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AI compute is so much cheaper on-prem that it's not even in question. And there are clients that demand it. And researchers, in general, like to do totally wacky things, and it's often easier/cheaper to let us if you have physical access.
We are a 1000-2000 person company and we have probably on the order of $100M of servers and data centers and whatnot, and I think we spend about 2/3rds of that every year on power/maintenance/rent/upgrades/etc. We don't generally trust cloud providers to meet our requirements for: * uptime (network and machine - both because we are good at reliability [and we're willing to spend extra on it] and because we have lots…
> We also have a number of machines with specs that would be hard to get e.g. on AWS. What specs are those? I was under the impression AWS has everything from extremely tiny to giant terabytes-of-ram-for-SAP instance types.
Amazon is constantly expanding the selection, so it's possible they've added something since we last seriously looked into this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you share the architecture and stack? What form do these jobs have? How do you manage workloads? How do you manage resources? Do users have quota for compute and storage? Do you use GPUs? If so, how do you deal with malfunction? Is this a distributed processing? Are the machines heterogeneous? What do you use for that cluster? What if a job requires dependencies? Do you create a compute environment on the fly or…
I wrote about it here: https://aravindh.net/post/sysadmin/ > What form do these jobs have? Mostly batch jobs written as bash scripts. Occasionally, some users run singularity containers. But, all through SLURM. > How do you manage workloads? SLURM > How do you manage resources? As a sysadmin, my inventory is via Ansible. All activity on servers happen via Ansible only. > Do users have quota for compute and storage? Y…
To manage runtime dependencies we use cvmfs.
A read only distributed filesystems, kinda like a very specific NFS for software distribution.
If that is never been a problem, cvmfs it is quite stable and very used in our field.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We also have a number of machines with specs that would be hard to get e.g. on AWS. What specs are those? I was under the impression AWS has everything from extremely tiny to giant terabytes-of-ram-for-SAP instance types.
We would need something like an X1 instance in terms of RAM, but it's hard to find something on AWS that has a well-tuned balance of RAM/CPU/disk for our needs. A lot of the big specialized instances are tuned for one particular limiting factor (RAM/GPU/storage/CPU/bandwidth/whatever) and I don't recall them having a good selection for "really big everything". Amazon is constantly expanding the selection, so it's pos…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We would need something like an X1 instance in terms of RAM, but it's hard to find something on AWS that has a well-tuned balance of RAM/CPU/disk for our needs. A lot of the big specialized instances are tuned for one particular limiting factor (RAM/GPU/storage/CPU/bandwidth/whatever) and I don't recall them having a good selection for "really big everything". Amazon is constantly expanding the selection, so it's pos…
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Many organizations do have private clouds. If by cloud you mean a public cloud like Google, Amazon, or Microsoft, then forget about it; not with these companies piping data directly to U.S intelligence.
What's the difference between private cloud and on prem? Does it just mean you let everyone spin up VMs etc rather than requiring them to go through IT?
We are a 1000-2000 person company and we have probably on the order of $100M of servers and data centers and whatnot, and I think we spend about 2/3rds of that every year on power/maintenance/rent/upgrades/etc. We don't generally trust cloud providers to meet our requirements for: * uptime (network and machine - both because we are good at reliability [and we're willing to spend extra on it] and because we have lots…
What industry are you in?
Are you concentrated in 1 geo location or... across USA / across 1 county / global?
A retail company may decide that the best place to put up a new branch is coincidentally (though there might be a correlation) at the edge of what the available ISPs currently cover. They might have to make a deal to get an ISP to extend their area to where the store is going to be. However, because of lack of competing ISP options on the part of the retailer, and the lack of clients in the retailer's area on the part of the ISP, that service is probably not going to be all that reliable.
Also, that retail company may experience a big rise in sales after a natural disaster occurs, when communications (phone/cell/internet) are mostly down for the area. One tends not to think about stuff like that until it happens at least once.
It's very important for the ERP/POS systems to be as operational as possible even when the internet is down.
Also, my clients aren't software development firms. They are banks and factories. They buy a software based on features and we figure out how to make it work, and most of the vendors in this space are doing on-prem non-saas products. A few do all their stuff in IAAS or colo but a lot of these places are single-rack operations and they really don't care as long as it all works.
A lot of people in small/midsize banks feel like they are being left out. They go to conferences and hear about all the cool stuff in the industry but the established players are not bringing that to them. If you can stomach the regulatory overhead, someone with drive could replace finastra/fiserv/jackhenry. Or get purchased by them and get turned into yet another forever-maintenancemode graveyard app.