[Bioclusters] Any experiences with these guys? Seems like they might have something

[Joseph Landman]

On Sun, 2003-11-02 at 21:31, Chris Dagdigian wrote:

[...]

> I'm a bit suspicious about your message though. I hope I'm wrong but 
> your yahoo ID is brand new and you posted from an IP block belonging to 
> Kinkos.

heh... I thought I was the only one who googled after seeing this
post...  :)

> Ever since Rackable got that latest round of venture funding they have 
> hired a bunch of aggressive outbound sales and marketing people who have 
> already pissed off one the life science labs I had referred Rackable to. 
> The message below sounds like more of the same.

Ugh.

I once worked for a company that did stuff like that.  6 years ago as I
remember.  They are still paying for it with that customer.  

This particular market has a long memory.  If you mess up, word gets
around, and business falls off.  This is not a good thing.

That said, there are a number of folks who make excellent units in that
form factor.  I can recommend specific ones with excellent hardware, and
good reputations from their base.  If you are looking to higher
densities, you might look at blades, though you need to be careful about
most of these offerings (which were designed for an entirely different
market, and hence do not have the features you might need in a
bio-cluster).  Some folks have adapted remarkably well to the
limitations of the higher density machines, and are using them quite
successfully (Sanger, et al). 

Buying a bio-cluster on the basis of a financial analysts recommendation
would be, well, somewhat difficult to justify to those with the
checkbook who want to know why you bought what you did.  Good CFO's have
a rather incisive way of asking "why buy from them" ...

-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Scalable Informatics LLC
email: landman@scalableinformatics.com
  web: http://scalableinformatics.com
phone: +1 734 612 4615