[ipython]

Yes, those are great stories... we were a small VC funded startup that had maybe five customers. We needed a network monitoring solution, so I built out a Big Brother network monitoring system (for nostalgia, check out the demo site: https://web.archive.org/web/20010124042600/http://bb4.com/bb...). I was told under no uncertain terms that Big Brother was not professional enough for our purposes and we needed to build out an entire NOC with HP OpenView. To monitor about 20 servers at the time, maybe growing to 100. At a cost of about $2m for the hardware, training, and facility buildout.

There was also the $1m/month rental of the EMC Symmetrix storage array (again, for five customers). When things went belly up and we needed to cut costs, we just moved data centers in the middle of the night, abandoning the Symmetrix storage array at the old facility (since the lease was covered in our colo payments).

Ahhhh those were the days... I did enjoy driving 26' rental trucks full of mission critical datacenter racks around the area as a 21yo. Fun fact: it's easier to rent a box truck as a 21yo than a regular car (at least it was at the time).