[geeks] Sun-HOWTO

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Thu, Oct 18, 2001 at 04:23:07PM -0700, Peter L. Wargo wrote:
> On Thu, 18 Oct 2001, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> 
> > What would be wrong with that?  Assuming that they had at least 288 sun
> > rays, it could be cost effective for a 72 proc machine.  Those machines
> > are 2 mill, right?  That is a cost of nearly $7k per sunray (not including
> 
> Bwahahahahaha!  <Thud> *Falling off of chair*
> 
> To give you an idea, when I boought a 64-CPU E10K in '98 with 64G of RAM,
> the *very discounted* price was $3.5M.

The list on the web site for a 72 proc machine is 4.1 million.  I'm told
that absolutely no one pays anywhere near list for Suns except on the web
site, so I made a guess.  Anyway, since I'm at there site, let me put
together some real numbers.

$4,100,000 for the server.
$650 for a Sun Ray 100.

Now, 2,304 clients seems reasonable for a maxed Sunfire.  That leaves
128megs for terminal, and 32 terminals per processor, which shouldn't be
bad since they are 900mhz USIIIs, and most terminals would be idle most of
the time anyway.

That means an initial cash outlay of $5,597,600, not including networking
gear, which probably needs to be better than average for the SunRays, but
shouldn't be a problem with how many network interfaces can be stuffed in
a SunFire.  That comes to $2,430 per seat.  About the same as for a PC,
except the network needs to be a bit better, but there should be great
savings on support staff.  

Maybe the Sunfires aren't good enough for that number of clients.  In
which case we perhaps should consider the heresy of saying that Sun should
be thwapped, rather than someone who considers doing such a thing with a
SunFire.
 
__
Joshua D. Boyd