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Misogynist posted:Pricing is typically considered to be vendor-confidential privileged information, and it's rather damaging for vendor relations to share it. Only because the way storage hardware (and most IT resources) is sold is bullshit.
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# ? Apr 11, 2012 21:43 |
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# ? May 21, 2024 14:22 |
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Erwin posted:Only because the way storage hardware (and most IT resources) is sold is bullshit. I hate having to actually talk people to get a rough estimate of how much something will cost. Just... have some retail prices layed out then save the enterprise wrangling for the people who actually call for a quote. This way I can show how cool I am with a printed savings estimate after "Wrangling with the vendor".
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# ? Apr 11, 2012 21:48 |
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Misogynist posted:Pricing is typically considered to be vendor-confidential privileged information, and it's rather damaging for vendor relations to share it. If you have a budget figure, call them up, and see if they have anything that fits your range. Yeah, I hate getting sales people all excited because the last thing they ever give me is an actual price. I usually have to go through a sales presentation and end up pissing people off because they were completely out of our price range. Basically I was looking for a range, like over 50K? 100k? 1 BILLION dollars? I just have no concept how much Compellent is.
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# ? Apr 11, 2012 22:03 |
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Erwin posted:Only because the way storage hardware (and most IT resources) is sold is bullshit. Hell in Sweden I can look at any public purchase made in the past, and if a supplier still sells that product they *have* to offer me the same deal.
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# ? Apr 11, 2012 22:05 |
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Erwin posted:I think some of their UI messages are written by high school interns:
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# ? Apr 11, 2012 22:11 |
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Timdogg posted:Yeah, I hate getting sales people all excited because the last thing they ever give me is an actual price. I usually have to go through a sales presentation and end up pissing people off because they were completely out of our price range.
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# ? Apr 11, 2012 22:48 |
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Rhymenoserous posted:I hate having to actually talk people to get a rough estimate of how much something will cost. Yes, yes, yes. I loving hate that you have to get quotes for something they clearly price up every single goddamn day: just make the price clear.
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# ? Apr 11, 2012 23:40 |
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necrobobsledder posted:More likely it's some outsourced developer that doesn't speak / read / write English as a native language. I'll be damned if I could come up with good error messages in Chinese or Romanian. Reminds me of the best example of this problem, PHP's unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM error. As if there's any other kind of T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM.
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# ? Apr 11, 2012 23:42 |
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Timdogg posted:Yeah, I hate getting sales people all excited because the last thing they ever give me is an actual price. I usually have to go through a sales presentation and end up pissing people off because they were completely out of our price range. I'd say your base config starts around ~$80k, few TBs, two NAS and no fancy stuff included. Add a tray of SSD, magic sauce, live volumes etc and you have just doubled the price. Add 10Gb, more disk, capacity etc... you get the picture.
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# ? Apr 11, 2012 23:48 |
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Maggot Monster posted:This is probably the laziest thing I'll ever post but does anyone have a decent "business case" they've used that successfully laid out the pricing for machines, storage, cabling, 10G infrastructure, the full works. I started with a number in mind that I figured was palatable for me to spend, and framed the discussion around our DR site. The hardware was lacking if we were to have a real disaster. What I did was priced out a full refresh of our production site, and we will move our production hardware to the DR site. We got 2 years out of it in production, and will now get another 3 years out of it at our DR site. Realistically, I know my business environment, and it's very easy to justify purchases when the FDIC suggests that you do so.* Knowing nothing about your company, I would probably just try to make one of the sites the red headed stepchild, and get a 2 year refresh cycle, moving stuff from site a to site c now, and in two years refreshing site b and moving the gear that is there to site c, repeating this process every 4 years. So site C gets 4 year old gear for 2 years. *On this note, does anyone have any suggestions on how to explain how VMware HA and clustering works to an IT examiner that clearly doesn't understand it? Last year one of the examiners told us that when we did DR testing, we had to bring each VM up on each cluster member to prove that the cluster member could run the VM. We decided we were going to ignore his request, but if he comes back I need to have a reasonable response to him, and I really don't even know where to begin with this guy.
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# ? Apr 12, 2012 00:37 |
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adorai posted:I just went through this process for my company. It's not completely unreasonable, just put members of your cluster in HA into maintenance mode in a rolling fasion to show the vms migrating and existing on different nodes.
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# ? Apr 12, 2012 03:56 |
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fatjoint posted:It's not completely unreasonable, just put members of your cluster in HA into maintenance mode in a rolling fasion to show the vms migrating and existing on different nodes.
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# ? Apr 12, 2012 04:01 |
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adorai posted:He asked us to prove that each VM can run on each node. I don't think he believes that each node is configured identically and is definately capable of running each VM. Without maintenance moding all but one node and showing that all VMs can run on that one node (not possible, concurrently) I do not know how to satisfy his request. The way to answer this is with Host Profiles. You know they're configured identically. He needs vSphere to tell him they're configured identically.
