never said a buddy of a buddy, this is a buisness i have worked for on contract many times, my buddy was the one who set it up orignaly, he asked for some help getting it configuared properly because he couldnt get it to auto assign apps to a spicific core/cpu, it kept buggin out, i had to look up the command lines and help test them then he had to make scrips to auto run xxx app on x core so that windows wouldnt spend all its time trying to load balance singel threded apps with multi threded apps on the same cpus.
the system is used as a server an compiler, they could have setup 4 boxes or more to do the same work, but it would have ended up causting more and being more work to manage, also the board they used allowed them to use scsi drives(large capacity drives) to mirror all the data on the scsi raid that they used, scsi performance is still the best in these kind of apps, yes its expencive but seagate gives 10year warr on some of their high end scsi raid kits(dirrectly ordered from seagate) its not perfect, scsi mirrored+striped would have been faster/better but caust was prohibitive(over 2x the caust because they would have needed an addin pci-x scsi raid card to do it as well as 2x as many drives) seagate gave them a deal on all the drives needed for that server and a couple others they needed to upgrade the scsi raids in(one had 14-4.6gb 15k rpm drives....hot fookers to.....burned myself trying to take them out to replace them)
the biggest setup i have seen a singel person own is a guy my uncle use to work with(coastguard) that now does rendering/anamation work for an add company, hes got 4xdual core opterons in a system with a scsi raid of 8 drives(mirrored+striped) as well as a 7MB/7MB sdsl connection, all payed for by his company, the systme also has a 3dlabs 640mb video card in it(huge hot and loud......) but he didnt pay for the system, they did so he could work at home and send stuff in and get stuff at decent speeds, im not exectly shure why they do it but i got the impression it was because hes very good at his job but isnt good with people and was causing problems at the office.
its like the orignal 4x4
really i dosnt matter tho, i never said that i knew somebody who knew somebody who owned one, i know a company that owned one i helped get working properly when i was also being payed to help upgrade a few other servers and get them back online as fast as posable.
oh a little advice, if you ever see a optical backup system that uses video disk size media(like records) RUN, they are SLOW and hard to deal with, this company had 6 of them rack mounted used to keep backups of their main servers, we had to backup then restore from them, backing up a server with less then 60gb total capacity took something like 16hrs.....it was hell, restoring, took just as long, because, the, things, are, slow, as, hell....

but TBH the IT manager of that company listened to me after seeing how slow those things where and ordered some external backup towers(towers that are scsi/sata/firewire/usb2 with multi 720+gb drives in them raided in hardware to show as 1 large backup drive) and we where able to backup all the servers with one of them then used the other to setup auto backup of all the work data on the workstations on a nightly basis, i so want one of the backup towers tho, the smallest ones where 4 720gb drives showing as one, cant remmber the formated capacity, but damn it was fast, and could connect to pretty much any port you would want to use for external data trasnfer, even had optical ports and gbit lan connections, humm, 2nd nic on my board connected to that via gbit lan..........*creams*