Re: Looking For Direction
On Thu, 10 Jun 2010, Lew wrote:
Arne Vajh?j wrote:
Lew wrote:
Tom Anderson wrote:
Absolutely no need for either of those. From what the OP says (and, i
guess, what i know about laboratory information management systems),
it's clear his resource needs are modest. You could run the app he needs
on an Atom.
Not that multi-core x86-64 chips aren't great, and aren't the backbone
of most java server work, and indeed aren't easily and fairly cheaply
availble - they are solid chips which do sterling service. But no need
to sell the guy a thousand-dollar server when a three-hundred-dollar
server will do the job with capacity to spare.
As Arne points out, it's actually harder to find a single-core machine these
days.
True! But the rest ...
Likewise 32-bit machine. Why buy for the past in order to run from now
through the future?
For professional use, trying to go on the cheap will cost you more anyway.
Been there, done that. It's stupid. Really utterly stupid. You end up
paying so much more than you would just buying the right thing in the first
place, and you're going to end up getting it anyway.
If you're talking desktop, you can buy a computer for a few hundred dollars.
It's still going to be multi-core. If you're talking rack-mount server,
you're not going to get away with three hundred dollars no matter what.
When you're talking about the lifeblood of a business, saving seven hundred
dollars because $1K is "too much" is just plain stupidity. Even at $5K or
$15K, the server itself will be the least of their costs. What you're paying
for isn't even the single- vs. multi-core or the 32- vs. 64-bit.
.... barring the following paragraph ...
You pay for reliability, stability and reliability, plus of course it's
the reliability that you're buying.
It would be best if they didn't go the stupid route.
.... is nonsense.
Don't cut corners, sure. But don't gold-plate either. When you provision
hardware - as when you do anything - you work out what you need, and you
pay for that. You build in some room for manoeuvre. If you're not sure
about what you might need in future, you build in some room for growth.
But since this application has such minuscule resource needs, even a
modest machine provides adequate headroom and room for growth.
Buy a good-quality machine. But buy the machine you need, not some vast
server that has an order of magnitude more power than you need for the
task at hand.
tom
--
But books is books: get pissed up on booze, take some drugs and walk
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