Costing Sun Ray vs Wintel

Tag : Heat Exchange System

Although this blog entry is about capital costs, this is just thethinest edge of the cost wedge: the big dollar differences are inoperating costs and user productivity - things I’ll start toget to tomorrow.
The big differences in cost come from software licensing, theaccommodations you choose to make with respect to failure, and thedecisions you make with respect to the minimal hardware needed todo the job.
To start with the easiest stuff first: the list price cost toprovision a thousand Sun Ray desktop users with 24.1″ TFTscreens mounted on the standard 2FS Sun Ray with Unix keyboards andmice, is $1,219,000.
Doing the same thing with Dell’s Optiflex 755 (1GB, Core Duo@2.53Ghz, 22″ LCD, and the “Ultimate Vistadowngrade” to XP Pro pre-installed) will cost you $1,311,000.
On the server side, if your base load is Office, E-communications,and file management, you’ll need a rack of eight Solarisservers: six of them dual core T5240 processors running in 64GB,two X4500, 24TB, data servers, and a shared one hour UPS for about$320,000 at list inclusive of the Star Office and related softwareyou need.
To ensure both operational continuity and appropriate levels ofresource over-kill you’d get two sets, put them in differentplaces, and assign them to separate sysadmin teams for a totalcapital cost, at list, in the neighborhood of $650,000.
On the Windows side the server picture is much more complicatedlargely because the key redundancy strategy is based on layeringvirtualization over clustering - for example you’ll needaround eight exchange servers but they could run on only fourmachines and would typically all access the same SAN. You canchoose, furthermore, between additional virtualization on largermachines or greater redundancy on smaller machines - and, ofcourse, all the software has to be licensed separately.
One reasonable approach would be to use 18 Dell R900 2.83Ghz E7220servers with 16GB each and a single shared 24TB Dell CX3 SAN withVMware and Microsoft’s 25 CAL, x64, enterprise server 2008pre-installed on each - at about $460,000 inclusive.
In addition you need a thousand Office Professional 2007 licensesat a retail price of $329,950 - for a system total capital cost, atlist, of about $790,000.
Thus the system total for the fully redundant 24″ Sun Raysolution comes to about $1.9 million or $1,870 per user while thecomparable numbers for the 22″ client-server system are $2.1million or $2,100 per user.
That difference is small - $200K would matter to me personally, butshould not be a significant factor in making a decision betweendissimilar systems for a business employing a thousand people.
So what will make the difference?
The big capital cost difference will come from the primary nonOffice application, or applications, you want to run on thosedesktops. As configured the Sun system is overkill with fullredundancy and more of everything from screen real estate tostorage and processor power -so adding something like Oraclefinancials would just add the licensing cost to the set-up.
In contrast the Windows system is tight because most of the memory,processors, and storage you’re buying is on the desktops andso useless when you want to add significant shared applications -for Oracle financials, for example, you’d have to add moreservers and storage along with the new license fees and then facesignificant backup and redundancy limitations.
Generically, however, the long run biggest cost difference is goingto come from staffing - the Unix system will need five or six ITpeople, the Windows one 20+ IT people and significant hiddencommitments of user self-support (aka futz time).
Politically the biggest difference is in power use. The base 2FSSun Ray uses 4 watts: two thirds what Dell’s Optiflex uses insleep mode and about 2% of what the 1GB model requires in fulloperation - and bear in mind that every watt converted to heat inthe machine adds another watt equivalent to the building coolingload.
Note that, in reality this cost difference is trivial relative tostaffing cost differences, but people are really bad at pricingpolitical correctness and 4 watts + screen vs 180 Watts + screenmakes for a really compelling overhead - and you get to explainwhat “in perpetuum” means.
From a capital cost perspective, however, the killer issue islongevity. Roll out those Dells and you’re into the nearestapproximation yet invented to perpetual motion: the evergreen cycleunder which users start to complain about the limitations of crappyout of date gear as the installer leaves their cubicles. Roll outSun Rays instead and you’re set until those 24.1″ TFTscreens become obsolete - probably around ten years anyway.
Capital cost is easy - but fundamentally much less important thanpeople think it is. The big issue, dwarfing even staffing costs, isthe differential effect on user productivity exercised by the twoarchitectures.
I’ll start on that tomorrow but, for now, think about oneminor aspect of this as it affects IT operations: server OSupgrades in the Solaris world aren’t usually visible to usersat all; and application upgrades are visible only to users of theaffected application, have no other effects on their desktops,affect all, or some subset of, users at exactly the same time, andcan (usually) be rolled back with little effort.