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To: Tony Viola who wrote (49154)	7/27/2001 12:35:35 PM
From: pgerassi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Dear Tony: You must be from another planet then. I see the bills from both the VAR's perspective, the manufacturer's perspective, and the customer's perspective. When I talk of mainframe CPU chips, I do not mean the CPU module. I am talking about the CPU chip itself (although I do make exceptions for certain standard modules like those of P3 in a slotted form). They contain such things as the CPU chips themselves, L3 cache SRAM, L3 control logic, CPU interface and control logic, backplane interface and control logic, firmware in ROM or flash, sockets, connecters, power supply regulators and converters, cooling components, EM shields, passive components, and packaging. Some of it is supplied internally and some goes to external sources (vendors). Do you do strictly Intel or have you specified other RISC CPUs like SPARC, Power4, PA-RISC, Alpha, Motorola, or even multiple chip ones like the ones in an IBM 3090? Even if Intel starts into this high end segment, the chipsets for these are highly proprietory and would not get bought from them. Thus, the modules that you purchase would be from the OEM, not Intel. If you still insist that CPU chips cost around 25% of a typical server as sold to a customer, give me some numbers to back it up. You can use the retail cost of the CPU, if you do not want to divulge your actual cost. But the purchase price of that server should be public domain knowledge. Hey, customers do get quotes on them. Please include configuration summary so that we could verify that they do sound reasonable. You should be able to know what it is being used for in broad categories like web, database, storage, science, engineering, etc. If you can't do the above, why are you insinuating otherwise? VARs do have one leg up on you as they do not have a bias to over specify beyond the customer stated needs. They do not need a 4 way 700 MHZ Xeon with 2MB cache to serve 1000 hits a day. They would sell a 600 MHz Celeron or Duron with 64 MB of memory, a 10/100 NIC, and a few GB disk with Linux in a cheap case. Two, if wanting a backup JIC. Pete As to what a turn key server needs with specifying a server, see above paragraph. This is typical that some customer vastly over specify the system for the task to be performed. Turn key system suppiliers have a disincentive to over specify (they make more money if it is just enough to do the job). As to what repairing a box has to do with it, simple! It shows whether you simply swap modules or actully fix the offending party thus, needing knowledge on why and how things are done. You actually have to take the cover off. Oops, that is a CPU chip (IBM) there and that is the L3 cache (Samsung) over there, etc. Heaven help the customer, if the I/O backplane goes. You have to disassemble the whole computer to get that out, replace it and put it all back together hoping that you did not miss something and seat everything correctly. The best systems are the ones easy to fix as well as breaking as infrequently as possible (hopefully never).