Re: Power7

On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 20:54, DrFranken <midrange@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Also I can drive 0.5 miles from where I sit to my favorite white box
computer store, GPC, and build a box with better performance than the
3650 for much less money. ÂWhat is it about the x3650 that would make me
buy such a thing to run Windoze or Linux when the white box is so much
cheaper?

Reliability, testing, support, etc. I assume you know the reasons and
this was just a rhetorical question.

You may not care about pricing, but i do. We have several customers,
and it hurts me to have them basically buy a box which does not offer
even the slightest bit of performance (or even reliability, if we're
talking about the tapedrive) for it's money.

I'm talking about the entry Power 520, one of two cores, old 65nm tech
(32nm is state of the art), high energy usage (i measured about 300W
at idle, not that it matters much), two 150GB 15kRPM 3.5 disk drives,
software mirroring, no disk cache, no raid, 1GB of memory, DDS or DAT
tape drives. These machines are painfully slow - the tape drives need
to be repaired constantly. The LTO4 drives are of course very decent,
but add 6k to the price tag. Of course, the exactly same LTO4 drive
without a IBM Power sticker costs just 4k. But i'm sure you can
justify this.