Re: OT: Yet Another Unhappy Customer for Vista

Joel Kolstad wrote:

"Joerg" <notthisjoergsch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:Xgn9i.161$TC1.130@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Redundancy is one thing but someone has to sit down as calculate the cost for all those maintenance workers. Not so sure if the number at the bottomline would be in the green.


I bet it is at Google... they have a lot of smart people there, and they're supposedly running something in the ballpark of 100,000 servers worldwide. At that level, I bet it's *much* cheaper to pay for a small team of full-time employees to run around changing out failed servers than it is to pay the *significant* premium (often 5x or more compared to what I suspect Google gets) to purchase "server grade" equipment that's probably really not nearly 5x as reliable. as the cheap stuff.


I believe John Larkin's approach is better, find a good quality PC with RAID drives, negotiate a nice deal, and then buy tons of the same. IOW a fleet purchase.


For most operations I think this is a decent strategy. The main hitch that comes in is that computer technology changes quickly enough that -- unlike, say, fleet cars -- it's unlikely you're going to be purchasing the same, exact PC configuration six months from now that you would today. The bigger guys like Dell and HP keep the same motherboard/case/etc. around for a couple of years with their business-oriented PCs, but the processors they drop into them get faster... and of course they'll try to get you to "upgrade" with Vista, but at least are smart enough to offer XP when enough people scream. :-)

(I also imagine that, in John's case, he's looking at paying no more than a 2x premium for a "good" PC compared to what the average office user has...)


And at 2x the above calculation manhours versus asset costs may become seriously lopsided. It's amazing how fast money flies out the window the minute someone has to pick up screwdriver and plies. Been there, we were cross charged for IT support so I know what it can cost. Which motivated us to buy top notch quality and not no-name gear.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com
.

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