Re: Load on udd.d.o
Hi,
On Mon Oct 24, 2011 at 17:17:19 +0200, Peter Palfrader wrote:
> Which brings us to a third part. If we actually wanted to replace everything
> that's older than say 3 or even 5 years with new systems, we couldn't afford
> it. Not by a long shot.
Debian got a lot of new machines by donations in the past, machines that
had been stocked with the best and newest parts at that time. The time
we got those donations is over and will most probably never ever come
back.
These machines don't come cheap if you actually have to buy them one at
a time. You get four or six gigs pretty quickly, but if you want what
counts of decent amounts of ECC RAM, say 24 or 32 gigs - which isn't too
crazy, it's going to set you back around a grand just for memory. And
that's nothing compared to storage.
You may think disk space is inexpensive these days, and maybe it is if
you put your data on 2tb consumer disks you buy from the discounter
around the corner, but storage in servers still costs a small fortune
(~1-2 USD per gig, on 2.5" 10k SAS disks, and you don't just want a
single one of them). Throw in another half grand to a grand for the
raid controller or the "optional" battery to enable the existing
controller's write cache.
Add CPUs, chassis, extended warranty and it's peanuts no more.
So far we've bought maybe two and a half machines from Debian money.
And that's in all of our history. Maybe we could buy more, but do we
have the funds? And if we do, can we justify spending that amount of
money if the existing gear still mostly does its job?
Cheers,
Martin
PS: now, you can try to cut down on costs of individual machines by for
instance moving storage out of the server itself and making it part of
the local infrastructue. I.e. provide storage via iscsi/fc/nfs etc.
But these things again don't come for free. You have to get that
infrastructure, and it suddenly is a spof. And it requires that new
machines get hosted at the place that has the storage. And then it
probably isn't as fast as a local raid10. Oh well. Nobody said it was
easy :)
--
Martin Zobel-Helas <zobel@debian.org> | Debian System Administrator
Debian & GNU/Linux Developer | Debian Listmaster
GPG key http://go.debian.net/B11B627B |
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