Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[neye_eve]

this is going to be a production server (runs all of our main apps and file shares), so downloading a beta on it wouldn't be a very good idea. Gotta keep it licensed for a production server, so no MSDN-type licenses either.

Cost was somewhere around $10K, dual 1.6's, 210GB Useable HD (in RAID 5, so 280 real space), 2GB mem. Ended up costing more than I'd thought it would, but I don't mind because it was still better $/performance than most others in its class.

it's weird though... pricing out an apple xserve actually looks *very* competitive in pure specs terms and price. the disks aren't SCSI, which is the main fall back (other than the fact it doesn't run windows), but if I had the OS X knowledge I needed and didn't need it to host a .Net IIS website, and could have another server do the group policy for the clients, I'd have a long hard look at the apple offerings...

2GB Ram, Dual G5s, 250 GB HD useable (500 GB, mirrored - no RAID 5 withou the xServer-Raid IIRC), Dual GB Ethernet... $5,599. Of course, there are WAY too many caveats for me to think about it for our company, but it's interesting to look at what's on the other side of the fence.

neye