Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why? • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by chime » Thu, May 07, 2020, 12:46 AM UTC

gge wrote: post #85

chime wrote: post #76

1. 500TB of storage for 3-6mo of CCTV footage. 2. Bought a hanful of $700 24 core Xeons on eBay 2 years ago for 24/7 data crunching. Equivalent cloud cost was over $3000/mo. On-Prem paid off within a month! 3. Nutanix is nice. Awesome performance for the price and almost no maintenance. Got 300+ VDI desktops and 50+ VMs with 1ms latency.

How high are your power costs?

Manufacturing company with insane deal with local utility. No idea but server room cost is probably under 2% of machinery cost so hard to quantify.

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

#172

Post by wooly_bully » Thu, May 07, 2020, 12:46 AM UTC

dahfizz wrote: post #126

bcrosby95 wrote: post #101

We have around 20 servers in a colo center down the street. At this number of servers we can still host websites that have millions of users (but not tens of millions). They are not exotic servers either. In fact by now they are, on average, around 11 years old. And costed anywhere from 2k to 8k at the time of purchase. Some are as old as 19 years. Hell, when we bought some of them - with 32GB of memory each - AWS ha…

I think people who have no experience managing servers dramatically overestimate how much time it takes to manage servers. Depending on your team, it can definitely be easier to manage your own hardware than to manage your cloud infrastructure.

In my experience, it's not the time required but that a lot of development teams don't have a sysadmin or ops skillset.

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

#173

Post by MorganGallant » Thu, May 07, 2020, 12:46 AM UTC

I picked up a few refurbished dell servers off Ebay for super cheap a while back - and usually use these with Cloudflare Argo tunnels to host various servers. However, since these are just sitting on the floor next to my desk, usually rely on cloud for any applications with high uptime requirements.

Recently though, I've been working on some distributed systems type projects which would allow these servers to be put in different physical locations (and power grids), and still continue to operate as a cohesive whole. This type of technology definitely increases my confidence in them being able to reliably host servers. I wouldn't want to be reliant on the cloud for large scale services though, from my understanding you can get some crazy cost savings by colocating some physical servers (especially for large data storage requirements).

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

#174

Post by jeremyjh » Thu, May 07, 2020, 12:47 AM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #150

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"…

Most business workloads simply aren't CPU bound, nor amenable to parallel computation. The public clouds would offer it if they had demand for it.

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

#175

Post by kjgkjhfkjf » Thu, May 07, 2020, 12:48 AM UTC

On-prem can make sense where your computing needs are constant and predictable. You can arrange to have exactly what you need, and the total cost of buying and operating it may be less than it would be to get comparable resources in the cloud.

If your computing needs vary over time, then provisioning on-prem for peak load will mean that some of your resources will be idle at non-peak times. It may be cheaper to use cloud resources in cases like these, since you only need to pay for the extra capacity when you need it.

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

#176

Post by SoylentOrange » Thu, May 07, 2020, 12:49 AM UTC

We are a research group at a company with 2000 or so employees. We have a few GPU machines to train models, which are utilized nearly around the clock.

AWS and co’s GPU-enabled servers are exceedingly expensive. Most of the GPU models on those machines are also very old. We pay maybe 1/3 or less to maintain these machines and train models in-house vs paying AWS.

Mind you, we use AWS for plenty of stuff...

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

#177

Post by dathinab » Thu, May 07, 2020, 12:50 AM UTC

quicklime wrote: post #94

badpun wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big question is - how much do you trust these providers.

I would guess that approximately zero banks own data centers that are operated by their own employees. There might be a few exceptions to this, but the reality is that most banks don't view technology as part of their core business. So this largely gets outsourced to IT consulting firms like Infosys, IBM, Wipro, etc. The big question is - how much do you trust these providers, and do you think they are more competent…

Or formulate it differently:

1. Trust a provider which whole existence relies on trust and which you can audit or at last cross-check the audit and security processes (as a Bank you are normally not a small customer).

2. Trust a provider which might 1st be a potential competitions in some business fields. 2nd is so big that it can easily afford losing you. 3nd for the same reason doesn't allow you any insights into there internal processes. etc.

Plus many of the banks having their own hardware also have their own IT team. So it's often about trusting your own people. I mean either you keep your it or you outsource _and_ go into the cloud. Keeping local servers but outsourcing IT at the same time seems kind not very clever tbh.

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

#178

Post by frellus » Thu, May 07, 2020, 12:52 AM UTC

Self-driving company here. We're doing on-prem because we have a clear projection on the amount of data we'll need to injest, store and process using GPUs.

The advantages of running things in a cloud are clear -- and as an infrastructure team we have challenges around managing physical assets at scale, however it's clear with the cost of cloud providers that eventually we would have to pull data into a datacenter to survive at some point.

Co-location costs are fixed, and it's actually easy to make a phenomenal deal now-a-days given the pressure these companies are under.

The real trick of it all is that regardless of running on-prem or in the cloud, we need to run as if everything is cloud native. We run Kubernetes, Docker, and as much as possible automate things to the point that running one of something is the same as running a million of it.

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

#179

Post by zozbot234 » Thu, May 07, 2020, 12:52 AM UTC

jeremyjh wrote: post #174

zozbot234 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"…

Most business workloads simply aren't CPU bound, nor amenable to parallel computation. The public clouds would offer it if they had demand for it.

Surely network latency (and perhaps throughput) is just as relevant to IO-bound and transactional workloads though? At least if they need to be served by a multiple-node cluster.

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

#180

Post by walterbell » Thu, May 07, 2020, 12:53 AM UTC

The (startup) Oxide podcast has good history/stories about on-prem servers, from veterans of pioneering companies. They are fans of open-source firmware and Rust, and are working to make OCP-based servers usable for on-prem. In one podcast, they observed that cloud is initially cheaper, but can quickly become expensive with growth. There is a time window where you can still switch from cloud to on-prem, but if that window is missed, you're left with high switching costs and high cloud fees.

https://oxide.computer/podcast/