The initial costs savings of the purchase are highly negated by the longterm. First, in 5-10 years will this company still be around, and will they have any support for this? Where will you go to purchase parts in 3-5 years, especially if they are no longer in business? I have seen countless times people having to re-purchase equipment simply because a replacement part could not be found. Last year a client had to replace a server because of a problem on the motherboard. They were using a white-box server. On the other hand, in this same week I replaced the power supply to my HP DL380 that is about 7 years old. If they were using an IBM, Sun, or HP server then we could have simply purchased a new motherboard and kept the server up an running. The initial cost savings of say $500 was really outweighed by the $4000 price to replace the server. I also would emphasize that the support from HP is going to be of much higher quality than what this company can provide. Again with HP, one Friday night at midnight I called their support regarding an issue with a server. Saturday morning I got a call in from a team of HP support techs who worked together to find the solution. I highly doubt you will get that from this company. In fact their support is M-F NBH. If a problem arises over the weekend, calculate the cost of having this down on Monday waiting for a solution as opposed to simply having it resolved and operational by Sunday. Don't look at costs alone, especially for a business. Keep in mind that the costs will be written off at the end of the year anyways. Over the years I can count numerous examples where people and businesses have been simply burned by going with the cost solution purchasing hardware such as white-box, low-end, consumer oriented, or 2nd tier MFRs. It's one thing to purchase from a place like this for a home computer, but quite the opposite when using this as a core business product. Sean -----Original Message----- From: "Chris Niesen" <chris.niesen at gmail.com> To: mlug-list at mail.milwaukeelug.org, tclug-list at mn-linux.org, madlug at madisonlinux.org Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2008 22:13:28 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] NAS storage advice request http://www.aberdeeninc.com [http://www.aberdeeninc.com/] My company is looking to buy two new NAS's from HP (at 10K each). They want to get about 10TB (raw) of space, and I came across the company above and was wondering if anyone out there in mlug, tclug, or madlug land had any experience with this manufacturer. They seem to have a very competitive price point. Thanks for any input you may have! -- Chris Niesen -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20080424/78e0fe18/attachment.htm