[Systems] [SLOBS] Hosting at RIT

[Rafael Enrique Ortiz Guerrero]

I concur with the 8-core solution and also the price seems reasonable
for these kinds of servers.


cheers!
Rafael Ortiz



On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 1:42 PM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 23:19, Bernie Innocenti <bernie at codewiz.org> wrote:
>> So we have a deal for free hosting at RIT.
>>
>> Ivan and I have been discussing hardware options over the fast few
>> weeks. We believe we have found a decent 8-core machine for
>> approximately $3000.  Ivan offered to pay a share of this sum.
>> I believe we have $2000 earmarked for infrastructure.
>
> Sounds good to me because:
>
> - we have some services in solarsail that are being too slow (trac,
> and wiki in smaller measure),
>
> - sunjammer has ASLO, which is likely to start taking more resources
> as children from Uruguay return to school and as more OLPC deployments
> get internet connection,
>
> - we have money earmarked for hardware,
>
> - you have been leading the infrastructure team and are the best to
> decide which hardware we need.
>
> Regards,
>
> Tomeu
>
>
>> The use we plan to do for this new machine is:
>>
>> 1) replace our aging main machine solarsail, which runs
>>   www, wiki, trac, planet and mailing lists
>>
>> 2) running aslo, which is currently saturating the processor
>>   on sunjammer, but should have plenty of room for growth on
>>   this box
>>
>> 3) House some of the small virtual machines that are currently
>>   hosted in disparate locations
>>
>> 4) host a few unrelated domains previously hosted on solarsail
>>
>> Point (4) may sound a bit controversial, but I think it's a fair deal,
>> considering that we've been using solarsail for as long as 2 years
>> without paying. All our infrastructure is currently running on third
>> party hardware usually shared by other services.
>>
>> This not only reduces operating costs for us ($0 so far ;-), it is
>> primarily a way to maintain friendly work relationships with our
>> partners and sponsors. I ultimately believe that friendly agreements
>> with people we trust personally are worth more than any support
>> contract.
>>
>> On the other hand, having our infrastructure fragmented in too many
>> disparate locations is costing us a lot in terms of sysadmin time, so
>> we're looking to consolidate our services on fewer physical machines in
>> 2-3 locations.
>>
>> It's not yet decided how much we'll rely on virtualization to partition
>> our hardware resources. There are good technical arguments both in favor
>> and against it. I'm not strongly opinionated either way, so I guess we
>> may decide what works best for us on a service-by-service basis.
>>
>> Thoughts?
>>
>> --
>>   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
>>  \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/
>>
>> -------- Forwarded Message --------
>> From: Paul Mezzanini <pfmeec at rit.edu>
>> To: Bernie Innocenti <bernie at codewiz.org>
>> Cc: Stephen Jacobs <sxjics at rit.edu>, David Farning
>> <dfarning at sugarlabs.org>, Charles J Gruener <cjg9411 at rit.edu>
>> Subject: Re: Sugar Labs hosting at RIT
>> Date: Wed, 16 Dec 2009 12:06:14 -0500
>>
>> Charles and I had a good long talk about what hardware is available
>> and its capabilities.  We are both in agreement that the hardware
>> available for donation is inadequate for your needs.
>>
>> What we propose is:
>> Sugarlabs buys the primary server and ships to RC.
>> RC racks / physically installs the machine and hands IPMI access to
>> sugarlabs for final config.
>> RC adds the primary server to its backup system for nightly backups.
>> RC provides a passive failover server located in RCs virtual
>> infrastructure.
>>
>> How does this sound?  Final details can be hashed out after we get the
>> groundwork set.
>>
>> -paul
>>
>>
>> On Dec 16, 2009, at 11:11 AM, Bernie Innocenti wrote:
>>
>>> On Tue, 2009-12-15 at 22:14 -0500, Paul Mezzanini wrote:
>>>> I need to run it by my boss. How much bandwidth do you estimate you
>>
>>>> use?  I need to see if I need to get approval from the networking
>>>> team
>>>
>>> Currently, we serve ~1000 reqs/sec at peak time, using up to
>>> ~15Mbit/s for a few hours in the morning. We estimate to double
>>> or triple these numbers within 6-12 months.
>>>
>>> The actual content is already being off-loaded to a CDN. We may
>>> further reduce bandwidth by offloading static files to machines
>>> hosted by the FSF or MIT.
>>>
>>>
>>>> I may be able to provide a backup machine in ESX for failover too.
>>>> There are other hardware options available depending on if you need
>>
>>>> full virt or para virt. Also on how much io you really need.
>>>> Charles (cc'd on this) can chime in on exactly what he has.
>>>
>>> As long as performance does not suffer, I have no preference.
>>> I guess full virtualization leaves us a little more flexibility in
>>> updating the kernel.
>>>
>>> We do limited I/O at this time because our workload is read-mostly
>>> and we have a lot of RAM to cache disks. We're saturating the CPU
>>> much before we start seeing any disk trashing.
>>>
>>> --
>>>   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
>>> \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/
>>
>>
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>>
>
>
>
> --
> «Sugar Labs is anyone who participates in improving and using Sugar.
> What Sugar Labs does is determined by the participants.» - David
> Farning
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