Dear Tony:
It is sold as server hardware. A server is not much good if it includes no hard disk or memory. To attach hard disk, you need controllers, PCI buses, cables, power supplies, and the places to put them either cases, cabinets, or racks. Sorry, server hardware includes these things. In the old days, the disk drives, and tape drives are included in the price because it was all proprietory. In the case of the GS320, they used both SCSI and Fibre channel connects. Heck, they had over 100 FC controllers in their submission. Remember this is an enterprise database server, not a silly one man web server PC. To get high TPCm's, you need high amounts of data in the database. Disk is mandatory for such a server unless you want to use all SDRAM instead at a far higher cost (more performance though). The NICs and switch connect the DB server to the front end concentrators (those PCs acting like 10K clients / users). The $6+M does not even include the concentrator systems. Heck to get 600+ ethernet segments requires a lot of hubs, switchers, routers, and scads of cables, power packs, and sheer space in any typical environment. And none of the that is included in the submission price.
Besides, they could not get these TPCs using network attached storage (the traffic is way too high for even 1000BT (100 MB/sec vs 160 MB/sec)). Fibre Channel is not considered NAS since it is just like SCSI in that the requests generally originate from the controller not an internal CPU. Those cabinets are simply place to put the drives and the redundant PSs to power them. The drives will not read or write without the FC controller and the controllers are in the server cabinet. If you take out all 32 CPUs, will the drives do anything? No, they won't. But Network attached storage drives will boot the NAS server box, perform backups (if there is a tape drive), and a host of other tasks. All the unattached FC drives will do is a POST followed by eventual return to idle state. Even if it is in SANs, it still in servers and part of the submission as server hardware. You really must not have a clue as to how these things are put together, do you?
Even the submitted price is light. You do not backup 3TB of disk with a single 20GB drive. It is not fast enough to do a backup in the required time of a few hours (it would take at least 450 hours not including loading and unloading of tapes). There are ways to shrink it, but not by two orders of magnitude. This server would not be used in a 24-7 lights out operation (missing hot backup, redundacy, tape library (150 tape cart. autoloaders are rare and even then are typically called tape libraries), and UPS).
Pete |
