Benjamin Smith lists@benjamindsmith.com wrote:
Client is cash-poor, in particular, is really feeling the squeeze from the death of the dial-up industry.
How much does it cost them per hour of downtime?
If it's enough, then spending $200 to build a backup, Socket-754 system of just a case, PS, mainboard, CPU and memory is well worth it.
Saving $3,000 while still providing reasonable options for "worst case" can provide a lot of brownie points...
Saving $2,800, $200 less, and reducing the downtime to minutes, instead of hours or even days in procuring new equipment, is a far better argument IMHO.
in any event, I've done a fairly large number of hardware swaps between P3/P4/Athlon systems, and haven't had much trouble with it.
On Linux, yes, to a point. Especially with the new 2.6 kernel, where the i686 kernel dynamically loads PPro/P2, P3, P4, Athlon/Opteron, etc... optimizations. Otherwise, I used to see people pull their hair out on 2.4, when they switched out a disk installed on an Athlon for a P4. Kernel panic (due to the Athlon kernel ;-).
When the next Opteron server comes in, after I've set it
up,
I'll test it out on an Athlon/64 system I can borrow for a bit and see what issues I run into.
Or you could just spend $200 and give your client a sub-hour recovery time, instead of hours/days.