[Beowulf] Re: Third-party drives not permitted on new Dell servers?

[Lux, Jim (337C)]

On 2/16/10 9:09 AM, "Joe Landman" <landman at scalableinformatics.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 5X markup?  We must be doing something wrong :/
> 


Depends on what the price includes.  I could easily see a commodity drive in
a case lot being dropped on the loading dock at, say, $100 each, and the
drive with installation, system integrator testing, downstream support, etc.
being $500. Doesn't take many hours on the phone tracking down an
idiosyncracy or setup to cost $500 in labor.

A lot of times, a company will price things to spread the NRE (all that
testing of drives in the lab in various configurations, working out the
driver parameters that make it work best, etc... Which can easily be in the
tens, if not hundreds, of $K range) across the sell price of the many boxes.

Then you wind up with folks asking about "how come the *same drive* from X
costs twice as much from Y?", while conveniently forgetting that X isn't
charging you for the $100K NRE or the $1000/incident support fee or the...