On Mon, 2010-07-19 at 17:54 -0600, Eric D. Mudama wrote:
On Wed, Jul 14 at 23:51, Tim Cook wrote:
Out of the fortune 500, I'd be willing to bet there's exactly zero
companies that use whitebox systems, and for a reason.
--Tim
Sure, some core SAP system or HR data warehouse runs on name-brand
gear, and maybe they have massive SANs with various capabilities that
run on name brand gear as well, but I'd guess that most every fortune
500 company buys some large number of generic machines as well.
(generic being anything from newegg build-it-yourself to the bargain
SKUs from major PC companies that may not have mission-critical
support contracts associated with them)
Any company that believes it can add more value in their IT supply
chain than the vendor they'd be buying from would be foolish not to
put energy into that space (if they can "afford" to.) Google is but a
single example, though I am sure there are others.
They may *believe* they can, but no one ever does, because you trade
increased manpower for up-front hardware cost. And companies aren't
willing to do that.
I've been around a large number of different environments (finance,
publishing, development, ISP, ASP, even HW manufacturing), and the only
place I've ever seen non-name-brand servers in a datacenter/server room
production configuration is for Google-like massive deployments.
Whitebox machines proliferate in SQE and desktop environs where they're
burnable and disposable. But for any kind of production use (or those
with a Deployment staging or QA setup), I've only ever seen brand-names,
WITH the service contract fully paid up.
IT departments are *always* critically understaffed, and in order to
make a whitebox deployment successful for production use, you need
dedicated staff for that - PERMANENT staff. Companies don't do that.
Admins are just so chronically overworked that they have no ability to
spend any extra time on making a whitebox setup usable for production,
even if they have the expertise. And you better believe that us Admins
won't even think about production support for a box that doesn't have a
service contract on it. Hardware and Software. Because no matter how
good you are, you can't think of everything (or, if you can, it takes
awhile) - and, the 20 hours it just took you to fix that machine could
have been 2 hours if it had a service contract. Doesn't take too long
for that kind of math to blow out any savings whiteboxes may have had.
Worst case, someone goes and buys Dell. :-)
Oracle is committed to developing practices and products that
help protect the environment
