On 8 Jan 2009, at 4:32 pm, Matt Turner wrote:
I attribute this to sellers who try to hit the lottery. That is, they hope that a corporate server with no back up fails and someone with access to the company's expense account spends 7000 GBP (as I was recently quoted for an ES47) to get a replacement immediately.
I can attest to that - we just got rid of a cluster of 8 ES40s to a research outfit that (for whatever reason) still hasn't made any effort to move off the platform. Of course, such people are running Tru64 or VMS; it's child's play to move services on Linux on Alpha to some other architecture.
That's why AlphaServer resale values are good - lots of Tru64 and VMS customers who don't want to move to Itanium. Tru64 customers (such as we were) are doubly hit - not only do they not have their architecture any more, but of course they don't have their OS either, and if you've made heavy use of Tru64-specific features, such as TruCluster or AdvFS, then you're not in a happy place. TruCluster in particular is hard to replace - HA features for Linux do not work in the same way, or provide the same features, and porting applications to, say, heartbeat, is not trivial in the least.
We bit the bullet and began migrating to Linux on x86 about 6 years ago, pretty much as soon as the HP/Compaq merger happened. The writing was on the wall. But I suspect a lot of customers drank the HP Koolade and believed them when they said that AdvFS and TruCluster would be ported to HP-UX.
Regards, Tim --The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is operated by Genome Research Limited, a charity registered in England with number 1021457 and a company registered in England with number 2742969, whose registered office is 215 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BE.