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

[Doug O'Neal]

On 02/16/2010 12:52 PM, Lux, Jim (337C) wrote:
> 
> 
> 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.

But when you're installing anywhere from eight to forty-eight drives in a
single system the required hours to make up that $400/drive overhead does
get larger.  And if you spread the system integrator testing over eight 
drives
per unit and hundreds to thousands of units the cost per drive shouldn't be
measured in hundreds of dollars.