>> When I joined the company, we had floor-standing servers with hot-swap
>> drives, dual redundant power supplies, a floor-standing UPS, and all the
>> rest. It still didn't cost anywhere near what a rack-mountable setup
>> would cost.
>
> Of the same brand and model?

No.

Generally manufacturers will make one model that's floor-standing, and 
another, different model which is rack-mount. That makes it quite hard 
to compare the same model in both configurations.

> Last time I looked at server costs (over 10
> years ago), the price difference between a Compaq Proliant 2500 with
> feet and a compaq Proliant with mounting brackets was the price of the
> mounting brackets.

And if that were the case, I'd have no complaints. My point is that this 
seems emphatically /not/ to be the case. It seems more like rack 
mounting is a "premium feature", and you have to pay a serious amount of 
money for it.

That said, for a /server/ there is at least some justification; it's not 
easy to fit all that stuff into such a small space. For other devices, 
there's really no way to justify it.

>> Heck, a USB keyboard costs, what, £2 maybe? Oh, but if you want a
>> keyboard draw for a rack? Suddenly it isn't £2 any more. More like £200.
>> Sure, the draw runners clearly cost money. Do they cost £198? I don't
>> think so.
>
> Are.
> They.
> The.
> Same.
> Brand.
> And.
> Model?
>
> If not, your comparison is useless.

Since when do keyboards have "models"?

> Are you being willfully dense? You don't understand why two different
> types of batteries might be responsible for the price difference?

I'm saying, not knowing how the batteries are different, I can't say 
whether or not that justifies the price difference. It might do, I don't 
know.

>>> Does it have remote management capabilities?
>>
>> Unlikely. (Although not impossible, believe it or not.) But then, for
>> £200 your rack mount unit probably won't either.
>
> Why not? My $99 dollar Linksys router has remote management.

Interesting... I haven't seen too many cheap devices that support this.

>> No management features. You just plug them in, turn them on, and they
>> work. (Once they finished learning MAC addresses, anyway...)
>>
>> I don't recall the exact model off the top of my head. They were
>> definitely SMC "EZ switch", but I can't remember the precise model
>> numbers. A mixture of 12-port and 24-port units.
>
> They are probably not the exact same model as what you had, but the
> SMC8505T is currently listed both on the standalone and the
> rack-mountable sections of the SMC website. Unless it's an error, I
> suspect the price will be very similar...
>
> On the other hand, the "smallest" SMC switch that actually looks like a
> rackmountable is the SMCGS16, whic DOES have a lot of extra features
> besides drill holes for mounting brackets.

I would imagine these switches are long obsolete now. A few Google 
searches turn up results such as

"The EZ Switches 10/100 (SMCFS1601/ SMCFS2401) are unmanaged, 
rack-mountable 16-/24-port Fast Ethernet switches for workgroup and 
small office environment."

which is probably what we had. Good luck figuring out what the original 
sale price was.

>> A cursory inspection of the nearest product catalogue indicates that the
>> starting price for a HP server is about £200, while the cheapest
>> possible rack-mountable unit is £400. Which, actually, isn't nearly as
>> bad as I'd expected. (I was thinking nearer £2,000. It /is/ HP, after
>> all.)
>>
>
> Is the £200 server THE SAME as the £400 one, apart from the mounting
> brackets? If not, your comparison is flawed.

No. The rack-mount is higher spec - that the difference is probably 
enough to account for the difference in price.

Which would seem to suggest that the difference is that they don't 
bother offering rack-mount for cheap hardware.

>> It just seems that being rack-mountable is one of those "premium"
>> features that makes manufacturers instantly put the price up, just
>> because they can.
>>
>> It's like printers with network cards. A network card costs, what,
>> £0.0016? And yet, a printer without one is £30 or something, but one
>> with it is £150. Presumably because they figure that your average home
>> user doesn't give a fig whether there's a network card, they just want
>> the cheapest one in the shop, but your average business user cannot
>> afford to do without one, and won't think twice about splashing a few
>> hundred pounds for something they actually need...
>
> It couldn't possibly because the USB printer at £30 prints only 6 pages
> per minute at 300dpi, while the networkable printer does twice as much
> at twice the resolution, has two paper trays and does automatic
> two-sided printing, can it? No... It HAS to be because of the built-in nic.

Actually, the printer I'm thinking of prints at a /lower/ resolution 
than most other inkjets. And it only has one tray and no duplex. I will 
grant you, however, that it most certainly /does/ print very, very fast 
for an inkjet.

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