On Sat, 2004-18-09 at 16:20 -0700, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote: Has anyone ever approached any of the name brand hardware providers for donations, or at least deals? If rack space is a problem - while it may be OK now, there is no reason to spend money there if you don't have to - something like IBMs blade system may be worth looking at. Downloading their (overly complex) spreadsheet, a chassis lists at $2789(us), which is a lot for a box. OTOH, it isn't just a box, it includes integrated network stuff, dual GigE per blade. I don't know what a 28 port GigE switch is worth, but that definitely makes that price seem far more reasonable. The "smallest" blade, Xeon 2.4GHz, 1 GB ram lists at $2629. I have no idea how flexible IBM is for people off the street, but I think Wikipedia qualifies as a special case. Speculating, I wouldn't be surprised if you could get 4 blades for $10k, and have them throw in a blade center for free. Even if you cant get, or dont want, corporate sponsorship, I think spending $10k warrants more then a day of pondering. Ive never been involved with any organization large enough to even dream about hardware on this scale, so this might be completely insane, but that kind of gear is good for something, wikipedia may be on that list.

On Sat, 18 Sep 2004, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote: Maybe now would be a good time to visit the idea of blade servers? Sun, HP/Compaq, and IBM all have decent blade centers now. (And there are "clones" out there as well.) [Ok, so Sun isn't listing the Opteron blades yet.] Has anyone bought a serial console switch yet? (as has been discussed before.) --Ricky