For a long time, I and most people on the planet have seemed to realize that consumer/home PC scalability is largely a myth. You certainly CAN upgrade that system just by purchasing a new CPU, removing the old CPU from the ZIF slot designed to make it ever so simple to do, and putting in a newer, faster CPU… but it happens so very rarely that it is hardly worth mentioning. Quite likely, if you buy a lower end system with the intent of upgrading it later, you’ll find that by the time you are ready to move up, the entire platform of technology has moved on, and the best you’ll be able to manage is a compromised solution. There is an odd paradox here, as the emerging bleeding edge often has quirks, incompatibilities, and non-standard features that are likely to be worked out a few short months down the road in mid-range equipment that costs far less than the premium price tag paid for bleeding-edge tech.
In a nutshell, buy the PC you can afford that will meet your requirements, use the hell out of it, and later on, once it starts to show age, buy a whole new one. By the time you upgrade your DIY system and find that you now need new ram, a new SATA drive, a new video card in a different slot standard, etc, you’re almost always money ahead just to go with a new machine.
I’m an avid DIY builder, and I do upgrades all the time. Some memory here, a bigger hard drive there, a new video card. I’ve also built a wealth of knowledge about the shortcuts and contacts that save money and headache when doing an upgrade. But mostly, I do it as a hobby. There is a good analogy to automobiles here. For the average person, building a kit car or a hot rod or a custom car just doesn’t make sense. You buy a new or used stock car, you drive it as long as it suits you, and then you get rid of it and get a new one. Automobile hobbyists often spend as much if not more than they would have to just go buy a stock car with similar characteristics new. The hobby is what drives them (and perhaps the ability to “pay as you go”). I really think the DIY PC market operates on similar principles.
But, recently, I’ve experienced something new but related to this, in the enterprise equipment arena. Shockingly, I’ve never really heard any mention of this in forums like these or in industry publications, nor have I heard my peers mention it. It seems to be the Pink IT elephant in the room, almost.
Are scalable enterprise technologies a myth? I’ve had three examples recently, all through Dell.
We had a Dell 132T tape library with a DLT2 single drive when I arrived. I wanted to add a second drive. The literature and sales brochures all pushed the scalability of the solution, in being able to add a second drive later when your needs required such. Unfortunately, a couple short years, maybe less, than the original purchase of the device, and Dell no longer offers the second drive.
Next, we went to upgrade our Dell EMC CX300 SAN with a new fully populated enclosure. While this was available, it was conditional. The new technology is at 4gb/sec, but of course, our older CX300 storage processor and enclosures are limited to 2gb. It also required an outrageously expensive and intrusive Flair OS upgrade. The promise of ease of scalability simply wasn’t delivered on. It was far more expensive and far more headache than SAN literuatre would lead you to believe.
Most recently, we purchased Power Edge 1955 Blade Servers and enclosures this last spring. This is the only purchase of the three that has occured since I’ve been here. Again, like a SAN, the primary sale point of blades is the ease of scalability. Yet, the blades themselves have already been discontinued. Let me elaborate, prior to these blades, we had another, older blade enclosure populated with blades. We had to buy THIS blade solution because that earlier one had been discontinued.
It seems to me that this is a similar effect in action to the DIY “upgrade” cycle. Trying to buy “just what you need now in a scalable, easily upgradable” product is a fool’s errand. The scalable, easily upgradable portion is going to be hopelessly out of date, if even available, by the time you are read to move forward. The concept of modular, scalable upgradability in enterprise components is a myth. If you need a SAN now, fine. If you want the benefits of blades now, fine. But don’t let that sales-pitch that, “And if next year, you need to grow, it will be a piece of cake to add another enclsoure and add more components to meet your needs”. If you need more a year or two down the road, you’re VERY very likely to have to throw that old baby out with the bathwater, to waterfall the old stuff into some less critical area of your enterprise and replace it with the latest, newest and most shiney incarnation of whatever it is that you need to “scale”.
What are your experiences? Have you purchased enterprise equipment on the merits of long term scalability and seen that promised delivered on, or do you share the same experience as me?
