Linux box: reasonable price

From: sinister (sinister_at_nospam.invalid)
Date: 06/28/05 

Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 20:13:03 GMT

My workplace currently uses two Solaris boxes (v1280, e4500) to do
scientific computation work. (More specifically, functional neuroimaging,
which can be fairly numerically intensive and also use up lots of disk
space---we now have a 16TB RAID array.)

Both the sysadmin and I think that, in the long run, Linux is an attractive
alternative to Sun.

He seems to think that we should first get a Linux box in the $10,000 (US $)
to $15,000 range. I don't see the point of this---for a lot of stuff, I
assume a $2000 box should be fine, and it appears to me you can get a really
nice box for under $4000.

Perhaps colloquially he wants something "enterprise quality," and my gut
feeling is that for a lot of scientific work, you might want something
"workstation quality" but don't need something "enterprise quality."

Any comments?