I probably wasn’t clear in the comments. I wasn’t meaning to suggest that everyone working in a company goes and build their own PCs. Rather, in my response to Sun Exec’s car analogy, I was simply trying to say that there isn’t much skill, time or effort required to put high-quality PCs together these days; compared to there being a huge amount of skill, effort, time and investment required to put a car together.

That’s the reason why there is such an enourmous market for computer cases, motherboards, CPUs, fans, power supplies etc. at the moment - lots of people and lots of companies *do* see value assembling their computers themselves from parts. Google chooses to do this, for example.

Now that doesn’t mean it makes sense for *most* companies to put their own computers together. It just means that it makes sense for *some* companies to do that.

As for assigning value to being able to pick up the phone and ring somebody up to come fix things, well, we haven’t discussed that - either the value, or the cost. Actually, I do assign value to that. Sun’s hardware and software support is something that I’ve been very impressed with over the years - it’s actually one of the reasons I have bought so much Sun kit.

You can’t both be!

Interesting point about steering demand. Does this mean that the 24TB Thumpers have issues that the 12TB don’t e.g. in terms of cooling? I’d be interested to hear more about what the issues are that make the 24TB model more difficult to build that the 12TB.

I don’t think your Toyota analogy works though. I wouldn’t rather pay Toyota for anything. And I don’t call having an interior swathed in plastic, “quality” I drive a Porcshe 911… and there’s a huge modding community among 911 owners (even if it is just putting aluminium pedals in, in place of the plastic ones Porsche so generously supplies). Oh, and plenty of 911 owners *wish* they could do some other upgrades themselves e.g. upgrading the firmware on the GPS Sat Nav/Phone/Sound System unit - the prices the Porcshe centres charge are completely outrageous considering all that’s involved is inserting a CD into the slot on the unit. Porsche like to think that people that can afford to pay $140K for a car shouldn’t mind forking out a thousand here and a thousand there for nothing. They’re wrong. People don’t like getting ripped off.

And yes, 911s are less reliable than Toyotas. But I still prefer the 911.

But that’s not the real reason the analogy doesn’t work. The real reason is that assembling a computer from off-the-shelf components is several orders of magnitude simpler that assembling a car. The truth is, anyone that’s capable of installing an OS, can build a better quality, more serviceable, more performant PC than say, Dell offers, in about two hours, and get equal reliability. You barely even need a screwdriver these days, and there are only a handful of components to put together.

Now, I’m not comparing Thumper to a Dell PC. As I said, Thumper looks great. Dell PCs don’t. I really wish Dell weren’t so damn to easy to buy from - else I’d be able to justify stopping buying the bloody things!

I agree with you 100% about the design looking fabulous in terms of maintenance costs. And that Thumper looks like a great product. However, there’s no getting around the fact that it’s a mystery why Sun is looking to charge $70,000 for a 24TB Thumper stuffed with 500GB SATA disks, when they’re charging $33,000 for a 12TB Thumper stuffed with $250GB SATA disks.

Now secondarily, I work in a place that was on the early access roles - ZFS on Thumper is absolutely incredible. That we can service them in 10 mins once every few months is not simply “a savings,” it’s near priceless. One storage admin costs us way, way more than some whitebox dense-pack could ever save us. Sun focused on *total* cost, and in my humble opinion, they absolutely nailed it.