disadvantages of linux cluster - admin

[Dean Johnson]

On Thu, 2002-11-07 at 07:01, Bogdan Costescu wrote:
> 
> > cheaper to buy 2 systems.... than it is to buy support contracts..
> > 	( keep lots of "spare parts" floating around 
> 
> I'm constantly amazed at the prolonged support contracts (like 2-3 years) 
> when, as you stated earlier, HW is out-of-stock or discontinued so fast. 
> Do these people keep huge stocks of whatever parts they put in your 
> system ? Even DIY approach of keeping spare (OK, let's say more than 1) 
> parts seems a bit too much to me, unless the cluster _must_ be homogenous.
> 

Of course they are just playing the odds and banking on the fact that
*most* parts are totally interchangeable. The only worrisome parts that
I can think of are the motherboard and cpus. Memory, drives, and the
rest of it are interchangeable and can easily be replaced, often with
something bigger, faster or stronger without problem. Memory may be a
problem for some machines that are truly picky. For instance, the
itaniums we had required registered ecc pc100 sticks. Thinking that
registered ecc pc133 sticks would work just fine, as considerably
cheaper, we were greeted with incompatibility. The vendor was nice
enough to swap them for their slower bretheren at no extra cost.
Curious.

	-Dean