======================================================================== ENTERPRISE STRATEGIES: AHEAD OF THE CURVE http://www.infoworld.com ======================================================================== Tuesday, November 9, 2004
DO YOUR HOMEWORK BEFORE COMPUTER SHOPPING By Tom Yager Posted November 05, 2004 3:00 PM Pacific Time Too often, the details that vendors present as important buying criteria are window dressing of little importance to the majority of business and enterprise buyers. I'm addressing PC and PowerPC servers in particular, as they make up the bulk of my lab's current research resources. ADVERTISEMENT -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- Grand Central's Linthicum and InfoWorld's Dickerson Discuss SOA's Service Oriented Architectures promise increased IT efficiency, better response times, new business models, and enable cross-company platform agnosticism. Nevertheless, there are also significant inhibitors. Where do you begin? This webcast from InfoWorld and Grand Central Communications not only provides tips and trends on SOA's, but also provides a framework for building an SOA at your organization. Register and view now at: http://newsletter.infoworld.com/t?ctl=9D7095:2B910B2 -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- Vendors boldface the speed of a server's CPUs the way automakers crow about horsepower. It's a detail thrown in to make a prospective buyer feel he's making a uniquely well-informed decision. But whereas the masses opt for 300 horsepower over 280 and fall for a pitch that includes a thump on the hood, the real sharpies pop that hood while the salesman describes the modern science of fuel injection. Because he knows you're that rare breed of buyer that understands. For servers, the subsurface detail understood by those in the know is the speed of the FSB (front side bus). Those who use the acronym scoff at those obsessed with gigahertz as the great unwashed. The speed of the FSB has become vendors' criterion for that rare breed of savvy buyer, an opportunity for vendor salespeople to puff you up by saying, "That's a great question!" Incidentally, the buyer who asks how many x the DVD-ROM drive is gets the great question award, too, so don't be too impressed with yourself. As every FSBer knows, its speed is expressed in megahertz -- higher is better -- and indicates how fast stuff moves from one thing to another thing inside the computer. How much stuff moves per hertz, where it goes, how long it has to wait to get there, what the FSB is on the front of and whether 800MHz Opteron, Xeon, and Xserve FSBs are comparable are details that vendors know one buyer in a thousand bothers to look up. The coming sub-subsurface detail -- the dealer invoice price of server computing -- is the distinction among AGP, PCI-X, and PCI-Express. The absence or presence of an AGP -- accelerated graphics port, for us mortals -- slot has long been vendors' way of showing the public that an entry-level server is more than a desktop done uglier, louder, and with ears. Should all other criteria escape buyers' study, it suffices to know that a server is a computer that can't do video games. The CliffsNotes -- now the first page of Google results that folks read five minutes before a meeting -- take on these peripheral buses is as follows: AGP is doomed; PCI-X is, uh, what the heck is PCI-X?; and PCI-Express is new and serial whereas the others are old and parallel. Many facts related to the purchase of servers are genuinely useless trivia, such as the number of onboard USB 2.0 ports -- two is always enough. If you're savvy enough to know that gigahertz no longer matters, you've found a thread worth pulling that will reveal meaningful details, fueling questions that vendors should have to answer in the course of earning your business. It's not my goal to make you an ubergeek who trades a social life for an encyclopedic knowledge of trivia. It is my goal to keep you from being the sucker on the lot who turns horsepower, dealer invoice, and window tint into deal makers. It always helps to do your homework. Tom Yager is technical director of the InfoWorld Test Center. ======================================================================== Stay On Top of Open Source Want to keep up on the hottest developments in the open source world? Want more information about Linux? Let InfoWorld bring you cutting-edge coverage every week in the Linux and Open Source Report. 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