It our continuing effort to increase collaboration with the University of California, Berkeley Lab is joining with other campuses in the UC system in using a contract for commodity computers negotiated and managed by UCLA.

The IT Division and our partners in Procurement are offering this site as a channel for all of our commodity Windows purchases, while continuing to identify specific recommended standards that we will support.

Windows Desktops and Laptops can be acquired from a new Vendor (KST) which was awarded a contract by UCLA through a competitive process several years ago. KST is a reseller and has arrangements with all the primary equipment vendors including DELL, Lenovo (IBM), HP, Gateway, and MPC (provider of our “Micron” desktop computers for the past 6 years). Using KST provides two advantages to Berkeley Lab: (1) We no longer have to spend time developing contracts like this ourselves and (2) we can change recommended standards as required.

Reasons why we select a particular vendor’s equipment over another for our recommended standard include cost, technical, and support considerations. Good warranty support, parts return policy, consistency in component choices, delivery performance, and so on contribute as much to the life cycle cost of a computer as does the initial cost of acquisition.

The computer store will continue to increase in value, as we add contracts for a source of custom high performance workstations (64 bit, dual processor – dual core systems), and increase the scope to other platforms. We also hope to provide a source for workgroup servers that are typically used to provide storage for projects with large data requirements (5TB - 20TB).

Go here to review the first version of our Computer Store.