1999-02-24-17:32:31 Dave Hitz:
Marc Nicholas:
To open a real can-of-worms, what would people on this list like to see in a low-end product offering? (Sub-$10k chassis).
This hypothetical discussion would be of great interest to me. :-)
Well, I think it'd be reasonable to hope that a sub-10k chassis could have a reasonably quick CPU --- e.g. K6-2/300 or so; say 128MB RAM, perhaps in one 128MB PC-100 SDRAM with 3 more slots available so you could take it up to 512MB cheaply; an OS that can be booted from some reasonably conventional media like some technology floppy, zip, jazz, cd-rom, tape, PCMCIA FLASH, or whatever; and a short-but-nonzero list of supported controller types you could shop from to slot in controllers which you would then attach to your drives. Have the base box come with one 10/100baseT port, and document what card[s] are supported for the user to buy more. Maybe offer a range in this line with steps up from the fast-pentia into alphas, but for a low-end offering you could let the customer provide their own SCSI gear. By this point lots of people have settled on drive types and enclosures that they swear by, and of which they've accumulated a lot of inventory. I betcha it wouldn't be hard to sell a breathtakingly fast, stable, reliable NFS server that could be hooked up to these drives.
-Bennett