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To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (260429)	5/19/2009 4:47:24 PM
From: Dan3	Respond to of 275872

Re: why not go with clustered 2-socket servers? Wouldn't the latter be cheaper? Hardware costs are actually pretty similar: The 8 series CPUs and motherboard cost more on a per socket basis, but we only need 1 PS instead of 4, 1 RAID controller instead of 4, etc. There is a big savings for a purely artificial reason, which is that COTS software we use is licensed per system, with the license tied to the system's mac address. I made it clear to the vendor how we wanted to use the software, and they were very much OK with licensing these systems under their standard terms. But the biggest savings is in terms of staff time. The people doing this work are analysts, not computer scientists, so to have the system be a very fast PC vs. having to learn at least some basics about dispatching jobs to a cluster (and having them or someone else manage that cluster) cuts down on staff time. And that's the real savings.