Damn expensive, eh?
As it happens I bought a couple boxes that size just recently. Except with 256G RAM instead of 96G. They cost $8500 per shot. That's not even 2 months of salary for a single developer.
Don't underestimate Moore's Law.
How much does the storage subsystem cost?
You know the whole stack of fully redundant iSCSI/FC kit behind it?
15x 146G SAS spindles are included with the price.
You know the whole stack of fully redundant iSCSI/FC kit behind it?
Why, yes? We do run a FC fabric and various DAS boxes for various purposes, but not on the DB servers.
I'm not sure what you're arguing about here, the figures (labor vs hardware cost) are not even in the same ballpark.
As a rule of thumb: If a piece of gear can save your team 1 month of work then it usually pays for itself.
In the US I've heard good things about ThinkMate. E.g. this is close to our configuration but with a different chassis; http://www.thinkmate.com/System/RAX_QS5-4410
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/elee/archive/2009/03/11/source-code-...
In general throw money at the problem first, resort to code last