As someone who was buying hardware in the late 1990s, it is hard to overstate the difference in buying experience between Sun or Digital (DEC) and someone like Dell. The former forced you into a live sales meeting, endless quote revisions, it was a nightmare. I remember calculating the server rails and power cords for a new Alpha server were going to cost more than a shipped/delivered Dell server that I could get the next day.
In a time frame like 1999 to 2002, much more broadly than that, just the increasing gap in cost vs what you would get between buying any hardware+OS package from a legacy Unix-like vendor (Sun, DEC, SGI) and doing your own thing on a FreeBSD, OpenBSD or Linux on x86 hardware.
Dell was obviously a top choice, but by 2000 or so, Linux or FreeBSD had become good enough that you could do exactly the same thing for a fraction of the cost and run it on x86 hardware you had purchased from either Dell or one of the top 5 or 6 Dell-competitors.
As compared to, as you say, sitting through sales meetings, price quotes, revisions, a long slow and arduous process to arrive at a figure where you come to a conclusion "yeah you can spend $60,000 on these Sun servers or we can buy $20,000 of x86 servers and get creative with our own software stack to do the same thing in house".
At a certain point 1U and 2U server hardware got fast enough on boring standard x86 single or dual socket motherboards from Taiwan, in the era of like the 1.2 GHz Pentium 3 with 512KB cache, that the performance was pretty damn good and the machine cost a fraction of what the equivalent Sun or SGI rackmount machine would cost. This is in the era before a multi core x86 CPU existed. And you could be sure that its BIOS and motherboard were already OK for use with a current Linux kernel, we're talking about motherboards from Supermicro, Tyan, intel whitebox reference server boards, etc.
People would sneer that you were using shoddy free software, but then the guys who bought the expensive vendor solution would discover that the paid software was also of poor quality and unlike the free version you didn't get the source so your only option for getting something fixed was to file a bug report and pray, despite spending 6 figures on a support contract.
coreyh14444 · · focus · HN ↗
walrus01 · · focus · HN ↗
In a time frame like 1999 to 2002, much more broadly than that, just the increasing gap in cost vs what you would get between buying any hardware+OS package from a legacy Unix-like vendor (Sun, DEC, SGI) and doing your own thing on a FreeBSD, OpenBSD or Linux on x86 hardware.
Dell was obviously a top choice, but by 2000 or so, Linux or FreeBSD had become good enough that you could do exactly the same thing for a fraction of the cost and run it on x86 hardware you had purchased from either Dell or one of the top 5 or 6 Dell-competitors.
As compared to, as you say, sitting through sales meetings, price quotes, revisions, a long slow and arduous process to arrive at a figure where you come to a conclusion "yeah you can spend $60,000 on these Sun servers or we can buy $20,000 of x86 servers and get creative with our own software stack to do the same thing in house".
At a certain point 1U and 2U server hardware got fast enough on boring standard x86 single or dual socket motherboards from Taiwan, in the era of like the 1.2 GHz Pentium 3 with 512KB cache, that the performance was pretty damn good and the machine cost a fraction of what the equivalent Sun or SGI rackmount machine would cost. This is in the era before a multi core x86 CPU existed. And you could be sure that its BIOS and motherboard were already OK for use with a current Linux kernel, we're talking about motherboards from Supermicro, Tyan, intel whitebox reference server boards, etc.
jandrese · · focus · HN ↗