(OT) Stable Hardware with long availability

[Bill Campbell]

On Tue, Jan 30, 2007, Net Llama! wrote:
>On Tue, 30 Jan 2007, Bill Campbell wrote:
>> Does anybody have any recommendations for hardware, main boards, CPUs, NICs
>> in particular, that's reliable, and there is some guarantee that it will be
>> available for extended periods of time?
>>
>> It doesn't have to be the Latest & Greatest technology as we want to use it
>> in Linux boxes for the SMB market that will be doing normal Internet
>> services, e-mail, web, firewall, ... that probably wouldn't tax a 1GhZ
>> Pentium processor, much less the high performance hardware commonly
>> available today.
>>
>> We want to be able to do software updates from binary packages without
>> having to worry about hardware compatibility issues (e.g.  the ``gmp'' math
>> package, used by amavisd-new, compiled on Intel gives invalid instructions
>> on AMD -- or perhaps vice-versa).
>>
>> I think there has to be some source of hardware of this type, if only for
>> systems used in applications where entire systems need to be certified as a
>> package (e.g. medical, aviation, etc.), and they can't be dealing with new
>> CPUs and main boards every six months.
>
>Just about any Tier 1 vendor (Dell, HP, IBM, etc) can provide 10+ years of 
>support on their HW asuming that you are purchasing in very high volumes 
>(where high means thousands of units).  Beyond that, I suspect that you're 
>out of luck here.

The issue isn't so much support as the ability to purchase the
same equipment over extended periods of time, without having to
pay TEMPEST prices (the Legal Looters may pay $600 for toilet
seats to their political supporters, but non-parasites can't :-).

Bill
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