a classic business question. Your problem is that you spend X amount on the SGI machines, and you receive Y amount of profit from using them. If Y is much larger than X, your wasting your time looking at Intel boxes, you would be better spending your time maximizing Y. If, however, Y is not that much greater than X, then you really don't have a choice, you will be required to move to the Intel boxes. If this is the case, the smartest thing is to immediately move to reduce your expenditures on the SGI stuff as soon as possible, and as rapidly as possible replace it with the Intel stuff. If you think your going to be able to try a juggling act, and use some SGI for some stuff, and some Intel for other stuff, I think you will find that your going to end up spreading your attentions so thin that you will end up being unable to gain maximum profitability from either hardware platform. Now, if you really do love the SGI stuff and cannot bear to part with it, and you really want to attempt to get it to work for you as the Intel stuff would (ie: good price/performance) then your going to have to roll up your sleeves and get your fingers dirty doing your own wrenching. This means no SGI service contract, buying SGI stuff on the used market, buying stripped SGI boxes and getting ram and disks from a PC clone dealer, etc. etc. The Sun people have been doing this for years, you can get used Sparcstations from lots of places, and buy standard off-the-shelf parts for them. For example, a 2.1GB Sun SCSI disk for a Sparc 5 costs $1000 from Sun, the identical disk from a disk dealer costs less than half that. A Sun 4mm DAT tapedrive costing $2000 is actually a repackaged Archive 4mmDAT, refurbished 4mm Archives cost $600. A Sun CDROM costing $500 can be replaced with a taiwanese "Vision" drive costing $120 and so forth. Of course, you have to spend more time understanding how your hardware operates, and it is up to you to determine how much profit your time is worth to the company and whether you can afford to do it this way. Also, you need to be careful before you paint all Intel equipment with the same brush. For example, Hewlett Packard will he quite happy to sell you a dual Pentium Netserver for $30K, while a dual Pentium Gigatrends motherboard clone computer with the same amount of disk and ram as the HP can be purchased for under $5K, and you will get identical performance. You won't be able to pick up the phone and call HP and have them come out and change the motherboard for you on the cheaper unit, though. It has been my observation that shops that don't do their own internal hardware troubleshooting usually end up paying tremendous sums to outside vendors and consultants. Admins at shops like this tend to lump the outside help into the price of the hardware, but this is a pleasant fiction unrelated to reality. If you are in this group, breaking the dependency on having other people do your hardware troubleshooting for you is going to save you the most money in every scenario, and this is also one of the root reasons that Intel gear is so cheap. Intel gear can be repaired by Vern down at the corner shop with common kitchen and garden implements, and most companies can afford to hire a green technician out of trade school to do it for cheap. SGI, Mac, and Sun gear, on the other hand, is so much more expensive that it rarely is used in "learn how to fix a computer" trade schools, thus the people that can do it cost a lot of money and companies usually cannot afford to hire them. So, many people end up turning to the vendor for hardware support, and that is where you spend the money.