Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:27:04 -0400
From: Andrew Sullivan <ajs@commandprompt.com>
To: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: Hardware vs Software RAID
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On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 01:07:25PM -0500, Kevin Grittner wrote:
>  
> It doesn't have to be free software to cut that way.  I've actually
> found the free software to waste less of my time.  

No question.  But one of the unfortunate facts of the
no-charge-for-licenses world is that many people expect the systems to
be _really free_.  It appears that some people think, because they've
already paid $smallfortune for a license, it's therefore ok to pay
another amount in operation costs and experts to run the system.  Free
systems, for some reason, are expected also magically to run
themselves.  This tendency is getting better, but hasn't gone away.
It's partly because the budget for the administrators is often buried
in the overall large system budget, so nobody balks when there's a big
figure attached there.  When you present a budget for "free software"
that includes the cost of a few administrators, the accounting people
want to know why the free software costs so much.  

> If you depend on your systems, though, you should never deploy any
> change, no matter how innocuous it seems, without testing.

I agree completely.

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs@commandprompt.com
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http://www.commandprompt.com/