On Wed, 2010-07-14 at 21:43 +0900, BM wrote: > On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 6:42 PM, Eugen Leitl <eu...@leitl.org> wrote: > >> Not in my neck of the woods, Sun have always been most competitive. > > > > You find Sun to be a better deal than Supermicro? Especially, > > when you're sticking a very large number of disks into it, and > > can't source the diskless caddies elsewhere? > > My few little cents here. > > I am running stuff on Supermicro and OpenSolaris, starting from > snv_121 times. Supermicro is a very cheap yet also reliable stuff > (which is very strange!!, ha-ha!). > > Saying "Sun hardware" is competitive — I would doubt quince. The > cheapest available from Sun is SunFire x2270 — > http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/servers/x86/sun-fire-x2270-m2-ds-070252.pdf > — I have some experience with this machine and I have to say: while it > is good machine and built well, yet it is very (I mean VERY) noisy, > one non-redundant power supply (what a lose!) and it very-very > non-green: will eat your power like a diesel locomotive. :) Now, guts > inside are quite cheap, so basically it is just a label "Sun" on top > of an average asian-built hardware. Yes, they are good machines, but > at the same time nothing really special. Price is quite big. > > Supermicro is as same beast, just 10x times (well, maybe less) cheaper > and in my case I had to remove DVD drive in order to let the thing > boot to install the OpenSolaris — somewhat OSOL could not detect the > DVD drive and boot always hangs (at installation phase). So I > installed the thing from USB stick. After that everything is OK. >
But you're not doing an equal comparison. We've talked about this on this list before. OEM equipment has a whole bunch of different features that you can't get via a build-it-yourself rig like Supermicro (even if you are having a whitebox vendor assemble the Supermicro and not do it yourself). Not just Sun equipment, but all OEM equipment is in a totally different class. Now, maybe you don't want those extra features, and that's fine. But don't think that you can say "well, my Fiat (car) is better than your Peterbuilt (semi-), since it costs 10% of the price, and both can drive down the highway at 100 kph". Up front pricing is but one of many different aspects of buying a server, and for many of us, it's not even the most important. When doing price comparison, you have to compare within the same class. Cross-class comparisons are generally meaningless, since they're too different, and (more importantly), features have different values to different people. Pick the class of server you care about, *then* talk about pricing. -- Erik Trimble Java System Support Mailstop: usca22-123 Phone: x17195 Santa Clara, CA Timezone: US/Pacific (GMT-0800) _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
