Cheaper winnies on an NCR tower

[H. L. Rogers]

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In article <601 at hscfvax.harvard.edu> pavlov at hscfvax.harvard.edu (G.Pavlov) writes:
>  Does NCR manufacture its own drives for the Tower series ??  If not, what 
>  does it do to them to make them worth their weight in gold (almost literally)?

Do you know anything about the real world?  Or do you just hide-out
on campus and pretend?

No, NCR does not manufacture disk drives.  NCR buys drives from drive
vendors, just like Sun, DEC, Apollo, and others do.  Your comment about
"...worth their weight in gold..." shows you either don't know the 
price of gold or the weight of a disk drive.  You don't even come 
close.  I just wish I could sell 140 MB for over $30K!

I *do* know what value is added and I *do* know *competitive* pricing 
in the marketplace.  The value which is added amounts to very intensive
qualification testing and reliability measurements before the first
drive is ever shipped in a TOWER.  NCR also does some very neat
things like empirically determining the optimum interleave factor
for a particular drive to maximize I/O performance.  NCR also
provides optimum software integration for each drive it supports.
I doubt that we are very much different from other vendors in
all these areas.

As to the price, NCR remains *competitive* with every other *computer* 
vendor on the basis of dollars per megabyte.  Check it out.  NCR does 
not claim to be *competitive* in its drive pricing with the price of a 
disk purchased directly from a disk vendor.  If a customer wants to buy
his own drive and integrate it into the TOWER, then go for it!  What
Sam was trying to say is that if you expect NCR to support that drive
as a part of your NCR maintenance contract, don't hold your breath.
On the other hand, if it is a drive qualified and supported by NCR,
I am quite sure NCR Customer Services will support the extra drive
for only a slight increase in the price of the support contract.
Just in case you don't understand why the support contract price
would go up, it is because it is based upon the mean time between
failures (MTBF) of the equipment.  Additional electronics will 
decrease the MTBF, making the particular equipment more expensive
to maintain because it is *predicted* to fail more often.

Many customers buy drives from NCR because they know the value of
reliability testing and enjoy the painless integration of
additional parts.  But we don't discourage those who want to
"roll their own."  The only caveat in addition to the maintenance
contract discussion above is:  if the software does not recognize 
the drive as one of many it *can* talk to, then you're going to need
help from the TOWER software developers to make it work.  And, Mr. G.
Pavlov, NCR has done just that for several customers.

No flames, please...I just can't stand to see a Harvard man get
red-faced.
-- 
HL Rogers    (hl.rogers at ncrcae.Columbia.NCR.COM)