Dear TB people,
Some weeks ago we proposed a set of specs that would at least meet all
our purchasing requirements. So that if Dell could get "special pricing"
for that limited set of configurations then they would at least meet
what people are asking for in their tender/quotes. If this was then the
best buy or not would clearly be up to the different institutions,
however it would at least mean that we were getting the best possible
quote from dell. We should perhaps do the same thing for a supermicro
configuration (or two). in the interests of fairness. There was some
iteration on the storage but nothing that I saw on the CPU configuration
that we suggested. I know that Eric from Dell has put some work into
this. Through travelling/teaching and a family crisis (resulting in a
funeral on Monday) I have not spoken to Eric in a while (about 3 weeks)
which is rather embarrassing.
I think that at the stage we are at we either forget this idea or move
it quickly to conclusion. I am at CERN in meetings all today so please
can I ask that somebody (Wahid being the obvious choice - sorry Wahid)
summarise the (I think 2) different storage options that we thought
people would be asking for. Please could I also ask Adam (sorry Adam -
the price you pay for passing on Eric's message to me ;-) )to suggest
concrete specs (model numbers and configurations) for other to comment
on. Finally do we have volunteers to do this for supermicro equipment
that we could distribute to the different SM suppliers so that we are
seen to have a fair process?
Either we get this together in the next day or two or we forget it.
Best,
david
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