As I said yesterday:
"Great! Oh, but wait there's no such thing as a free lunch: so for a small business who doesn't have their first fiber SAN, just how much will it cost to stand up a new turnkey system from scratch?
Insofar as capacity, let's say just 12TB worth, as that's an obvious comparison: the value performance baseline is $1500 (three 4TB internals in RAID0 on the 2012 Mac Pro).
Beat the price and you have a viable business case. Or fail...and you're just like any other IT Dept who has forgotten that they're a support organization who lives on overhead dollars paid for by the business units."
Frankly, I can live with internal or external ... but the decision still boils down to the brass tacks of the business case, which is always going to ask: HOW MUCH DOES IT COST?
I'm not going to write a blank check.
-hh
Hm, you need 12TB of striped storage using traditional disk and accessible over a high speed connection? Under $1500? The LaCie 5big can do 10TB over Thunderbolt, which would be plenty of bandwidth for most SMB applications as direct attach storage. If you want that over FC, you're going to have to go rogue and build your own box, since any reputable vendor won't be under $2700 for a FC SAN solution, or $6000 for a turnkey setup with drives.
Here's your problem: a turnkey solution from a reputable vendor is going to cost some serious dosh up front, with the idea that because said centralized storage is used by multiple business entities, that it's worth the steep initial price. If you want a storage array for under $1500, I can easily build you a 40TB array with RAID 0/1/5/6/10/50 support. It won't have the warranty, support, or feature set of a proper SAN, and it won't be turnkey, but you'll get what you want at the price you're willing to pay.
That's neither here nor there, though, since this is ultimately about the Mac Pro. Will it force organizations to rethink their current setups? Absolutely. Will it put a strain on SMB's? You betcha. Thing is, though, Apple has
always been a premium brand, even when they made Enterprise servers and SANs. You always paid a price premium compared to their competitors, and you likely always will, especially in their higher-end gear. I work for a Medium-sized business now, and we're facing a complete overhaul of our publishing division since Apple is pushing Thunderbolt so hard, and our old displays and FW gear becomes unreliable or unsupported. Do we like the prospect of replacing all of our old CCFL Cinema Displays with Thunderbolt ones at $1k a pop? No, but we understand that's the future, and that in order to remain competitive, it's an expense we'll have to endure, and the same goes for the nMP. We don't like it, but we understand that the long term picture of adopting Thunderbolt will be the increased flexibility available to us in terms of expansion, as well as the potential for reduced cost if Intel every succeeds with implementing it into PCs.
If the nMP is too expensive a proposition for you in both the long term and short term, then you either need to reevaluate your business expenditures if they're truly necessary items, or look to alternatives that fit your budget.
) to have a cpuasaurs in it's own dedicated location doing it's own dedicated tasks..
