Comments on: Cloud Computing Infrastructure for Facebook Developers on Dell Servers. What does it mean?

By: jonn2

jonn2 — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 04:26:02 +0000

Site, Site, Site, Site, Site,

By: Bernd Eckenfels

Bernd Eckenfels — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 01:34:04 +0000

We had twice the need to buy servers for internal testing. The first offer from Sun against Dell was lost because Sun did not had 4 Core Intels at that time. The second offer was lost because the pricing of the Sun Servers (with 30-40% savings for development partners) have been worse than the Dell list prices(!?). Stuff like FCP-HBAs are ridiculous expensive at Sun. And I wish it was not the case… in this situation I had luck to be able to talk directly to sun (although the order would be fufilled over the channel). I miss a web system configurator like dell has.

By: mcd

mcd — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 04:10:08 +0000

David,

It sounds like there we’re two issues that pushed you away from Sun in this build-out:

1. Sun pre-announced the X4150 well before they could deliver product (direct or through their channel).

2. You needed Sun to provide hardware for testing before making a buy (so many need this step when the purchase has so much risk associated with it) but this sounds like a consequence of issue #1.

And Dell had a mature product in good supply (PE2950’s?) and addressed the testing issue quickly to win the business.

Is that a fair assessment of Sun’s failure to help you address this upgrade to your compute capacity?

Or did Dell also give you additional considerations to help you manage expansion and control risks? Of course, none of this is any of my business… I’m just curious.

By: David Young

David Young — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 23:22:05 +0000

@ah: a switch to Dell does not mean we’re considering switching our base OS. Our distribution of OpenSolaris is important to Joyent. The underlying hardware platform isn’t. Except that we need consistent, dependable supply.

By: ah

ah — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 19:32:47 +0000

next step:
switch to xen with rhel/centos/debian/freebsd?

By: Jinks

Jinks — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 08:58:38 +0000

Wow, I really hope that Raj post is not a true and real official statement from SUN.

It certainly doesn’t make help their case in how his comment was articulated.

By: Raj

Raj — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 06:48:29 +0000

Just to set record straight – I had personally shipped 25 ×4150 systems to you for implementing infrastructure for FB developers and for some reason you decided to take x4150s and several other systems and never return our phone calls and emails. You also mentioned that you were able to purchase 10 ×4150 systems from channel. I wish you provide true and correct information to your customers. Now since you’ve decided to work with Dell, I expect the systems to come back to us asap.

By: David Young

David Young — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 09:30:31 +0000

@Dick: get in touch with us (david [at] joyent [dot] com). Let’s see if Joyent can help you.

By: Dick Davies

Dick Davies — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 05:16:16 +0000

@Jason: understood – we’re in the same position (in our case COMSTAR makes a lot of things possible that x4500s+iSCSI doesn’t).

What I was querying was :

“ And OpenSolaris is supported on these systems according to a recent news item. “

which sounded like Dell would offer support for OpenSolaris (something I thought even Sun didn’t do). Did I misread that?

At present I have nothing to go on but press releases, and we have a lot of Dell kit here (and a real need for a strong x64 Solaris platform).

By: Jason A. Hoffman

Jason A. Hoffman — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 07:00:24 +0000

@Dick, we’re the support for OpenSolaris. It’s not a problem for us to do anything we’d like to do with it.