[HCoop-Discuss] Dedicated servers?

[Adam Chlipala]

John T. Settino wrote:
> Adam Chlipala wrote:
>> I'm sure that we save the most money by owning our own servers, but I 
>> believe that we need to be paying a colocation provider to handle fixing 
>> broken hardware.  I'm not sure which providers will agree to do that.  
>> Given the costs of paying our own people directly to go to data centers 
>> and fix broken hardware, does anyone disagree that we should be looking 
>> for set-ups where someone else accepts responsibility for keeping our 
>> hardware working, for a fixed monthly fee (like insurance)?
> FWIW, my work just sent hardware to a company called Cybercon in St. Louis for colo. One of our machines arrived there after being damaged in shipping, and they are taking care of the repairs (in this case, swapping a motherboard). Perhaps this may be what you're looking for, Adam?
>   

That's along the right lines, but I'm thinking of a set-up where the 
colo provider handles purchasing and assembling the machines, too.  If a 
machine were damaged in transit, that would be occurring outside the 
level of abstraction that we would deal with, so we wouldn't even need 
to hear about it.

The main problem scenario isn't zany shipping accidents, but just the 
inherent low lifetimes of commodity hardware components.  For instance, 
more than 1% of hard disks fail each year.  With the way we do things 
now, we're not in a very good position to deal with such failures.  We 
don't have spare parts on hand, and we don't have people ready to go 
install them quickly.  This is why we should have a colo provider sell 
us all our hardware, so that we can take advantage of their common stock 
of spare parts and common pool of labor.