Budget

 What is your budget?

There may be budget trade-offs we, and you, need to make to your systems design based on the budget you have available for your new purchase. Your sales engineer will work with you to prioritize your needs and examine these trade-offs, because your budget will directly affect what options you are able to afford.

The best technical solution for your particular application may not fit within your budget. Your Aspen sales engineer will work with you to design the best possible solution for your requirements that fits within the budget you give us. Many design decisions, such as your choice of specific file systems, storage solutions, memory per core, processor type and speed, and even chassis form factors can dramatically affect the final solution price.

There are certain features you should never contemplate doing without. One big area to watch carefully is storage reliability. On smaller cluster designs, customers often consider removing hot spare disks from the design to save several hundred dollars. Perhaps that money can be used to good effect for more processing power or another node, but how valuable is your data? Is it better to have more processing power and have the cluster down or your data lost because you didn't spend that money for extra data reliability? No, it isn't, because your data output is the entire reason you purchased your solution.

As a general rule, lower your processing power goals, not your reliability goals when faced with budget crises.

How about that whatchamacallit that does the newfangled other thing that you just read about on HPC Wire that you really really want? Hey, we're gear heads too! We love new stuff. But please keep in mind that technology is almost always more expensive during its initial adoption phases, and tends to become much cheaper later in its market life. Please concentrate on getting a solid cluster design that has the reliability and basic features you need before adding additional "nice to have" requirements that can adversely impact your budget. Your sales engineer can discuss these decisions and outline some of the options you need to think about as they help you specify your system design.

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