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While RAM has by no means made a formal study of such matters, in general we've found that smaller resellers have been increasingly negative about the Xeon CPU family over the past couple of years. However, in speaking with Chuck Orcutt, Nexlink senior business manager, we found just the opposite. Seneca has remained agnostic about its server offerings for many years, but no matter what the headlines or fads of the day, Orcutt notes that Seneca's Xeon sales have continued to grow. "Whatever the state of the competitive playing field, we still see a large number of our clients sticking with Xeon," says Orcutt. "They're finding values beyond simple performance. I think that's really the key. When people look at Intel, they see stable platforms, proven technology. They're not just saying they need the fastest machine on the market. They really want something they can confidently run their business on." This is why Seneca has a sort of split opinion about Intel's new Bensley server platform. On one hand, the distributor/system builder isn't joining too much in the buzz frenzy about the Core architecture and its competitive advantages. Hardware will only get you so far in the server world. Orcutt says he's more excited about Bensley's Advanced Management Technology and I/O Acceleration. He maintains that people who buy from resellers want services, not just chips and boards, and this has always been a key advantage of the Xeon line regardless of standing in the competitive benchmarks du jour. On the other hand, the competitive benchmarks coming out now do show Woodcrest with an undeniable price/performance advantage over it's competition. Beyond that, though, Woodcrest is delivering a dramatic drop in power consumption, and this promises to have significant benefits for Seneca's business. "The critical piece for our market is the thermals and what's going on with the power," says Orcutt. "If Woodcrest delivers on everything that has been promised, that's going to mean fewer fans and less noise in the systems. And selling into small businesses, not all of these people have computer rooms or rack enclosures set aside where it's not an issue. They're usually out on the floor, in someone's office, so bringing down heat and noise is very exciting. That's a challenge with any performance-oriented server sale at this point." Another constant challenge is finding new ways to add value to the company's server offerings. One of Seneca's chief solutions on this front is validation work. Sure, manufacturers have their supported hardware lists, but Seneca actually rounds up complete configurations with the pertinent software packages (a healthy number of Seneca's customers are ISVs) and puts them through what might be called stringiest post-validation. Sometimes this proves necessary because legacy operating systems and drivers are involved that might have fallen off of manufacturers' testing lists. In the same vein, Seneca does a lot of system image creation and maintenance work for customers. "Another hot Xeon play right now is virtualization," says Orcutt. "A good example might be a school environment, where they're always coming up with a new class that needs a new server. With virtualization, that's so much easier to do. Now, we've already seen a large number of customers implement VMware to achieve this goal. Bensley just takes this to the next level. You could say that's what we're hoping Bensley does for our servers in general. We want to take a great product line with lots of built-in reseller value and lift it up even higher." |
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