Just to confuse you more, I mean, give you another point of view:

> - CPU: 1 Xeon Quad Core E5410 2.33GHz 12MB Cache 1333MHz

The reason the Xeon line is good is because it allows you to squeeze maximum 
performance out of a given processor technology from Intel, possibly getting 
the highest performance density.  The reason it is bad is because it isn't that 
much better for a lot more money.  A mainstream processor is 80% of the 
performance for 20% of the price, so unless you need the highest possible 
performance density, you can save money going mainstream.  Not that you should. 
 Intel mainstream (and indeed many tech companies') stuff is purposely 
stratified from the enterprise stuff by cutting out features like ECC and 
higher memory capacity and using different interface form factors.

> - 10  Seagate 400GB 10K 16MB SAS HDD

There is nothing magical about SAS drives. Hard drives are for the most part 
all built with the same technology.  The MTBF on that is 1.4M hours vs 1.2M 
hours for the enterprise 1TB SATA disk, which isn't a big difference.  And for 
comparison, the WD3000BLFS is a consumer drive with 1.4M hours MTBF.

And we know that enterprise SATA drives are the same as the consumer drives, 
just with different firmware optimized for server workloads and longer testing 
designed to detect infant mortality, which affects MTBF just as much as old-age 
failure.  The MTBF difference from this extra testing at the start is huge.  So 
you can tell right there that the perceived extra reliability scam they're 
running is bunk.  The SAS interface is a psychological tool to help disguise 
the fact that we're all using roughly the same stuff :)  Do your own 24 hour or 
7-day stress-testing before deployment to weed out bad drives.  

Apparently old humans don't live that much longer than they did in years gone 
by, instead much fewer of our babies die, which makes the average lifespan of 
everyone go up :)  

You know that 1TB SATA works for you now.  Don't let some big greedy company 
convince you otherwise.  That extra money should be spent on your payroll, not 
on filling EMC's coffers.

ZFS provides a new landscape for storage.  It is entirely possible that a 
server built with mainstream hardware can be cheaper, faster, and at least as 
reliable as an EMC system.  Manageability and interoperability and all those 
things are another issue however.
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