Which leads to a key point: This kind of worksheet is only as good as the pricing you feed into it. In our case, we obtained per-port pricing for adapters and switches by dividing the base prices for products from vendors and online sources like CDW, PC Connection, and SANDirect by the number of ports they provide. We averaged multiple prices obtained this way to get our basic figures. We used server adapter prices where applicable, and we compared managed switches, not unmanaged ones.
We know there are lots of pricing sources not accessible to us, including discounts from vendors for existing customers. Indeed, after publishing these results in our weekly newsletter, a spokesman from Mellanox contacted us claiming that another supplier, Colfax Direct, offers a Mellanox 10 Gbit/s InfiniBand card for $125, as well as a Flextronics 8-port InfiniBand switch at about $100 per port. That's great, but since Colfax Direct does not sell any of the other vendors we covered, we didn't factor this lowball figure in.
Aside from this effort to keep apples-to-apples compared and to level the playing field as much as possible, we can't claim to be scientific about our approach. That said, we are open to suggestion: Do you think these are valid comparisons overall? Do you have different prices to share? Do you favor a particular interconnect for reasons other than its price tag -- cost savings that don't show up on this worksheet? Hit that message board, or contact us. We're all ears.
Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Byte and Switch's editors directly, send us a message.
Mellanox Technologies Ltd.
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