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# ? Apr 12, 2012 05:16 |
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Misogynist posted:That's why you give them a budget up front. I used to do this with recruiters all the time and it saved me a lot of heartache.
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# ? Apr 12, 2012 10:00 |
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Misogynist posted:That's why you give them a budget up front. I used to do this with recruiters all the time and it saved me a lot of heartache. And when you give them a budget of $100k, that hardware they just sold to another guy for $75k will be shown to you for $95k because they "really sharpened their pencil and got you a great deal."
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# ? Apr 12, 2012 13:13 |
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adorai posted:Knowing nothing about your company, I would probably just try to make one of the sites the red headed stepchild, and get a 2 year refresh cycle, moving stuff from site a to site c now, and in two years refreshing site b and moving the gear that is there to site c, repeating this process every 4 years. So site C gets 4 year old gear for 2 years. To be honest I should have probably elaborated. We have about ~250 or so production servers (probably more hidden and squirreled away around the place) scattered across several datacenters. (4, but I'm only focused on 3 right now). My job is to help bootstrap the automation so that we can actually scale and manage what we already have, as well as aggressively upgrading from RHEL 3/4 to 5/6. As part of this work we've been rebuilding things straight into production. We have almost no "test" and extremely limited "dev". What I'm actually trying to spec out right now is enough virtualization to realistically build a full test tier for everything we've got. We wouldn't need as many machines (often services are part of a pool of 5-10 servers) so I think I can get away with 150 nodes at between 2-4G of RAM with 32G of disk for each server (plus an unspecified chunk of space required to replicate smaller test sets of data where appropriate). I have it in my head that the best thing to spec out is enough hypervisors to handle 100 nodes per datacenter, plus about 5TB of storage in each location as well as 10GigE and other associated stuff to get an environment that is completely dedicated to virtualization. (Our disaster recovery plans, for better or worse, involve moving to having multiple clusters of services, one per datacenter, with loadbalancing between them. We may never even get close but it seems more likely than trying to do a full DR site.)
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# ? Apr 12, 2012 13:14 |
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Erwin posted:And when you give them a budget of $100k, that hardware they just sold to another guy for $75k will be shown to you for $95k because they "really sharpened their pencil and got you a great deal." Vendor management takes people skills. If you're not able to competently negotiate, you will get taken advantage of, end of story.
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# ? Apr 12, 2012 15:21 |
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Misogynist posted:This certainly explains why I gave a vendor a budget of $1.5m for a recent project and got back a quote at $600k. I always say my budget is a lot lower than it is and get competing bids so I can get better prices.
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# ? Apr 12, 2012 15:25 |
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So I'm reading through Scott Lowe's "Mastering VMware vSphere 5" and I have to ask, does it get any better? I just started the networking chapter, but after 4 chapters of "Launch the vSphere Client if it is not already running, and connect to a vCenter Server instance." I'm getting pretty exhausted of being taught how to bush buttans.
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# ? Apr 12, 2012 16:04 |
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Here's how you negotiate with vendors: YOU figure out what you need (space, IOPS, HA, future capacity, etc) and YOU figure out your budget, then you take that to the vendor and see if they can meet the need you defined for the price you specified. Don't make this like a Diablo II trade game, where everyone stands around for 30 minutes just repeating "wug" and "i dunno, wuw".
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# ? Apr 12, 2012 16:08 |
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FISHMANPET posted:So I'm reading through Scott Lowe's "Mastering VMware vSphere 5" and I have to ask, does it get any better? I just started the networking chapter, but after 4 chapters of "Launch the vSphere Client if it is not already running, and connect to a vCenter Server instance." I'm getting pretty exhausted of being taught how to bush buttans. You can always do everything via powerCLI to make it a bit more challenging, but if you did the 4 then 5 will seem dry
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# ? Apr 12, 2012 16:12 |
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Rhymenoserous posted:I always say my budget is a lot lower than it is and get competing bids so I can get better prices. My vendors probably think I am doing this, but in reality I just have a poo poo budget! Don't be afraid to counter offer; I've gotten some insane deals from sales guys who are eager to get in the door for whatever reason. For example, I'm working on a project to shore up our crappy backup/DR situation. We're not a huge company so there isn't a lot involved in this, but I want it to scale for the future. Asked a vendor for a quote on some VM-aware backup software, he sent me a figure greater than my budget for the entire project. I told him as much and said no thanks. He came back again with a figure with poo poo I didn't want anyway trimmed off and priced less than half the original quote
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# ? Apr 12, 2012 16:30 |
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Has anyone ever tried actually backing up ESXi? I'm a little late upgrading from ESXi 4.1 to 5.0 U1. VMWare's upgrade guide warns that you cannot rollback to a previous version once upgrading. Googling around people seem to suggest that there is no point to backing up ESXi. I know you can use the vSphere CLI script vicfg-cfgbackup.pl to backup the configuration. Would it then be possible to rollback by reinstalling ESXi 4.1 over 5.0 and using the saved configuration file? Our environment is very simple, a single host with 10 VMs, no vCenter, update manager, or plugins.
