Re: Offtopic : Large hostings and colocations ?where?
On 5/11/07, Lennart Sorensen <lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
On Fri, May 11, 2007 at 08:54:51AM -0500, Igor TAmara wrote:
> Hi, I would like to know if there are services offering machines
> with about 2teras of space and 20mbps of bandwidth, I guess with no
> monthly limit. In my country, Colombia, we don't have ISP that can
> offer this kind of things in a moderately way.
>
> Do you have a recomendation about where can I have a dedicated
> server, or colocation with this info?
No idea. Never dealt with that.
There are definitely vendors around that will provide pretty well
whatever you want; at work, we deal with Q9 Networks, in Toronto,
Canada, and have racks full of all sorts of stuff (IBM pSeries
(PPC/AIX) boxes, IBM disk arrays, lots of network gear) sitting at
their data centre. We also have a similar centre hosted with AT&T in
New Jersey, in the US.
http://www.q9.com/
You can pretty well get anything, for a price. I don't have any close
idea of what we pay; there's a LOT of gear, and a LOT of bandwidth, so
we're paying a LOT for that. Not worth comparing...
The amount of hardware being describe in this discussion thread seems
like it's right at about the point where it would be *slightly*
cheaper to buy space, and put your own set of redundant systems in
place, rather than paying someone to provide you with a server.
If you have your own partial rack, you'll want to have extras of
pretty well everything pre-installed in the rack because it's mighty
inconvenient to need to deliver something there if some part falls
over.
Even though you might only need 1 server, that can fit in a 1U space,
you ought instead to put in 2 or 3 of them, because that way you can
have everything ready in "standby" mode in case a server fails.
Likewise, having enough disk in the disk array (quite likely
worthwhile, if you start needing terabytes) that you could afford to
lose several disks before any serious degradation would start to take
place.
I'll leave the kibbutzing over which RAID level is "best" to others.
If reliability is the point of the exercise, DO NOT try to fine-tune
the configuration in order to satisfy requirements. If you needed to
do that, then you're way too close to the edge, and you should be
provisioning more conservatively (e.g. - buy a few more disk drives,
and have more redundancy and/or speed).
At some point, buying RAID controllers with battery-backed cache is
likely to be enormously worthwhile for both performance and
reliability; with terabytes of data, that's pretty likely a relevant
optimization. In the SATA world (which seems to be the economical way
to get speed and space these days), Areca and 3Ware seem to be the big
names for decent PC-compatible SATA RAID with BBC (battery-backed
cache).
None of this comes particularly cheap; any time I've seen people skimp
on any part of it, that comes at a cost to either reliability or
performance or both. I don't think you can "save money" on it to any
great extent.
--
http://linuxfinances.info/info/linuxdistributions.html
"... memory leaks are quite acceptable in many applications ..."
(Bjarne Stroustrup, The Design and Evolution of C++, page 220)
Reply to: