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The article's price tag of $2.3 MM for 12 HP Servers with 24 cores per server and 166 GB of RAM each is ridiculous. We just paid just under $50k per server for
by 300bps 5y ago
The article's price tag of $2.3 MM for 12 HP Servers with 24 cores per server and 166 GB of RAM each is ridiculous.
We just paid just under $50k per server for on-prem physical servers that have 144 cores per server and 1.5 TB of RAM each.
For 12 of them it would be less than $600k and you'd get a total of 1,728 cores and 18 TB of RAM to compare against the mainframe's 30 cores and 2 TB of RAM for over 4x the cost!
- throwaway98797 5y agoNobody gets fired for buying IBM.
- matmatmatmat 5y agoWell, maybe in the past.
- tyingq 5y agoUsing list pricing comparisons of course favors the mainframe in this comparison. Since commodity hardware is sold at a fraction of list price and mainframes are not.
- m4rtink 5y ago4x the cost is actually not bad for the massive redundancy, hotswap-everything, boatloads of IO, insane build quality and crtitical legacy software support a mainframe gives you!
- brianwawok 5y ago4x the cost for 5-10% of the performance? Yes, that is terrible.
- vntok 5y agoThere are many other parameters to consider than raw perf.
- DaiPlusPlus 5y agoQualitative ones, yes. Apple’s Macintosh made waves with its cheeky hello world demo: “Never trust a computer you can’t lift” (…and defenestrate). Similarly, with an IBM big iron box, if something goes wrong, I sure hope the 6-figure support contract gets it fixed - probably within a few hours if you’re in Manhattan or the SF Bay, but what about elsewhere? Whereas with commodity HP/Dell/Supermicro pizzaboxes in a HA configuration I don’t need to worry about needing a same-day fix for hardware issues - I could put things off for months, even - and probably do it myself and spend the support contract money on a Plaid Model S and have money left-over for a Mac Pro with XDR display (with the cool stand!). I know IBM’s srsbsns machines have their own redundancies - including being able to hot-swap literally everything, it still feels like open alternatives are overall better in the long-run.