On Mon, 2010-07-19 at 17:54 -0600, Eric D. Mudama wrote: > On Wed, Jul 14 at 23:51, Tim Cook wrote: > > Out of the fortune 500, I'd be willing to bet there's exactly zero > > companies that use whitebox systems, and for a reason. > > --Tim > > Sure, some core SAP system or HR data warehouse runs on name-brand > gear, and maybe they have massive SANs with various capabilities that > run on name brand gear as well, but I'd guess that most every fortune > 500 company buys some large number of generic machines as well. > > (generic being anything from newegg build-it-yourself to the bargain > SKUs from major PC companies that may not have mission-critical > support contracts associated with them) > > Any company that believes it can add more value in their IT supply > chain than the vendor they'd be buying from would be foolish not to > put energy into that space (if they can "afford" to.) Google is but a > single example, though I am sure there are others. >
They may *believe* they can, but no one ever does, because you trade increased manpower for up-front hardware cost. And companies aren't willing to do that. I've been around a large number of different environments (finance, publishing, development, ISP, ASP, even HW manufacturing), and the only place I've ever seen non-name-brand servers in a datacenter/server room production configuration is for Google-like massive deployments. Whitebox machines proliferate in SQE and desktop environs where they're burnable and disposable. But for any kind of production use (or those with a Deployment staging or QA setup), I've only ever seen brand-names, WITH the service contract fully paid up. IT departments are *always* critically understaffed, and in order to make a whitebox deployment successful for production use, you need dedicated staff for that - PERMANENT staff. Companies don't do that. Admins are just so chronically overworked that they have no ability to spend any extra time on making a whitebox setup usable for production, even if they have the expertise. And you better believe that us Admins won't even think about production support for a box that doesn't have a service contract on it. Hardware and Software. Because no matter how good you are, you can't think of everything (or, if you can, it takes awhile) - and, the 20 hours it just took you to fix that machine could have been 2 hours if it had a service contract. Doesn't take too long for that kind of math to blow out any savings whiteboxes may have had. Worst case, someone goes and buys Dell. :-) -- Erik Trimble Java System Support Mailstop: usca22-123 Phone: x17195 Santa Clara, CA Timezone: US/Pacific (GMT-0800) _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
