[Beowulf] Redmond is at it, again

[Laurence Liew]

Hi all

> > If you work for a disro company and you are reading this,
> > all I can say is, WAKE UP! You are going down the tubes fast
> > in the HPC market. If you work for a cluster vendor and you are
> > reading this, please push your management hard to adopt at
> > least one open distro. We'll pay for support for it, but not using
> > the current pricing scheme that the Redhat's, Suse, etc. are
> > charging.


So what would be a per node price people (edu? commercial?) would pay
for the OS with support and updates? Do note that support for HPC
clusters requires technically competent and HPC savvy engineers and
these do not come cheap....

Based on previous discussions and email.. it seems that USD$50 - USD$100
per node to be about right/acceptable for a cluster OS that is supported
with updates and patches and basic support for HPC type questions.

Comments?

Cheers!
Laurence
ps. I work for a cluster vendor. 



On Wed, 2004-05-26 at 05:42, Jeffrey B. Layton wrote:
> For some people, me being one of them, this is a HUGE threat. Let me
> explain.
> 
> Redhat, Suse, etc. have gone to a per-CPU price for license
> and support driving up the costs of installing the OS on a cluster.
> In fact, the last quote I got for a 72 node cluster averaged about
> $400 a node! Now management has started to compare this price
> to Windows and guess what? - Windows is cheaper on a per
> node basis. This includes purchasing and support! We already
> have a massive license with MS so we get Windows pretty
> cheap, but I can get Windows myself cheaper than $400 a node.
> We started to talk to management about the support costs, etc.
> but they argue that they already have a whole bunch of admins
> trained in Windows so support costs should be low (I tried to
> explain the difference between admining a cluster and admining
> a Windows server). Plus we have an infrastructure to push
> updates to Windows machines, so they though updates would
> be a no-brainer as well.
> 
> At the ClusterWorld conference I tried to talk to various distro
> vendors about pricing, but they weren't listening. I don't mind
> paying a relatively small fee to purchase a distro, but paying a
> support costs for each CPU is nuts! If I have a problem on one
> node, I have a problem on ALL nodes. The distro companies
> have yet to understand this. Novell is starting to come around
> a bit, but they still aren't there yet.
> 
> We are encouraging cluster vendors to support at least one
> open distro. That way we aren't held hostage to these companies
> that don't understand HPC. I don't know if we're making any
> head way, but I constantly hope we are. We're also trying to
> push IT management into "approving" a couple of open distros,
> but they are reluctant because they don't see a company behind
> them (they insist on the "one throat to choke" model of support).
> However, I'm still hopefully.
> 
> If you work for a disro company and you are reading this,
> all I can say is, WAKE UP! You are going down the tubes fast
> in the HPC market. If you work for a cluster vendor and you are
> reading this, please push your management hard to adopt at
> least one open distro. We'll pay for support for it, but not using
> the current pricing scheme that the Redhat's, Suse, etc. are
> charging.
> 
> If you work for a company that sells commercial software for
> Linux (e.g. compilers, MPI, etc.), please support more than
> RHEL and SLES! Think seriously about supporting an open
> distro and also supporting a kernel/glibc combo.
> 
> I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way. Let's tell the
> distro companies that we won't stand for it!
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Jeff