If someone has the time, interest, and is confident enough about hardware wankery, we need some specs and costs on a three well-appointed servers to replace osgeo1, osgeo2, and a few blades. Assume we would be wanting to run Xen (or something like it) for a number of server instances on each machine (more cores and more RAM, the better). Assume we're running at OSL, 2U's would probably be fine, and at least one of the machines should have enough hd to run our trac/drupal postgresql/mysql databases.
How much can we get for $20k USD? Being the lazy and rather uneducated person that I am, I would head over to Dell's site and see what a tricked out dual-proc Nehalem with 8+ gb of RAM would be and multiply x 3, but I would suspect we could do better than that. Alternatively, should we just outsource the hardware procurement to OSL entirely, or is having our own physical hardware something we really want?
osgeo1 and osgeo2 on peer1 is not our hosting future, and we are continually getting requests for more and more services. Unless someone has a better idea, I propose we start looking seriously at OSL for our hosting home and decide if we want to be having our own hardware or be completely virtual. Let's try to have all of the bits in place by the New York sprint (February or March) so we can piggyback our buildout, development, and deployment with that event. Sound like a plan?
If someone has the time, interest, and is confident enough about
hardware wankery, we need some specs and costs on a three well-appointed
servers to replace osgeo1, osgeo2, and a few blades. Assume we would be
wanting to run Xen (or something like it) for a number of server
instances on each machine (more cores and more RAM, the better). Assume
we're running at OSL, 2U's would probably be fine, and at least one of
the machines should have enough hd to run our trac/drupal
postgresql/mysql databases.
How much can we get for $20k USD? Being the lazy and rather uneducated
person that I am, I would head over to Dell's site and see what a
tricked out dual-proc Nehalem with 8+ gb of RAM would be and multiply x
3, but I would suspect we could do better than that. Alternatively,
should we just outsource the hardware procurement to OSL entirely, or is
having our own physical hardware something we really want?
osgeo1 and osgeo2 on peer1 is not our hosting future, and we are
continually getting requests for more and more services. Unless someone
has a better idea, I propose we start looking seriously at OSL for our
hosting home and decide if we want to be having our own hardware or be
completely virtual. Let's try to have all of the bits in place by the
New York sprint (February or March) so we can piggyback our buildout,
development, and deployment with that event. Sound like a plan?
Howard
I can help with the research, and highly recommend silicon mechanics as
a possible vendor. I know for my lab we just got a beefy 8 TB (RAID 6)
plus 8 core, lots of ram machine for under $5000, and most of the cost
was the hard drives.
In talking with some people I know who do this kind of thing a lot, they
recommend kvm over xen these days, though I don't know the details both
are good options. Note: Ubuntu now includes software to create clouds,
it's on my todo list to investigate how it works.
If someone has the time, interest, and is confident enough about
hardware wankery, we need some specs and costs on a three well-appointed
servers to replace osgeo1, osgeo2, and a few blades. Assume we would be
wanting to run Xen (or something like it) for a number of server
instances on each machine (more cores and more RAM, the better). Assume
we're running at OSL, 2U's would probably be fine, and at least one of
the machines should have enough hd to run our trac/drupal
postgresql/mysql databases.
How much can we get for $20k USD? Being the lazy and rather uneducated
person that I am, I would head over to Dell's site and see what a
tricked out dual-proc Nehalem with 8+ gb of RAM would be and multiply x
3, but I would suspect we could do better than that. Alternatively,
should we just outsource the hardware procurement to OSL entirely, or is
having our own physical hardware something we really want?
osgeo1 and osgeo2 on peer1 is not our hosting future, and we are
continually getting requests for more and more services. Unless someone
has a better idea, I propose we start looking seriously at OSL for our
hosting home and decide if we want to be having our own hardware or be
completely virtual. Let's try to have all of the bits in place by the
New York sprint (February or March) so we can piggyback our buildout,
development, and deployment with that event. Sound like a plan?
Howard
I can help with the research, and highly recommend silicon mechanics as
a possible vendor. I know for my lab we just got a beefy 8 TB (RAID 6)
plus 8 core, lots of ram machine for under $5000, and most of the cost
was the hard drives.
In talking with some people I know who do this kind of thing a lot, they
recommend kvm over xen these days, though I don't know the details both
are good options. Note: Ubuntu now includes software to create clouds,
it's on my todo list to investigate how it works.
Thanks,
Alex
I should clarify I believe we bought 4-8 quad core cpus.