What is on Your Mind?

My reply was not so much to emphasize that you can get paid support. My reply pointed out that managers in large corporations and organizations have a "cover your back side" strategy. If something fails, they must be able to point to someone else and say "we hired the best and paid big bucks, it is their responsibility."

I see this all the time, perhaps because I've been in the IT business since 1987, 18 years, and have worked as a risk management consultant for very large organizations and I know how they think. They all think just about the same - self-preservation, "cover your back side".... find someone else to blame.

Thank you all for your replies.

Now I know

Still tho... 65 G's... Ouch!!!

I suspect however, that many big companies have no qualms about paying that kind of money.

Sort of like paying for a $10,000 toothpick

Not really. In big systems problems arise which are simply not present in small systems. For instance: a HDD has an average life cycle of (say) 5 years. If you build a system with one harddisk, you could expect (ov average) it to run these five years before breaking. You do not need a certain procedure for changing disks in this case. You simply take the risk of having one unplanned outage every five years.

Now suppose you have a system with several TBs diskspace and hence (again, say) 300 disks attached to it. Since all of them have a life expectency of 5 years a disk failure will happen on average every 5yrs/300, which is about once every week. In this case you need a procedure on how to change disks while the system is running or risk one unplanned outage every week.

This is why a Mac with a G5 processor costs only half as much as an Intellistation from IBM with the same processor - the difference is not only IBMs surplus factor (that too, but not only that), but also many features to make operating a data center with some thousand Intellistations *possible* (as opposed to "a complete nightmare"), unlike a datacenter with some thousand consumer-grade MacFrags with a nice design and nothing more.

This principle can be extended to software as well, but there is even another point: software is expensive to develop and cheap to sell. That means writing a program costs some effort while selling a copy of it costs nearly nothing. Hence, when you build software for some outlandish platform where you don't expect to sell many copies the price will be relatively high (very high in some cases), because it is the same effort to write the OS and sell it 100 times as it is to write it and sell it 100.000 times. Maybe the UNIX you say was some realtime OS (most Unixes aren't real-time at all) or for some extremely rare hardware (massively-parallel for instance?) or something such.

bakunin

My approach to this mystery is from a fairly lame point of view

Trying to understand what makes such a UNIX system so expensive,
I was looking for extra "bells & whistles" as one would expect from a
Rolls Royce as opposed to a plain ol' chevy, like maybe more commands to play with...

Having messed around with a few free Linux distros in the last 4 years, I was
taken aback by the $65,000 figure.

Thank you for your explanation