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Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

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Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

#141

Post by jedberg »

burnte wrote: post #117

Yes. Why? Cost, availability, flexibility, bandwidth. For a lot of companies, on-prem servers are the best solution for efficiency and cost. One great example. We were paying $45k/yr for a hosted MS Dynamics GP solution. For $26k we brought it in house with only a $4k/yr maintenance fee. We bought a rackmount Dell, put on VMWare, have an app VM and a DB VM. My team can handle basic maintenance. In the past 11 months…

> The Cloud is just someone else's computer. If they're running those machines more cheaply than you are, they're cutting out some cost. The question is, do you need what they're cutting?

They're cutting overhead and getting better deals on hardware than you could ever get.

Their efficiency is their profit margin.

Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

#142

Post by 32gbsd »

Cloud servers tend to hide their limitations behind payment tiers which makes it hard to really know how far you can push things. Also there are various turns, conditions, cache rules, change management strategies that are hidden when dealing with someone else's constantly changing box of magic.

Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

#143

Post by AnonC »

shortlived wrote: post #23

Small company here (30 total people, 8 in IT/software). - unwillingness to seed control of the critical parts of our software infrastructure to a third party. - given our small team size and our technical debt load we are not currently able to re-architect to make our software cloud-ready/resilient. - true cost estimates feel daunting to calculate, whereas on-prem costs are fairly easy to calculate.

> unwillingness to seed control

Typo alert: you mean “cede control”, not “seed control”.

Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

#145

Post by philg_jr »

centimeter wrote: post #71
willart4food wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without revealing toomuch: What industry are you in? Are you concentrated in 1 geo location or... across USA / across 1 county / global?

> What industry are you in Something plumbing-y; the company is not well known > 1 geo location or... Global, although probably 50% in the US

Guessing here...ad-tech

Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

#146

Post by dathinab »

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #106
snarfy wrote: post #83

The idea of the cloud is to only pay for what you use. Your on-premise server is idle 99% of the time so why are you paying for a full server? If that's not true, it turns out it's quite expensive to run things in the cloud. If your workload is crunching numbers 24/7 at 100% cpu, it's better to buy the cpu than to rent it.

Cloud servers tend to be more reliable as well if you don't run your own datacenters. We have lost our internet connection or power 3 times in the last year in the office. Its not the end of the world since we can go to 4g for our own usage but if our servers were hosted locally this would be a huge issue.

Don't forget that between cloud and servers in the company there are still VPS and rented dedicated hardware in a data center.

So you:

1. Don't manage hardware.

2. But manage a server (OS+software stack).

3. Have reliable internet, power and physical security from the data center you are renting your hardware from (if you trust them fully!).

4. Have fixed cost but also fixed resources. Tends to be cheaper for many tasks. Especially CPU/GPU heavy ones.

Re: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

#150

Post by zozbot234 »

tgamblin wrote: post #104

I work in Livermore Computing at LLNL. We manage upwards of 30 different compute clusters (many listed here: https://hpc.llnl.gov/hardware/platforms ). You can read about the machine slated to hit the floor in 2022/2023 here: https://www.llnl.gov/news/llnl-and-hpe-partner-amd-el-capita... . All the machines are highly utilized, and they have fast Infiniband/OmniPath networks that you simply cannot get in the cloud. F…

> All the machines are highly utilized, and they have fast Infiniband/OmniPath networks that you simply cannot get in the cloud.

It's weird that these networking technologies are not used more in "plain" datacentre settings, since networking latency and throughput has to be a significant challenge to scaling up non-trivial workloads and achieving true datacentre-scale computing. We hear a lot about how to "scale out", but that's only really feasible for relatively simple workloads where you just seek to do away with the whole issue of keeping different nodes in sync on a real-time basis, and accept the resulting compromises. In many cases, that's just not going to be enough.

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