ummm Ruairi, they're not cheap switches they're really friggin expensive switches that are a year or ten old (see poster above who saved nay on $11k on his overpowered home-mega-router)
best read the article again bro
Aside from junk sourcing, consumer tech gets better and better. I use consumer tech for small biz linux servers and the stability is pretty impressive. Downsides like single power supplies and no iLo but in the (very) small biz world they barely have a UPS or rack let alone two independent sources of leccy. I do miss iLo though, waiting for that to move into a standard software stack instead of hardware.
Getting exciting with current consumer tech levels too, this year I'm offering 1000MB storage read/write on a server the size of a shoebox consuming 40w for less than $2k. I'd need like +$10k in enterprise spending to achieve that.
The secondhand market is now flooded with heaps of sexy kit that corps don't want. Not like enterprise kit breaks easily anyway, lasts for ages unless you're talking about a disk.
junk sourcing ftw!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
