On Tue, 18 Jan 2011, Brad Knowles wrote: > On Jan 18, 2011, at 8:29 PM, da...@lang.hm wrote: > >> running an application on Amazon EC2 sounds sexy, but if you consider the >> cost of running an instance all month long the pricing suddenly makes colo >> and rented servers seem like a great deal (especially if you factor in >> performance, take a look at the benchmarsk that phoronix did a couple of >> weeks ago) > > I recently interviewed with a small Austin startup that does everything on > EC2, using elastic clustering & load balancing, hadoop, etc.... From what > I've seen, there is no way in hell that they could run this system on > co-located servers at this point, because most of their usage is transient, > and the only thing that persists is the database system that is generated. > > Yes, the storage itself is expensive, but the ephemeral compute power to > create the storage and being able to pay for just the time necessary to > quickly spin up a good size hadoop cluster to load the terabytes of data and > then let it go again -- that's priceless.
yes, if you really need huge amounts of power for a short time it can be a win. but compare the cost of 2 hours a day of EC2 time vs someone like serverbeach. if you really expect to need that much time each month (even if continuously), the colo can be cheaper over a month. > However, in that same vein, it could be useful to discuss the pros and > cons of an el-cheapo storage system like the Backblaze box, and compare > and contrast that to something like a Sun X4500 "Thumper", and why in > some cases it might actually make sense to pay more money for the more > expensive hardware and software because it helps you greatly reduce your > overall admin overhead and your people costs, thus ultimately reducing > the TCO. yep, and you can even go on from there to the larger storage systems (with their replication, snapshots, phone-home servicing, etc), although not neccessarily in the same whitepaper. David Lang _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.lopsa.org https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
