>> OTOH, it seems that any equipment that says "rack mountable" on it is
>> instantly 5x the price, for no apparent reason...
>
> Of course, the engineering that goes in designing the special connectors
> to power and manage these boards, as well as keep them ventilated comes
> free of charge, in your world...

What "special connectors"?

Buy a UPS that sits under your desk. That's £50. Buy a UPS that is rack 
mountable. That's £800, minimum. Sure, they probably don't sell rack UPS 
with capacities as low as they do for the desktop. But 16x the price? 
Really? For a battery and an inverter?

Buy a 12-port desktop switch. £30, maybe? Now buy a rack mountable one. 
That'll be £200 please. Sure, it's physically bigger. There's more metal 
in it. Metal costs money. But does it cost /that/ much money?

(Before anyone asks - no, just because it can be rack mounted, that does 
/not/ mean it has management features. When I joined the company, we had 
a whole rack full of switches, all rack mounted, none of them managed. 
And all about £400 each.)

Redundant power supplies cost extra. RAID controllers cost extra. 
Hot-swap drive bays cost extra. And yet, a server that has these costs 
nowhere near as much as a rack-mount server. Now sure, making something 
like a server actually small enough to be rack mounted is nontrivial. 
There's a reason laptops cost 5x the price of a similar desktop. I 
understand that. But for goodness' sake, if you make a /wire clamp/ 
that's rack mountable, suddenly it goes from being £2 to £80. It's like 
it's a license to print money...

Post a reply to this message