[vworld-tech] Big Tin?

[Steven J. Owens]

On Sun, Apr 04, 2004 at 07:08:38PM -0700, Brian Crowder wrote:
> This massive hardware costs money...  lots of money to buy, a fair 
> amount of money to maintain (you might have to pay maintenance on the 
> OS, too...  and some OS vendors like to charge for a license per CPU), 
> and lots of money to rent rack-space for.  If you can find a physically 
> (and financially) smaller solution, I'd suggest you do it.  I don't know 
> if the costs on these massive machines have started to scale better 
> recently, but if the hardware costs twice as much, and you can only 
> serve an additional 50% players per CPU, it simply isn't worth it.  It 
> probably isn't even worth it for 100% more players per CPU.  For a 300% 
> improvement?  Maybe.  :)

     Coincidentally enough, the March issue of InfoWorld has an
article, _Tapping Into Big Iron_, page 41, the "case study" sidebar
wher some Microsoft type cites a wintel server at about $2 per MIP
while a mainframe is about $2000 per MIP.  Of course, it's a microsoft
marketing type, so who knows where he pulled those numbers from.  From
what I recall in my brushes with big iron, you can't even sit down at
the table without being ready to spend in the millions.

-- 
Steven J. Owens
puff at darksleep.com

"I'm going to make broad, sweeping generalizations and strong,
 declarative statements, because otherwise I'll be here all night and
 this document will be four times longer and much less fun to read.
 Take it all with a grain of salt." - Me at http://darksleep.com