Re: [help] 1 cpu to rule them all
From: David Wright (david_c_wright_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 07/12/04
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Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2004 00:31:20 +0200
Desi Cortez wrote:
> Timberwoof wrote:
>
>> Time was when that was a viable way to do things, but nowadays CPUs
>> really are cheap enough that every user can have his own. Go to eBay and
>> order a pallet of five Dell Optiplex 150 computers, load 'em up with
>> Linux, and away you go.
>>
>
> Exactly.
>
> I don't understand how this 4-user HP machine can be so 'cheap' when 4
> high end PCs today can be had for $150 ( www.pricewatch.com ) and monitors
> can
> be bought for $50. So a 4 user system with PCs would cost $800 ( add in
> educational discounts ).
>
> Is HP giving away a server and 4 disk less workstations, or X terminals
> for less than $800 ?
It depends on your definition of cheap... Maintaining 100 central
application servers in an air-conditioned computer room and keeping the
configuration and maintenance in one place is a lot more economical than
having 1000 PC's dispersed around an office block or collection of
buildings. For a small business, it doesn't make as much sense, but when
you start talking about hundreds or thousands of desktops, the savings
start to build up.
If you cut the number of physical machines you have, you cut the number of
support staff you need to maintain them as well. If you have 1000 PC's, you
need a lot of people running around fixing problems and a large help desk.
Concentrate that into a couple of hundred servers supporting 1000
X-Terminals, you start to make big savings, you don't need to keep as many
spare PC's kicking around, likewise you don't have 1000 hard disks, plus
the servers hard disks to maintain, just the server hard disks.
If you have a hardware failure, yes, it will affect more than one user, but
you can just offload them onto another sever, and your support staff don't
have to run in different directions to fix the problem. It is all in one
place.
You also save money on ancillary software costs, you don't need to licence
n,000 copies of your anti-virus software, just server copies, that will
save you several thousand a year for a start.
Plus, compare the components you are using, you get, to a certain extent,
what you pay for. You will often find a lot of corners have been cut
offering a really cheap PC - outdated mobo, slow memory, slow disks,
generally not optimised for throughput.
A while back, (well, a long while back), I had an old 386/20 from Compaq. We
got a new 486/33 in and everybody was "oh, wow", a 486! But we had switched
to "cheap" vendor, who offered the "equivalent" machines to Compaq at a
fraction of the price (equivalent in spec, not necessarily performance).
The interesting thing was, running the benchmark software on the two
machines showed that, although the 386 was a much slower machine - in
theory - it was actually faster than the 486. In raw calculations, the 486
won hands down, but when it came to data throughput, the old Compaq won
because it had a decent hard disk and memory, it was a quality product, not
built from the cheapest components.
For a multi-user machine, you will need to invest in "proper" technology,
designed for high throughput and drives and controllers which are designed
to cope with multiple simultaneous requests (E.g. SCSI). Where you make
your money back is in running costs, Microsoft's famous TCO (Total Cost of
Ownership). And they do have a valid point, it isn't the initial outlay
that is the expensive part of a computer, it is the day-to-day support
costs that count, where their TCO banter falls down is saying TCO on
Windows is better than Linux - if you have Windows administrators, it may
be cheaper to stay with Windows, if you have *nix administrators, or people
who can learn quickly, the point is moot.
The same was true of the first 386 PC's, they had, theoretically more
processing power than some of the existing mini's and mainframes of the
time. BUT they weren't designed with throughput in mind. Hang 100 users off
a mini and 100 users off a PC of the equivalent processing power and see
which one is faster... And when you get to 100+ users on a single box, then
you start to see real TCO benefits.
With a site of 500 users with 6 mini computers, we had a helpdesk of 2
people. With 500 PC's, we had 10-15 support staff running around the
building. Plus the hardware maintenance costs go up exponentially with more
PC's.
Dave
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