Calder Group Inc

Luckily most of you aren’t buying servers or trying to stretch your hardware budget. For those of you who are, here are some tips on saving money.

Actually there is only one tip, buy as little as possible from the original manufacture. You see the original manufacture like IBM or HP has pricing power, and they will charge you an arm and a leg for their brand name products.

Here is how you apply these rules

• By the most minimal configuration from the manufacture
• Use a VAR for the purchase and buy additional items like memory and disk drives from the VAR
• Have the VAR do the installation of the memory and disk drives

So for example, if you wanted to buy a HP-DL385, dual opteron with 12Gb of memory and 3 72Gb drives don’t buy it all from HP! Get an HP-DL385 with 2Gb or memory and one tiny drive. Then have the VAR purchase the additional memory and drives, install them and ship them to you.

Shop around and find some good VAR. They are competitive, and unlike the manufacture they don’t have pricing power.

This won’t work for all your hardware needs. Take a HP-DL585 for example. It can take up to 64Gb of memory, but only specially certified memory from HP may be used.

This is why you can get a 2 way HP-DL385 with 16Gb for $7,000, but a 2 way HP-DL585 with 64Gb will cost at least $68,000. Four times the memory nine times the cost.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 19th, 2006 at 12:10 am and is filed under Linux, Software Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.