Having done support for dozens of law firms over the years, 90+% of them have UPS battery backups to run their servers and network gear for a few hours. Its not a generator, but its juice enough to bridge the small outages and gracefully shut down if there are power issues.
And the vast majority of companies don't have those hyper-specialized needs. Hospitals: yes. Lawyers' offices: no.
You never worked for a law firm, have you? Data integrity, availability and security are paramount in firms larger than a few partners. This is made more difficult because many (not all) lawyers think they know everything and will happily dump gigabytes of confidential documents onto unsecured laptops and dropbox accounts, if you let them. And what if you represent defense contractors? Data must be secured in very specific ways and managed/monitored only by those with valid security clearances. I won't even address the liability issues associated with not ensuring attorney/client confidentiality. You have no idea what you're talking about.
Generators may not be the best example, because of economies of scale. It is cheaper to run a couple gigawatt power plants than thousands of kilowatt generators. A diesel generator tends to be for backups, or perhaps a conversation piece when you fire it up to make sure it still works every few weeks [1].
Servers are different. A cloud provider will be using the same type of hardware that their clients will be using, be it blade enclosures, 1U x86 servers, an EMC VNX backend, Cisco Nexus fabric, ASA firewalls, and so on. The big question... do you pay for the servers sitting in your data center, or do you pay for them sitting in some data center Bog knows where. Either way, those servers will get paid for.
[1]: If you can hear people over the noise it makes.
The (largely theoretical) cost savings come from utilisation. If you run the servers, you need to have peak capacity on hand - your website needs to be ready to handle being linked to from slashdot or a major news site, your fileservers need to be up to the task of everyone logging on in the morning, and you need enough storage always to hand to be ready when that guy down in PR starts work on his 1080p raw video for the new advertisment project. That means that most of the time your servers are sitting lar
I run two diesel generators, they're backups for when the local utility stuffs up their responsibility and fails to provide power, it's exactly the same reason I'm not going to outsource my server farm to someone else.
There seems to be a decent inbetween stage in the world of servers though. With servers, there's 4 options. You can own the datacenter. You can own the servers and rent out space in a datacenter. You can rent out servers inside a datacenter owned by someone else, You can host your applications on virtual machines that run inside somebody else's datacenter. Each level gives you less control over the services. If you own the datacenter, you're responsible for everything. If you only have a single server, th
a lot of people have that very niche case and amazon was the first i know of to effectively satisfy it. i usually need 0 machines (of substantial power), but occasionally could use a few, so paying $2.80/hr. for a 244GB machine is pretty damned convenient. likewise i could play with a decent CUDA machine for $0.65/hr. if i ever came up with an idea to try out. assuming i use a simulator/emulator for development and preliminary eval, then 50 hours should be way more than enough, which is ~$30. peanuts.
Yeah, for development and research, I agree, they have their uses. It's nice to be able to rent a high power machine for a few hours to test out some stuff, or run some simulations. But for day to day production machines, hosting web applications that don't actually have load that is variable, I really don't see the point, at yet I see plenty of companies doing it.
it's probably a reason (excuse?) to fire someone who was being paid too much in the first place. $90k/year (or however much a server monkey costs) will buy a lot of ec2 hours, plus the healthcare and payroll taxes are a lot cheaper.
yeah, it might not be cost-effective in the long run (then again, it might) but who cares? they certainly don't.
on a less serious note, maybe the spot-pricing works out? not for the frontend of course, but it may be reasonable for some applications. i don't know, i never used it.
That's the whole idea behind Amazon. What you pay scales with your installed user base. As for other similar applications it is because the costs of a virtual server are cheaper than renting a whole machine for rather obvious reasons.
If you can manage to get a link to a "cloud server" where the SLOWEST link to the server meets or exceeds 1Gbps for small businesses (with 30ms or less latency) , and you can get 10Gbps or faster (and bond multiple links to expand bandwidth further) for larger organizations, AND have daily backups in easily-migrated formats stored in escrow by the cloud provider in the event that the government raids and confiscates servers because some drug cartel or "piracy" ring happened to have cloud services on the same physical box as your virtualized servers, AND you have net neutrality so Comcast/Time Warner/Cox/etc. can't throttle your network speeds because you're in the "top 1% of users" (read: you're actually using the services they offered to sell you and you agreed to buy then they reneg on their contracted offerings) then it will be a practical option.