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# ? Apr 12, 2012 16:44 |
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Corvettefisher posted:You can always do everything via powerCLI to make it a bit more challenging, but if you did the 4 then 5 will seem dry It looks like the networking chapter is more crunch, but I just felt like I was reading page after page of babby's first computer hand holding steps. There are even a few times where he says "this process is exactly the same as the previous thing we just did, but I'm going to walk you through it in mind numbing detail again." So I start to glaze over when it's another 2 pages of screenshots of vSphere wizards and tab clicking. Even if he started his step by step stuff with something like "For this task, we'll need to be in the whatever tab," but instead he walks us through getting to that tab a hundred times, and I feel like if I haven't learned how to find that tab by now, maybe I'm just not cut out for computers (or breathing).
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# ? Apr 12, 2012 16:49 |
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Kerpal posted:Has anyone ever tried actually backing up ESXi? I'm a little late upgrading from ESXi 4.1 to 5.0 U1. VMWare's upgrade guide warns that you cannot rollback to a previous version once upgrading. Googling around people seem to suggest that there is no point to backing up ESXi. I know you can use the vSphere CLI script vicfg-cfgbackup.pl to backup the configuration. Would it then be possible to rollback by reinstalling ESXi 4.1 over 5.0 and using the saved configuration file? Our environment is very simple, a single host with 10 VMs, no vCenter, update manager, or plugins. It takes like 20 minutes to install ESXi and you have the configs you can just import them. Any bare metal restore you do would take longer than just reinstalling and applying the config. So uh yes, if you want to roll back just install etc. Allthough you'd probably be better off just doing a fresh install of 5 and re-attaching your VM's from a time wasted standpoint.
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# ? Apr 12, 2012 16:53 |
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Rhymenoserous posted:It takes like 20 minutes to install ESXi and you have the configs you can just import them. Any bare metal restore you do would take longer than just reinstalling and applying the config. This, and if you have host profiles(lucky SOBs) host profiles is a simple click
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# ? Apr 12, 2012 16:55 |
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Yeah, were I him I'd just schedule a 4 hour downtime window at some point and just do it. 4 hours is more than enough time to dig through all the permutations of "Well the upgrade didn't work, I'm going to isntall 5, the 5 install didn't work, I'm going to install 4.1." etc. Honestly I don't forsee any problems unless you are trying to install it on a graphing calculator or something.
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# ? Apr 12, 2012 17:01 |
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Kerpal posted:Has anyone ever tried actually backing up ESXi? I'm a little late upgrading from ESXi 4.1 to 5.0 U1. VMWare's upgrade guide warns that you cannot rollback to a previous version once upgrading. Googling around people seem to suggest that there is no point to backing up ESXi. I know you can use the vSphere CLI script vicfg-cfgbackup.pl to backup the configuration. Would it then be possible to rollback by reinstalling ESXi 4.1 over 5.0 and using the saved configuration file? Our environment is very simple, a single host with 10 VMs, no vCenter, update manager, or plugins.
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# ? Apr 12, 2012 17:11 |
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It's all on a local RAID. We have ESXi installed on RAID 1 with VM data stored on a RAID 5. Are you saying I can install ESXi 5.0 on a USB flash drive, boot off that with the host, and then add VMs residing on the local RAID to its inventory? That would be a great way to test it.
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# ? Apr 12, 2012 17:25 |
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Kerpal posted:It's all on a local RAID. We have ESXi installed on RAID 1 with VM data stored on a RAID 5. Are you saying I can install ESXi 5.0 on a USB flash drive, boot off that with the host, and then add VMs residing on the local RAID to its inventory? That would be a great way to test it. yes
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# ? Apr 12, 2012 17:30 |
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Kerpal posted:It's all on a local RAID. We have ESXi installed on RAID 1 with VM data stored on a RAID 5. Are you saying I can install ESXi 5.0 on a USB flash drive, boot off that with the host, and then add VMs residing on the local RAID to its inventory? That would be a great way to test it.
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# ? Apr 12, 2012 17:41 |
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I was actually just reading that article once Misogynist pointed it out. Thanks dudes!
