I've been perusing vendor websites comparing prices on their big iron Opteron boxes. I've found something that isn't quite right:

1) Sun x4600 M2, 64GB RAM, four Opteron 8218s, two SAS drives, RHEL3, rack kit: $47,999
2) HP DL585G2, 64GB RAM (extrapolated from their online pricing), four Opteron 8212s two SAS drives, RHEL3, rack kit: $70k or so
3) Dell PowerEdge 6950, 64GB RAM, four Opteron 8220SEs, two SAS drives, RHEL3, rack kit: $30k

Notice something odd? There isn't much in the way of detailed specs on Dell's site, but their pricing for 4GB DDR667 RAM is $20k for 64GB, or around $1.5k/DIMM. HP's pricing is $4k/DIMM. Sun is in the middle, and to be fair, the x4600 scales to twice the spec of either the Dell or HP system. Either Dell's throwing one heck of a loss-leader in a bizarre way, or someone messed up the site pricing.

Posted by Paul Venezia on March 19, 2007 11:41 AM