Robert G. Brown wrote:
The real question is why an admin-rich environment with lots of full time admins would ever buy into such a deal. If you've got a full time admin ANYWAY, paying $150/month for support on top of this (beyond the cost of the hardware is just insane.
Have you ever administered a lab full of these units? You need as much help as you can get to administer the windows machines. Sadly, while claims of there being more windows admins are true (thats not the sad part) you need (far) more to administer fewer windows machines than the fewer admins needed for more Linux machines (that is the sad part).
We have seen 2 full time admins handle 4000+ Linux machines with time to develop software to make their lives easier (Incyte), as compared to seeing 10 windows admins struggle to keep 100 machines each up to date.
The cluster version of w2k* should alleviate or at least make it tolerable for clusters. Desktops are another matter. Part of the reason that it is locked down so tight in large organizations is that when it fails (not "if") they want to reduce the degrees of freedom of the failure modes. Keep it simple, in their own way.
But that is straying a bit. Large organizations often are not admin rich, they tend to try to cut out costs. Admins == costs. Admins need as much help as they can possibly get. If for $150/machine in a large organization, you can take away some level of their pain, this might be worth more than the cost of the additional healthcare coverage, heartburn medicine, and upper/lower GI series needed ...
-- Joseph Landman, Ph.D Founder and CEO Scalable Informatics LLC, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] web : http://www.scalableinformatics.com phone: +1 734 786 8423 fax : +1 734 786 8452 cell : +1 734 612 4615 _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