Which is fine given the lack of any presented argument against running your own generator (or server). It is however a pretty good refutation of the summary claim that admin's are avoiding moving to the cloud because they are afraid of losing their jobs. The servers are still there whether at a cloud service or individual company and still need administrated. If anything cloud shops create more admin jobs. The company still has to admin their servers, they just don't rack and stack them.
Most of the small businesses I have worked with have an "IT guy" who knows how to troubleshoot Windows and do a few other things. I haven't been in a sub-100 person shop that had qualified storage, networking, and system admins.
SMBs need to outsource for specialized IT expertise, whether to consultants or cloud providers.
I didn't know we were talking about mom and pop shops. They don't have storage and network admins because they don't have significant storage and network architecture to admin. But even in the ultra tiny shops where the IT staff are outside consultants they should have restricted physical access to your server(s). It's one thing to have someone in to work on the system you run your accounting on. It's quite another to not only put that system on the internet but give 24/7 physical access to a third party. Se
I've been in IT since the '80's, and every company I've worked for, large or small, has had their own backup generators of some sort. Some, at start-ups, were just a portable gas generator that they could set outside the back door and fire up to keep a few critical servers running. Other larger companies had jet turbines on standbye.
All for the same reason that companies are hesitant to commit all of their IT to the cloud - keeping control. It's not about jobs, it's about being sure that critical services are available when you need them, and also who's neck you're going to throttle when things go wrong.
Electricity supply is reliable enough in many places to make it difficult to justify a generator for anything that is not utterly critical (which is a lot less than most people think).
Other larger companies had jet turbines on standbye.
That's bullshit hype unless they are a huge data centre and selling that as a MAJOR feature - tiny little jet engines from the 1950s can pump out 20MW which is the sort of thing used to cold start a power station - coal conveyers, crushers and all.
Your point ignores the fact that people are increasingly switching to self power generation... solar power... wind... and yes... lots of off grid diesel generators.
The instant we have a reasonable power storage self power generation will explode.
So your argument is self defeating. People want to move to self generation.
This is actually pretty insightful. Yes, many, many people shouldn't be running their own generators. I can get a 20kW generator from the local home depot for $5,000, but it's probably not meant to run forever. I imagine one that is meant to deliver 20kW constantly costs more. And you have to fuel it. And hire someone to come fix it when it breaks. Clearly, that's a bad idea.
What if you already own a power company? What if you've already made the investment in generators and people who know how to ru
Instead of "server huggers" we think of cloud sysadmins as Lakitu, a helpful koopa that rescues your applications when they've gone off track. Lakitu also throws spiny eggs at those suspender-ed and unshaven hackers who try to penetrate your kingdom's defenses. True, Lakitu can be knocked offline allowing such hackers to steal your bitcoins easily while your cloud floats along unattended, but this rarely happens. Given the success rate of Lakitu in the literature, I think we can easily agree that it's ko
I have a mental image of the cloud servers being managed by a gaggle of nearly-homeless sysadmins the IT manager picks up in an unmarked van every morning at five in front of the local Home Depot.
The internet, that you when you click on the blue "e", that's your cloud. You can store as much as you like on your cloud. Your cloud can float on the information superhighway, up as much as you want. Everytime someone visits your cloud, it rains apps on them, and they smile.
Your server isn't a cloud. It's just a water tap. People have to drive to your house to use the tap. There are no apps coming from the tap. It makes people sad. You should pay money to put your apps on the cloud, where everyone can read
As a former cloud administrator: no. When you have 2000 physical servers, why do you care that 50 of them are currently broken? Why would I care that the hard drive failed in one and I had to re-install it (with an identical image and configuration to the other 1999 servers)
Hell, we had servers that never worked from the day they were delivered and no one gave a shit: it went on the backlog for the DC guys to diagnose and RMA. Some of them got fixed after 6 m
Cloud needs server huggers (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:1)
And the vast majority of companies don't have those hyper-specialized needs. Hospitals: yes. Lawyers' offices: no.
Re: (Score:1)
Having done support for dozens of law firms over the years, 90+% of them have UPS battery backups to run their servers and network gear for a few hours. Its not a generator, but its juice enough to bridge the small outages and gracefully shut down if there are power issues.
