[HCoop-Discuss] On organizing people to get work done

[Daniel Margolis]

We should also compare with Linode/Slicehost, which seem a bit cheaper 
than Amazon (and a bit more traditional in terms of what you pay and 
what you get).

At Linode machine with 2.8GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and 1600GB of 
transfer is $160/month, which is a lot cheaper than the below EC2 
configuration, though significantly less storage, etc.

Mire seems to only have ~5GB RAM and, if I'm reading the output of df 
right, like 20GB for the OS install and 8GB on AFS, so the above Linode 
configuration seems still suitable.

Additional, lower powered machines for failover or other services (e.g. 
dedicated shell, web, mail, or whatever) are as cheap as $20/month, 
depending on configuration.

I believe you can also do nonrouteable addressing between virtual hosts 
for free (i.e., without it counting against your quota), meaning you 
could have one large virtual machine with a lot of storage as an AFS 
server and other, smaller machines as clients.

A table like this might be useful:

		Current		Linode
Transfer:	1TB		1.6TB
Disk:		28GB?		128GB
Memory: 	5GB		2.8GB
CPU: 		Opteron 1.6GHz	? (>= 1/5th of some server-class machine)
Cost/month:	? 		$160

Feel free to fill in with alternatives (e.g. Amazon) and correct the 
above information.

Dan

On 5/9/2009 7:50 AM, Adam Chlipala wrote:
> David Snider wrote:
>> OK Let's try again with the numbers on this site because their calculator
>> seems to be showing numbers way lower than what is here:
>> http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/
>>
>> All Data Transfer Out 	$0.10 per GB ($102/TB/mo)
>> First 10 TB per Month In $0.17 per GB ($174.08/TB/mo)
>> 1 YR Large linux instance  $1300 ($108/mo) or 1 YR Extra Large linux
>> instance  $2600 ($216/mo)
>>
>> # Large Instance 7.5 GB of memory, 4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores
>> with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 850 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform
>>
>> # Extra Large Instance 15 GB of memory, 8 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual
>> cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of instance storage, 64-bit
>> platform
>>
>> Which comes to $384.08 or $492. Still a good deal cheaper than Peer 1 it
>> seems.
>>
>
> OK, these numbers seem like a better comparison.  I still think we
> definitely want multiple servers/instances, for load balancing and fault
> tolerance reasons, if nothing else.  Adding in another instance or two,
> we get to the point where the price is pretty darned comparable to what
> we're paying for a quarter cabinet at Peer 1 now, and we could use our
> Peer 1 space to house considerably more compute power/storage than we
> would get with even 3 of the biggest EC2 instances.
>
> Ignoring our staffing needs, the only additional cost factor in EC2's
> favor is cost of buying machines and replacement parts.  With our
> current number of members, I believe these costs are pretty much trivial
> and have negligible effect on the big picture.  The big win with EC2 or
> some other virtualization platforms is the freedom from need for our
> staff to buy hardware, monitor it for failures, and replace it when it
> breaks.  Even with EC2, we would need to implement our own scheme for
> dealing with failed hardware, though we could on Amazon to have
> replacement (virtual) hardware available for us at all times, and to
> implement their own durable backups of storage, etc..
>
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