If you buy through a VAR and/or Dell reps you don't pay the price on the website. What you actually pay is typically significantly lower. I don't think anyone actually buys servers like these by just ordering from the website. We (Let's Encrypt) certainly don't.
These are expensive servers, crossing into six digits, but not $200k.
I’m looking at buying some fortigate firewalls to do some natting, looks like 200Fs will be fine, but even the fortigate sales guys won’t give me a price, I have to go to resellers who also refuse to give prices, which adds friction. Cisco exactly the same.
When looking at options, price is at the forefront of my mind, but sales guys want me to choose their company, and even commit to the specific device and numbers, before I even see the price.
Almost walked away from the fortigate option until I found avfirewalls which gave me a ballpark idea of what I could afford to implement, and what trade offs. The benefits of the fortigate over a mikrotik were worth it at that price, but it was painful getting the price out and they nearly lost the sale as I assumed it would be 10 times more.
Ebay has them for 3.2k and CDW new for 3.6.
- Hospitals have an interest in massively inflated high sticker prices to make as much money as possible from those who pay in cash, e.g. foreigners, and to make the debts look better for collection agencies - basically, assuming the true cost of a procedure is 1000$, when the hospital bills 1000$ and that goes to collections who buy the debt for 10% of value the hospital gets 100$, and if the hospital bills 10k $ and the collections agency pays 10%, the hospital gets 1000$ or the actual cost
- Insurances have an interest in high sticker prices because they will negotiate with the hospital to pay true cost + some markup anyway - so with a higher sticker price, they can claim that their insurance saves the buyers a higher percentage
- Employers have an interest in high sticker prices because they can market themselves as employers who provide a better health insurance than the competition
The people losing out in this gamble are those who cannot afford insurance and have to declare medical bankruptcy.
And in the case of hardware or even some "contact sales for a quote" SaaS it's the same end result: the ones who lose out are small businesses (who can't achieve the sales amount to qualify for cheap-ish rates), and the big companies with dedicated account managers have a nice life.
Past threads: https://www.reddit.com/user/bad0seed/submitted/
Probably in the range of $2100 to $2200 per unit from a x86-64 component distributor in moderate quantities.
"42% off list price: use code SERVER42"
Doesn't make the price reasonable exactly, but it's kind of funny.
In a way you could say the ones not calling a rep are subsidizing your cost for the server.
Such as a fairly low cost 4U threadripper box, running VyOS (ultimately based on a very normal debian Linux) with multiple Intel 100GbE NICs in PCI-E slots.
The Intel linux kernel (and FreeBSD) driver support for those is generally excellent and robust. Intel has had full time developers doing the Linux drivers for that series of cards since the earliest days of their 64-bit/66MHz PCI-X 10Gbps NICs about 17 years ago.
Also worth mentioning that FRR is now an official Linux Foundation supported project.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/networ...
Works great. The PCIe card itself has 2 more slots for SSDs
The GPU is on the 2.0 x8 slot because they don't really transfer that much data over the lanes.
I honestly didn't realize PCIe was up to 4.0 now, and I am pushing up against the limits of PCIe 2.0 but it still works! And I’m “only” at the limits, and its only a limit when I want faster than 3,000 megabytes per second, which is amazing.
Granted, this would have been considered a good enthusiast motherboard in 2012. Buying new but cheap is the mistake.
So each drive acts like it has its own slower (but fast enough) pcie slot, and then the raid0 combines the bits back to double the performance.
Could be wrong but I get 2,900 megabytes per second transfers from RAM to disk and back.
And this is PCIe 2.0 x16
so maybe if you want , 3,000, 4,000 or 6,500 megabytes per second then I have nothing to brag about. I’m pretty amazed though and will be content for all my use cases.
https://www.siliconmechanics.com/system/a+-ultra-superserver...
2U
128-Core
307TB NVME
4 TB RAM
-------
= $102k
Supermicro was cheaper by 20-30% had a quantitatively better power profile which basically meant it paid for itself and just rocked on every dimension. And their sales reps were able to answer every question we had including sending us a excel model of their power usage. The dell folks never got back to us on power usage.
I dunno why folks insist on Dell crapola.
Also "fun" is "The solid state storage I can buy for $100 is equivalent to all the world's computing storage in what year?"
I'm super fun at parties!
If we're talking about 90s or early 2000s Sun, probably. Even then, though, these systems probably had substantially better I/O performance.
I have a SPARC laptop lying around from 1995 that gets a whopping 20 MB/s in disk read/write speeds across its dual half height SCSI drives. That still beats all but the best SD cards.
The full size systems with SAS and other options would get even better disk performance.
I think the first servers I had in production had 8 MB RAM. No more, certainly. Soon we'll be at 1000x that. My dad's first "server" was 3 orders of magnitude smaller, with 8 KB of RAM (hand-wound wire core memory). In that time, the US population hasn't even doubled.
The listed servers are from few years ago so I guess there might be some bigger ones available these days.
Even the super slow ones like on kindle, are _choices_ that have been made in favor of something else. a second to turn a page on a book isn't unbearable
High-end Android phones have 120+ ms latecy. That's easily noticeable and actually annoying (at least to me).
My personal pet peeve is the latency of input when i'm starting new applications in KDE. E.g. I'll start a new terminal with Super+Enter, followed by a Super+Right Arrow in order to tile it to the right. But the latency is big enough, that often it's not the terminal that ends up tiled, but the application that had focus earlier, e.g. a web browser. It's really annoying.
I also don't understand how still in 2020 when I move a window with the mouse, the window can't keep up with the mouse.
30ms input lag is what we should work towards. But that's not what we have today. Today is actually crap.
I keep meaning to try out WindowMaker again as my Fedora window manager. I feel like it would be incredibly speedy on today's hardware.
64 cores and 24 NVME drives in a 2U spot on a rack is just insane compared to what we used to have to do to get a beefy database server. And it's not some exotic thing, just a popular mainstream Dell SKU.
If you price it out on Dell's site, you get a retail price north of $200k. That is really what made it clear for me. That you could fit $200k+ worth of DIMMS, Drives, CPUS into a 2U spot :)