Re:Cloud needs server huggers (Score:4, Insightful)
For electricity? Perhaps.
But the need to maintain control of their own documents is no less for a lawyer than a Hospital, as any lawyer would tell you.
Re: (Score:2)
You're talking about the physical components versus the software components.
Re: (Score:2)
Software these days works fucking awesome without particular hardware. Virtually every language is multiplatform.
Re:Cloud needs server huggers (Score:4, Informative)
And the vast majority of companies don't have those hyper-specialized needs. Hospitals: yes. Lawyers' offices: no.
You never worked for a law firm, have you? Data integrity, availability and security are paramount in firms larger than a few partners. This is made more difficult because many (not all) lawyers think they know everything and will happily dump gigabytes of confidential documents onto unsecured laptops and dropbox accounts, if you let them. And what if you represent defense contractors? Data must be secured in very specific ways and managed/monitored only by those with valid security clearances. I won't even address the liability issues associated with not ensuring attorney/client confidentiality. You have no idea what you're talking about.
Re:Cloud needs server huggers (Score:4, Informative)
Generators may not be the best example, because of economies of scale. It is cheaper to run a couple gigawatt power plants than thousands of kilowatt generators. A diesel generator tends to be for backups, or perhaps a conversation piece when you fire it up to make sure it still works every few weeks [1].
Servers are different. A cloud provider will be using the same type of hardware that their clients will be using, be it blade enclosures, 1U x86 servers, an EMC VNX backend, Cisco Nexus fabric, ASA firewalls, and so on. The big question... do you pay for the servers sitting in your data center, or do you pay for them sitting in some data center Bog knows where. Either way, those servers will get paid for.
[1]: If you can hear people over the noise it makes.
Re: (Score:2)
The (largely theoretical) cost savings come from utilisation. If you run the servers, you need to have peak capacity on hand - your website needs to be ready to handle being linked to from slashdot or a major news site, your fileservers need to be up to the task of everyone logging on in the morning, and you need enough storage always to hand to be ready when that guy down in PR starts work on his 1080p raw video for the new advertisment project. That means that most of the time your servers are sitting lar
Re:Cloud needs server huggers (Score:5, Interesting)
I run two diesel generators, they're backups for when the local utility stuffs up their responsibility and fails to provide power, it's exactly the same reason I'm not going to outsource my server farm to someone else.
Re: (Score:2)
I wasn't saying it was never necessary. Just that "Someone needs to" is a far cry from "I need to"
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
a lot of people have that very niche case and amazon was the first i know of to effectively satisfy it. i usually need 0 machines (of substantial power), but occasionally could use a few, so paying $2.80/hr. for a 244GB machine is pretty damned convenient. likewise i could play with a decent CUDA machine for $0.65/hr. if i ever came up with an idea to try out. assuming i use a simulator/emulator for development and preliminary eval, then 50 hours should be way more than enough, which is ~$30. peanuts.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
it's probably a reason (excuse?) to fire someone who was being paid too much in the first place. $90k/year (or however much a server monkey costs) will buy a lot of ec2 hours, plus the healthcare and payroll taxes are a lot cheaper.
yeah, it might not be cost-effective in the long run (then again, it might) but who cares? they certainly don't.
on a less serious note, maybe the spot-pricing works out? not for the frontend of course, but it may be reasonable for some applications. i don't know, i never used it.
Re: (Score:2)
That's the whole idea behind Amazon. What you pay scales with your installed user base. As for other similar applications it is because the costs of a virtual server are cheaper than renting a whole machine for rather obvious reasons.
Re:Cloud needs server huggers (Score:5, Informative)
If you can manage to get a link to a "cloud server" where the SLOWEST link to the server meets or exceeds 1Gbps for small businesses (with 30ms or less latency) , and you can get 10Gbps or faster (and bond multiple links to expand bandwidth further) for larger organizations, AND have daily backups in easily-migrated formats stored in escrow by the cloud provider in the event that the government raids and confiscates servers because some drug cartel or "piracy" ring happened to have cloud services on the same physical box as your virtualized servers, AND you have net neutrality so Comcast/Time Warner/Cox/etc. can't throttle your network speeds because you're in the "top 1% of users" (read: you're actually using the services they offered to sell you and you agreed to buy then they reneg on their contracted offerings) then it will be a practical option.
