Jan Heichler wrote:
And if a small company does something new you won't sell a huge
quantity. So the components get (usually) more expensive. The
engineering isn't quite as advanced (because it is expensive) and many
errors just show when you have a larger install-base.
Most large (and small) companies are buying product from essentially the
same group of (ODM) manufacturers. More in a minute.
KC> Anyway, I was thinking about companies like Penguin or Scalable,
designing
KC> their own hardware products, like Relions or JackRabbits, and not just
KC> reselling Supermicro boxes. Unless I'm mistaken on the fact that
those systems
KC> are somewhat different from off-the-shelf boxes.
Mhh... a Relion server does not look very different from Intel-Servers
(i mean the intel-oem products). A Jackrabbit seems to be a standard
Chenbro/ICP/Whatever chassis with commodity Boards/Controllers/Disks.
The real trick is probably the software.
Software, hardware selection, firmware, build, and burning/testing. Its
amazing how often systems fail if not built correctly/consistently :(
So don't get me wrong: don't want to mock their products. And it seems
that some customers really like the idea of companies having "own
products". I worked for a company with a own product line before - but
behind that there was Supermicro/Intel/MSI... you name it. Customer
didn't had real advantage... was just a marketing thing.
Most of the TLA and similar companies, the tier 1's, buy their
motherboards and chassis from the ODMs. I showed one of our customers
some of the ODM hardware in the past and it was amazing to here them
gasp and say "but that looks just like our XYZ PDQ machine." Yup, and
there is a reason for that too.
KC> I don't know about Streamline, but AFAIK, Clustervision "just"
resells big
KC> names hardware, they don't make their own.
That is true (for ClusterVision). We (i'm with ClusterVision) are
investing in our Software - because there we see a lot of potential to
do better than what you see on the market. Hardware is not that
different - except for the brand-name.
See above. Brand name hardware is sourced from ODMs. Scratch off the
right label on those HP or IBM motherboards, and you could get a
surprise (at least in the past, now it is likely that the "surprise" has
been paid to be removed).
[...]
Even a company like SGI doesn't seem big enough to really have own
hardware (and live with what you earn for it on the market). And even if
ICE is a nice system - it is not that much different from what other
BladeSystems are doing. So why should a customer bother?
Why build it from scratch when you can assemble it for less, or even pay
someone to pre-assemble/test it for even less. This is what the big
boys and girls do.
What differentiates one from the other? Apart from the (often
expensive) brand name sticker/label/..., it would be software.
KC> So, to get back to the original discussion, SGI disappearing from the
KC> landscape means one less option to choose from. Considering the fact
that
KC> those options are already kind of fewer than in the US, the relative
loss is
KC> more perceptible.
Maybe i'm too young to really see SGI going down as a big loss - in my
time they were just another Intel-Selling company with a strange
attitude and really expensive products. But i never understood the
excitement about Sun either ;-)
Heh ...
Way back in the day youngster ... they had these big refrigerator sized
behemoths with hardware accelerated graphics, up to 16 processor cores,
and a whopping 16 GB ram. Ran a unix-alike, and cost $1M USD ... you
just cant get these now ...
[muffled sounds of frantic whispering and wild gesturing]
... oh you can? In a 4U box? With more memory and graphics fire power
... better IO ... for a lot less than $1M ???
--
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics LLC,
email: land...@scalableinformatics.com
web : http://www.scalableinformatics.com
http://jackrabbit.scalableinformatics.com
phone: +1 734 786 8423 x121
fax : +1 866 888 3112
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