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# ? Apr 12, 2012 17:43 |
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Misogynist posted:That's why you give them a budget up front. I used to do this with recruiters all the time and it saved me a lot of heartache. I have to ask, why would you give any vendor your budget upfront? My personal opinion is that if you have $20k to spend on widgets, and you tell a vendor that you have $20k to spend on widgets, they'll come up with a solution that costs $20k. Personally I prefer to work on the solution with the obvious caveat that you both need to know that the solution is going to come back in the ballpark. I had to laugh when we had our SAN. List is/was around $58k. Special bid came back at $43k. They sent us an evaluation unit that was supposed to be from an eval pool but they had none so sent a brand new sealed unit. After three weeks we were told we could have it at $23k "to save the hassle of collecting it". I wanted to tell them to gently caress off out of general principle, but we smiled sweetly, said yes please and bought it.
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# ? Apr 12, 2012 18:14 |
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Bitch Stewie posted:I have to ask, why would you give any vendor your budget upfront? What you have just described is how every business interaction should work. You tell them "I have $20k and I need a 20 lbs of widgets" and they say "OK, here's 20 lbs of widgets" and everyone is happy. Believe it or not, even if a vendor creates a solution that satisfies your needs and fits within your budget, their actual cost is lower than what they charge you. That difference is called "profit", and it's how business works. While we can argue the fine details over how much profit it's "ethical" to collect, the fact is that they satisfied your need for the price you asked for.
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# ? Apr 12, 2012 19:41 |
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Kerpal posted:It's all on a local RAID. We have ESXi installed on RAID 1 with VM data stored on a RAID 5. Are you saying I can install ESXi 5.0 on a USB flash drive, boot off that with the host, and then add VMs residing on the local RAID to its inventory? That would be a great way to test it. Most people I know running ESX on a local raid are buying machines with SD card slots now so they can run the hyper visor off one of those.
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# ? Apr 12, 2012 20:06 |
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Rhymenoserous posted:Most people I know running ESX on a local raid are buying machines with SD card slots now so they can run the hyper visor off one of those.
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# ? Apr 12, 2012 20:46 |
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Bitch Stewie posted:I have to ask, why would you give any vendor your budget upfront?
From a professional ethics perspective, pricing is generally considered vendor confidential and it's damaging to vendor relations if you disclose the details of your solution to another vendor. However, there's nothing wrong with saying "Vendor X's nearline storage system came in at $420 per TB and we really need you to come up with something in the ballpark for us to consider your solutions." Bottom line: you need to know what the product is actually worth, and you need to know the type of person you're dealing with on the sales side of things. If you have a suspicion that a vendor's product is going to fall outside of your budget, express that up front. Vendors appreciate when you don't waste their time as much as you appreciate when they don't waste yours. Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 22:27 on Apr 12, 2012 |
# ? Apr 12, 2012 22:21 |
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FISHMANPET posted:So as I read through Masterping vSphere 5 and VMware vSphere Design, I'm mentally planning my departments virtualization build out (and my boss is listening to me on this, so I can't gently caress it up) and I decided to look for 10 Gb Switches. If you haven't bought these yet, Dell steered us toward the 8024F for our VM project. The switch is way cheaper than the 10GBase-T switch and Twinax SFP+ Direct connect has lower transceiver latency than cat6/7. If you are just doing a top-of-rack install that is within the 10m distance of twinax I can't think of a good reason to use cat6/7. Nukelear v.2 fucked around with this message at 15:41 on Apr 13, 2012 |
# ? Apr 13, 2012 14:55 |
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Nukelear v.2 posted:If you haven't bought these yet, Dell steered us toward the 8024F for our VM project. The switch is way cheaper than the 10GBase-T switch and Twinax SFP+ Direct connect has lower transceiver latency than cat6/7. If you are just doing a top-of-rack install that is within the 10m distance of twinax I can't think of a good reason to use cat6/7. Wow, the 8024F is $3400 cheaper than the 8024. I assumed we'd need to buy SFP+ modules for each of those ports, I didn't realize there existed a cable with an SFP+ end. I assume that I can then plug those into an Intel SFP+ NIC. Though Dell doesn't currently offer an SFP daughter card on the 12G servers. Though it really doesn't matter, I guess none of this is going to happen for at least 2 years
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# ? Apr 13, 2012 16:06 |
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# ? May 21, 2024 14:22 |
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FISHMANPET posted:Wow, the 8024F is $3400 cheaper than the 8024. I assumed we'd need to buy SFP+ modules for each of those ports, I didn't realize there existed a cable with an SFP+ end. I assume that I can then plug those into an Intel SFP+ NIC. That's not really an issue unless you need the slots for something else. My setup is 12G, R620's with a Broadcom 57810 dual port SFP+ for iscsi and the daughter card is a quad port 1Gig for general network. Also not an issue because in two years everything will be different. Edit: Actually look like they do have a daughter card, that actually looks pretty sweet, Broadcom 57800 2x10Gb DA/SFP+ + 2x1Gb BT Network Daughter Card Nukelear v.2 fucked around with this message at 16:48 on Apr 13, 2012 |
# ? Apr 13, 2012 16:22 |