Until then, fuck cloud servers. Seriously.
Re: (Score:3)
It is however a pretty good refutation of the summary claim that admin's are avoiding moving to the cloud because they are afraid of losing their jobs. The servers are still there whether at a cloud service or individual company and still need administrated. If anything cloud shops create more admin jobs. The company still has to admin their servers, they just don't rack and stack them.
Putting things "on th
Re: (Score:2)
Most of the small businesses I have worked with have an "IT guy" who knows how to troubleshoot Windows and do a few other things. I haven't been in a sub-100 person shop that had qualified storage, networking, and system admins.
SMBs need to outsource for specialized IT expertise, whether to consultants or cloud providers.
Re: (Score:2)
It's one thing to have someone in to work on the system you run your accounting on. It's quite another to not only put that system on the internet but give 24/7 physical access to a third party. Se
Re:Cloud needs server huggers (Score:4, Informative)
I've been in IT since the '80's, and every company I've worked for, large or small, has had their own backup generators of some sort. Some, at start-ups, were just a portable gas generator that they could set outside the back door and fire up to keep a few critical servers running. Other larger companies had jet turbines on standbye.
All for the same reason that companies are hesitant to commit all of their IT to the cloud - keeping control. It's not about jobs, it's about being sure that critical services are available when you need them, and also who's neck you're going to throttle when things go wrong.
We don't all live in California (Score:2)
That's bullshit hype unless they are a huge data centre and selling that as a MAJOR feature - tiny little jet engines from the 1950s can pump out 20MW which is the sort of thing used to cold start a power station - coal conveyers, crushers and all.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Your point ignores the fact that people are increasingly switching to self power generation... solar power... wind... and yes... lots of off grid diesel generators.
The instant we have a reasonable power storage self power generation will explode.
So your argument is self defeating. People want to move to self generation.
Re: (Score:2)
This is actually pretty insightful. Yes, many, many people shouldn't be running their own generators. I can get a 20kW generator from the local home depot for $5,000, but it's probably not meant to run forever. I imagine one that is meant to deliver 20kW constantly costs more. And you have to fuel it. And hire someone to come fix it when it breaks. Clearly, that's a bad idea.
What if you already own a power company? What if you've already made the investment in generators and people who know how to ru
Re: (Score:2)
Electricity is generic. Data, software and their use are not.
Re:Cloud needs server huggers (Score:5, Funny)
No you see if you are an admin at a cloud service provider you should just place all your cloud servers in the cloud cloud.
Re: (Score:2)
Isn't the "cloud" just a bunch of servers? Should nobody be hugging THOSE servers either?
Obviously, it's Turtles all the way down. [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Instead of "server huggers" we think of cloud sysadmins as Lakitu, a helpful koopa that rescues your applications when they've gone off track. Lakitu also throws spiny eggs at those suspender-ed and unshaven hackers who try to penetrate your kingdom's defenses. True, Lakitu can be knocked offline allowing such hackers to steal your bitcoins easily while your cloud floats along unattended, but this rarely happens. Given the success rate of Lakitu in the literature, I think we can easily agree that it's ko
Re: (Score:2)
I have a mental image of the cloud servers being managed by a gaggle of nearly-homeless sysadmins the IT manager picks up in an unmarked van every morning at five in front of the local Home Depot.
Re: (Score:2)
The internet, that you when you click on the blue "e", that's your cloud. You can store as much as you like on your cloud. Your cloud can float on the information superhighway, up as much as you want. Everytime someone visits your cloud, it rains apps on them, and they smile.
Your server isn't a cloud. It's just a water tap. People have to drive to your house to use the tap. There are no apps coming from the tap. It makes people sad. You should pay money to put your apps on the cloud, where everyone can read
Re: (Score:2)
As a former cloud administrator: no. When you have 2000 physical servers, why do you care that 50 of them are currently broken? Why would I care that the hard drive failed in one and I had to re-install it (with an identical image and configuration to the other 1999 servers)
Hell, we had servers that never worked from the day they were delivered and no one gave a shit: it went on the backlog for the DC guys to diagnose and RMA. Some of them got fixed after 6 m
Re: (Score:2)
It's clouds all the way down!