Musings on hardware prices - opps

[Alvin Oga]

hi ya michael

- wow.. long reply .. :-)

- simple summary ..
	- there's no $$$ in hardware ... maybe 3% -5% margin
	so you spend $1,000 up front to make $50 bucks when they pay up

	- the way dell makes $$$ is they charge their 10% or 30% of
	prepaid maintenance 

On Tue, 23 Aug 2005, Michael T. Halligan wrote:

> Which distributor? The only large distributor I know that's easy to deal 
> with is Ingram..

ingram is a joke in my book .. but that's just me 

>  I believe they bought everybody else. 

nah ... maybe the dying distributors ...

and it also depends on if we're talking "component" distributors
vs "PC" distributors ( see below )


>  Acma is a tier down from Malabs. I'd be happy to find out how to
> work in-between MA & Ingram.

Malabs is worst than ingram in terms of ontime delivery and pricing
and they're what i call a consumer store without a physical store

- other thing that would help is for folks to stop advertising
  parts they do NOT have in stock in the silly computer mags ( compuser )
	- 
	- they all get those parts within an hr at a couple of 
	- the distributors
	-
 
> Hardware sucks.

or can be fun .. depends ... on point of view

> On the low-end, I can buy 30 servers from Dell for the same price as 10 
> IBM or HP's low-end
> servers (I'm talking IBM's x336 or HP's DL14X line.. Not their better 
> gear).

DL series is compaq ?? and they're 1 level above dell's worst performance
boxes

> My assumption
> with Dell is usually to expect the worst, 30% of servers to be in some 
> state of failure at any time.

yup... seems to be par ... and i say one gets what one pays for ??

> As much as I despise
> Dell's component choices and technical support, it's a financial AND 
> technical decision dell is making really hard.

yup...if one is interested in pricing ... dell is hard to beat

if the customer is intested in performace/reliability ... than dell is 
out of the loop in my book
 
> >	- i havent seen any dead/broken ibm boxes ... 
> >	- i havent seen too many dead/broken hp boxes
> >	- i have seen too too too many dead/broken dells and compaqs
> >  
> Then you haven't worked in a large enough installation. 

maybe ... i deal with x,000's of boxes ...

> Hardware dies.

yup...

the $100M question is ... 
	- why does it die
 	- is there any pattern to these dead boxes
	- how does it die
	...

> Commodity hardware is cheap, no matter who is selling it to you.

cheap is good ....

google also proved that beyond any doubts

> IBM's is the best .

and you pay for that "name brand" too and supposedly get the 
knowledgeable world famous ibm support instead of the unisys zombies
though i ran into 1 knowledgeable unisys dude that knows how to
rebuild a dead hw raid system with 3 out of 12 disk failures
( it's actually super-flaky dell hw ( 1tb of storage at $20K ) that has
  since been decommisioned/replaced by a $6K linux box, but at least
  it works even if its over priced )

> And if you really do have so much free time to re-invent
> the wheel, you should be selling more.

i re-invent the wheel when the current products out in the market
doesn't solve the customers problems

people like to use name brand or actually been there done that,
and now they come looking for "me" ... which i like, whether its
me or you guys that can also deliver custom solutions too

and yes... i do have free time, because i do things "my way"
since its my time and $$$ that they will have to pay ...

but sometimes i eat the big one... live and learn ..

> Can you give me a list of your customers then?

i will assume that you will trade your customers list ?? :-)

> If you're doing things 
> the hard way, building servers
> by hand, writing your own tools instead of utilizing existing free and 
> commercial ones, you are probably
> not doing right by your customers.

that'd depend on the customer specs and budget and expectations ??

> I personally couldn't look a 
> customer in the face, and tell them that
> it makes sense for me to bill an extra 300 hours on a 300 server 
> deployment,

i dont pre-assume anything like that to make a pointless point ??

but i do say .. bring me a (signed) legit offer and i will match it
or tell them to go with the other deal

> Isn't it our job to gather requirements, and understand specs, then make 
> recommendations? That's certainly part of how I operate.

that's the point ...and offer complete ( working ) solutions in addition
to "recommendations" that meets their specs and/or fix their
specs/requirements

> I think you put a lot of faith on parts selection.

i do ... that is precisely the difference between bying from
tom-dick-n-harry and their gorilla vs buying the same identical parts
from some other distributors and NOT having these so called "hardware
problems"

one hopefully learns over the 30yrs of building hardware and systems 

> Building your own servers
> is never a good idea, in my opinion, for a production infrastructure.

depends on the solution the customer is trying to solve

	- heat flow and cooling is the biggest problem for which
	some existing solutions doesnt work ...
	( just measure the temps .. no way to argue )

	- dead parts ( unreliable parts ) is equally bad or worst ...

- some of the distributors

	http://www.Linux-1U.net/Distributors/

c ya
alvin