[geeks] FYI SGI Challenge

[Peter L. Wargo]

Back in my NCGR days, our CEO and his cronies decided to get into bed
w/SGI and dump Sun, against the wishes of the SA's.  So, we got a 4-CPU
challenge XL with a Clariion RAID rack.  Supposed to be "at least 10x" the
speed of our exisitng 4-cpu SS1000 w/SSA.

Try about 1.5x, after a year of tuning, week-long outages, and other
happy crappy.  We finally tarded it in on a 4-CPU E4000 w/2 SSA's, got
12.5x the performace of the SGI for 1/3 the price.

On top of everything else, the sales guy was a dick.  Not only did he
*not* try hard to make the deal right, by offering a low price on a system
to replace the POS XL, in the middle of the troubles he came up and told
me he was "disappointed" that I hadn't bought more workstations.

I basically told him that I'd buy more workstations as soon as his .5M POS
started to work.

Later, when I told him we were trading in the POS, he got really nasty
w/me.

I hate SGI.  I hate IRIX.  I hate what they did to Cray, with the
exception of selling the E10K group to Sun.  I'm watching them flounder
now, and grinning...

-Pete

-----
Peter L. Wargo
pwargo at basenji.com
Owner/operator of basenji.com.

On Mon, 16 Jul 2001 nick at snowman.net wrote:

> Ok, I'll bite, why?
> 	Nick
> 
> On Mon, 16 Jul 2001, Peter L. Wargo wrote:
> 
> > AAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!  I HATE those friggin' things!
> > 
> > (Bill knows why...)
> > 
> > _Pete
> > 
> > -----
> > Peter L. Wargo
> > pwargo at basenji.com
> > Owner/operator of basenji.com.
> > 
> > On Mon, 16 Jul 2001, Gil Young wrote:
> > 
> > > On Ebay:
> > > 
> > > http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1255210194
> > > 
> > > Gil Young
> > > Call Sign: KG4KVX
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