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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?

#191

Post by bradhe »

centimeter wrote: post #36

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…

> because we have lots of fancy redundant infrastructure that we can't rely on from cloud companies)

Haha. This can't possibly be true.

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

#193

Post by dathinab »

aspyct wrote: post #27
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you disagree, give us your example TCO estimates for all of that vs cloud. I'm sure HN readers would be happy to dissect it.

Unfortunately I don't have exact numbers, having never been responsible for the budget of those. This is only an estimation considering the pricing I see from the cloud providers, and the rates I know from my fellow contractors. Besides, I'm not exactly trying to win a war here. Simply trying to know under which circumstances it is better to go for on-prem vs public cloud.

If you already have a IT team which needs to handle 100+ Linux&Windows desktops systems, 40+ Laptops, WIFI network switches and firewall for all this as well as a few conference rooms and a few servers for local storage/backups(1) and similar. Then adding a small number servers isn't changing much in the workload for the IT. ;=)

(1): Available even if internet is down.

----

Also frequently doing most scientific computing tasks are _much_ cheaper on-premise (if you have space for it). Especially given that some have setups like multiple terabyte of RAM.

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

#194

Post by icedchai »

fiveguys94 wrote: post #163
junar wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $700 24 core Xeons on eBay 2 years ago Can you clarify? I don't think such a product exists as a single chip at that price point. The Threadripper 3960X costs $1400, and that released less than a year ago. Edit: Looking up Intel chips on Wikipedia, I think you might be using 12-core/24-thread chips... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylake_(microarchitecture)#Xe...

I picked up three Dell R900's for an average of $200 each, with 4x Xeon E7450 and 128GB of ECC RAM. No hyperthreading (2011!), it's 24 real cores. They're noisy and use lots of power, but you can't argue with the value for money.

I have one similar to this. I don't think it is an R900, but it's an older 1U rack mount. I forget if it's a 12 or 24 core xeon, but it was dirt cheap, came with 72 gigs of RAM, and sounds like a jet engine turning it on. I recently built a Ryzen box with 128 gigs of RAM and it's much quieter...

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

#195

Post by funfunfunction »

alexpotato wrote: post #160
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"…

There are a lot of people from the National Lab super computer world who end up in High Frequency Trading for just the reason you describe. Specifically, how do you optimize a large cluster of computers to operate at the lowest possible latency. For the National Labs, those computers could be in the lab or with other labs around the world. For the HFT folks, the machines could be in an exchange or spread across multi…

Hey I’d love to pick your brain about what it takes to do this kind of work coming from a web/systems engineering background. Shoot me an email at samheutmaker at gmail if you’re open to it.

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

#196

Post by XCSme »

chickenpotpie wrote: post #43
XCSme wrote: post #34

I use a $5/mo DigitalOcean VPS droplet instead of AWS or other "cloud" service. I only have to host an analytics dashboard ( https://usertrack.net/ ), I don't need scaling and this way I know exactly how much I will pay. The resources are more than enough for my needs and I don't think it could be much cheaper even on the most optimized pay-per-minute of use cloud platforms. I also have some other APIs hosted in the…

Whenever I need to host something small and I’m trying to decide between DO and AWS I always ask myself. Would I rather be surprised by the bill or my website crashing from too much traffic? I almost always pick DO because I don’t want to mess something up and lose a few hundred dollars.

I use DO now because I like their interface and that they keep adding new features. Plus in my case I can easily spin-up new servers with their prebuilt images marketplace and cloud-init support. I tried using AWS before, but last time I did their interface was awful and pricing hard to understand/predict.

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

#197

Post by j88439h84 »

alexpotato wrote: post #160
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"…

There are a lot of people from the National Lab super computer world who end up in High Frequency Trading for just the reason you describe. Specifically, how do you optimize a large cluster of computers to operate at the lowest possible latency. For the National Labs, those computers could be in the lab or with other labs around the world. For the HFT folks, the machines could be in an exchange or spread across multi…

I'm curious why you moved to LLNL from HFT?

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

#198

Post by renewiltord »

philg_jr wrote: post #145
centimeter wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

100% ad tech or some Mulesoft style middleware app.

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

#199

Post by sergiotapia »

wooly_bully wrote: post #172
dahfizz wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is accurate in my experience. Also keeping things up and being there in case shit hits the fan is a full-time job. You can't write features and also manage servers equally well. Unless you have no life I guess.

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

#200

Post by sergiotapia »

Just want to say I love threads like these. I hope one day where I work we can have two or three obscenely beefy servers and be done with it. I'm planning for something similar probably Q2 2021 as our expenses grow too large on a manged hosting platform like Heroku/Render/Aptible.
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