bah! (more Dell vs. VA)
- From: John Madden <weez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: technocracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 23:48:35 -0500
I don't know where the notion that VA systems are more expensive than the
industry standard came from, but I'd just like to pass this on...
The Dell 2450 (that's left us with the sour taste of Dell) came configured
with roughly the following:
- 512 megs ram
- PERC3/si RAID controller (not even supported)
- 3 18gig Quantums (scsi-3, I think)
- 2 PIII/600's.
- Dual port intel 10/100 (this is really nice, and cost an extra $256 on
the VA box, which is the only thing I can pick at on the VA side....) plus
an onboard 10/100. I don't know what the foof was wrong with it, but it
had to be disabled to get the box to even boot. Go Dell...
- Redhat 6.2 (barely)
- *Crappy* documentation (mostly just redhat's stuff)
Exactly what was paid may be something I shouldn't talk about, but I'll
save you the trip to the website: it was around $8,000.
Now let's head over to VA's site. The basic FullOn 2240 starts at $7,535,
and surprise, it actually has better hardware than that Dell. Let's knock
the configuration *down* a bit to get it as close as possible to the the
Dell:
- 512 megs ram
- Mylex RAID controller (fully supported by open drivers)
- 2 PIII/650's (don't even offer 600's =) )
- Had to add another nic to get it up to two. Only $89, but the machine
really oughta have 2 to begin with...
- The RH 6.2 thing plus VA's custom stuff. Haven't seen it, but from VA,
I imagine the setup would be at least competent, which is a lot more than
I can say for the Dells. Add an actual user's guide, which has gotta be
better than Dell's "this is what this light means" 50-pages-of-BS.
Yeah, sounds expensive? How's $6,138 sound? I was... shocked. That
extra $2k will get you a sweet tape drive, or maybe some nice support
options (which Dell either doesn't even offer or you don't even want). In
the end, you're getting a *better* machine than that 2450, if nothing else
because of a working hardware raid controller, not to mention the extra
100mhz of cpu, or the fact that VA actually "gets" Linux.
Dell oughta just pack it in and go back to selling Windoze.
And Neil, I'm seriously not trying to kiss ass here, either. =)
John
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