On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 4:53 PM, Brandon High <bh...@freaks.com> wrote: > On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 7:45 AM, Joel Buckley <joel.buck...@sun.com> wrote: >> How much is your time worth? > > Quite a bit. > >> Consider the engineering effort going into every Sun Server. >> Any system from Sun is more than sufficient for a home server. >> You want more disks, then buy one with more slots. Done. > > A few years ago, I put together the NAS box currently in use at home > for $300 for 1TB of space. Mind you, I recycled the RAM from another > box and the four 250GB disks were free. I think 250 drives were around > $200 at the time, so let's say the system price was $1200. > > I don't think there's a Sun server that takes 4+ drives anywhere near > $1200. The X4200 uses 2.5" drives, but costs $4255. Actually adding > more drives ups the cost further. That means the afternoon I spent > setting my server up was worth $3000. I should tell my boss that. > > A more reasonable comparison would be the Ultra 24. A system with > 4x250 drives is $1650. I could build a 4 TB system today for *less* > than my 1TB system of 2 years ago, so let's use 3x750 + 1x250 drives. > (That's all the store will let me) and the price jumps to $2641. > > Assume that I buy the cheapest x64 system (the X2100 M2 at $1228) and > add a drive tray because I want 4 drives ... well I can't. The > cheapest drive tray is $7465. > > I have trouble justifying Sun hardware for many business applications > that don't require SPARC, let alone for the home. For custom systems > that most tinkerers would want at home, a shop like Silicon Mechanics > (http://www.siliconmechanics.com/) (or even Dell or HP) is almost > always a better deal on hardware.
I agree completely. About a year ago I spent around $800 (w/o drives) on a NAS box for home. I used a 4x PCI-X single-Xeon Supermicro MB, a giant case, and a single 8-port Supermicro SATA card. Then I dropped a pair of 80 GB boot drives and 9x 500 GB drives into it. With raidz2 plus a spare, that gives me around 2.7T of usable space. When I filled that up a few weeks back, I bought 2 more 8-port SATA cards, 2 Supermicro CSE-M35T-1B 5-drive hot-swap bays, and 9 1.5T drives, all for under $2k. That's around $0.25/GB for the expansion and $0.36 overall, including last year's expensive 500G drives. The closest that I can come to this config using current Sun hardware is probably the X4540 w/ 500G drives; that's $35k for 14T of usable disk (5x 8-way raidz2 + 1 spare + 2 boot disks), $2.48/GB. It's much nicer hardware but I don't care. I'd also need an electrician (for 2x 240V circuits), a dedicated server room in my house (for the fan noise), and probably a divorce lawyer :-). Sun's hardware really isn't price-competitive on the low end, especially when commercial support offerings have no value to you. There's nothing really wrong with this, as long as you understand that Sun's really only going to be selling into shops where Sun's support and extra engineering makes financial sense. In Sun's defense, this is kind of an odd system, specially built for unusual requirements. My NAS box works well enough for me. It's probably eaten ~20 hours of my time over the past year, partially because my Solaris is really rusty and partially because pkg has left me with broken, unbootable systems twice :-(. It's hard to see how better hardware would have helped with that, though. Scott _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
