Musings on hardware prices

[Michael T. Halligan]

>>I'm quoting out a managed services offering for a new customer, with 10 
>>servers. The specs are 2GB memory,
>>dual 400gb sata drives (it's a very low-IO app), dual xeon 2ghz procs.. 
>>Even with a padded estimate on power
>>consumption costs, and hosting (before bandwidth) my base costs ends up 
>>being something like $1200 per month.
>>    
>>
>
>$200	generic 2U rackmount case
>$250	generic dual-xeon mb
>$300	2x Xeon-2G	( Xeon-2.8 @ $250 )
>$280	2GB DDR ecc
>$600	seagate 300GB sata 
>$100	misc fanc
>-----
>$1730  ( cheaper for them to buy hw and rent the fractional ds-3 ?? )
>	- add additional custom widget costs as needed
>  
>

Ahh, typos and unclear statements on my part.   The processors are 
actually Dual Xeon 3ghz procs with 2mb cache.

The $1200 per month is our base cost for leasing all 10 servers from 
(cough) dell, with a $1 buyout, including rack-space, power, and 
"extras" (fractional
switch, console server, remote PDU, etc costs).

We leased 5 last month for our own hosted infrastructure, only to turn 4 
of them into a quick managed prototype for a new customer. I ordered
5 today, and then started working on a new proposal, realized that the 6 
I'll have will be 4-short for this new proposal when it's signed.. I'll 
never get
my hostd infrastructure upgraded :)

>>Is it me, or are we getting old?
>>    
>>
>
>nah... price is stable over time ...  its just getting faster and faster
>
>c ya
>alvin
>  
>

I'm not so sure about that. 5 years ago I purchased 200 valinux servers, 
really haggling on the price. I remember the configs were 2x 1GB dimms 
(which
were hugely expensive back then), dual 80 gb IDE drives, dual p3 800mhz 
procs, I believe dual power supplies, and dual Intel gigabit cards 
(though that
company never owned anything gigabit).  This was after about 3 weeks of 
shopping the price around to IBM/HP/Dell, as well as 1/2 dozen local 
vendors.
We were really, really happy with the price, which I seem to remember 
was around $525k, including shipping, taxes, etc.  We certainly weren't 
using
Xeons which were far too expensive, and not even the fastest processors 
(I believe VA had 1.3ghz p3s at that point).   For an example, I could 
buy 200 of
the dell servers, with some haggling, for about $280k, with taxes and 
shipping (and 1/6th of that will be the rack rails!)


Michael