31–40 of 110 posts
I hope this shakes up the VPS hosting industry, too. I'd love to see what kind of Linode or EC2 style on-demand computing these might provide.
It would have been better to see a comparison with SGI (ex-Rackable) CloudRack systems, which have a bit of an inbetween approach, using Xeons, but at least nominally seem to pack in more cores in the same enclosure size. One of their power tricks, in addition to pulling back DC converters further from the computers, is to allow things to run hot, resulting in savings on cooling costs.
It would have been better to see a comparison with SGI (ex-Rackable) CloudRack systems, which have a bit of an inbetween approach, using Xeons, but at least nominally seem to pack in more cores in the same enclosure size. One of their power tricks, in addition to pulling back DC converters further from the computers, is to allow things to run hot, resulting in savings on cooling costs.
The SeaMicro server probably would look pretty lousy when compared on SGI's turf, since Atom processors aren't designed to be performance-competitive with the current desktop and server processors.
What would make more sense is a comparison a datacenter for a company like Disney or Google or Amazon. I suspect that even though SeaMicro's rig would look pretty bad for heavy number-crunching apps, it would most likely do very well in web and database. Those apps don't need to share a lot of data between threads/processes, and they're generally I/O bound rather than compute bound. With proper caching setups, they're mostly network bound, rather than disk bound also.
I hope this shakes up the VPS hosting industry, too. I'd love to see what kind of Linode or EC2 style on-demand computing these might provide.
Personally, I won't touch any hardware until I can get it from more than one vendor (usually, until you get to that point it's too expensive. Their may not be much price pressure in the industry as a whole, but in my niche, there certainly is.)
Interesting in terms of technology, but of no interest to me as someone who does colocation and web servers for my clients, especially since they almost all use traditional RDBMSes like MySQL and Postgres. The Atom is too underpowered and too RAM limited for individual systems - you would do better in most cases with a 2x quadcore setup and 32-64GB RAM combined with OpenVZ or Solaris Zones. Lack of ECC = automatic di…
I would rethink that if I were you. What if you started to provide virtual private servers on one of these boxes instead of offering colocation? I think this innovation makes VPS solutions even more efficient than they are today.
The thing about being a VPS provider is that if your hardware chokes, your customers notice, and they get pissed. Sure, if you are running some kind of web farm you set it up so that things keep running without interruption if you lose a server. But if you provide VPS hosting and you lose a server? People notice, and they will be pissed. If you are a VPS provider and you loose customer data? they will parade your severed head around town on the end of a pike.
Amazon has successfully tackled this problem by training their customers that they can shoot a server at any time. This is good for them, but it's not how VPSs have traditionally operated. customers expect the thing to stay up and for their data to stay safe.
This news is yet another data point that developers will need to hack concurrency sooner than later, as a core skill in one's professional repertoire. Off to learn Stackless PyPy, Clojure, Scala, etc...
Interesting... I've never been in a really big datacenter, so I'd like to see some (hopefully non-biased) reviews from somebody that does work in those places. Would this really work well for the intended market? There are lots of startups over here that plan on massively serving webpages - would something like this (only cheaper :) ) make you reconsider using whatever cloud services you're currently using? Articles…
I hope this shakes up the VPS hosting industry, too. I'd love to see what kind of Linode or EC2 style on-demand computing these might provide.
Hopefully it will be cheaper. $20/month might sound very cheap but for some guys (like myself) living in 3rd world countries, it's almost next to impossible.
Note: I'm not really interested in business people; I want *NIX enthusiasts who are /not/ spammers, who can write English and are capable of running a Linux box that won't get compromised, and who don't need much help from me to run the thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hopefully it will be cheaper. $20/month might sound very cheap but for some guys (like myself) living in 3rd world countries, it's almost next to impossible.
Hey, I have a question. If I wanted to advertise to /technical/ people in your area, where would I do it? Note: I'm not really interested in business people; I want *NIX enthusiasts who are /not/ spammers, who can write English and are capable of running a Linux box that won't get compromised, and who don't need much help from me to run the thing.