[57north-discuss] Hosting servers

[Tony Travis]

On 24/07/2021 16:52, Robert McWilliam wrote:
> [...]
>> To be clear, they consume about 250W when idle and ~350W when working.
>>
>> FFS,
>>
>>     Tony.
> 
> Heh, yes I was just typing a message checking if you meant W but you noticed yourself before I got as far as sending :)

Hi, Robert.

Thanks :-)

> 6x250W comes to about £2400/year (with what I'm paying for electricity, I don't know how that compares to price at the hackspace). And north of £3k/year if they're mostly busy and at the 350W each end of the range. What were you thinking for metering/covering cost of the electricity usage?

I was thinking about 57North paying for the electricity and Internet in 
return for member access to the compute and storage of the six servers.

> Couple of kW is enough to probably have noticeable impact on room temp. Extra heating might be welcome in winter but not when weather is like it has been recently. Do you know if the units in the roof do cooling as well as heating? Might need to account for extra load on them. What were you thinking for cooling?

Passive cooling (windows open...)

> Yeah, I'd agree with you that EC2 is expensive for stuff running 24/7 (for a decent length of time). For stuff I'm responsible for we've got a mix of bought and rented dedicated servers for things that run 24/7 and use EC2/Azure for intermittent tasks.
> 
> I didn't mean to suggest that these servers weren't right choice for your needs - I expected you would have done appropriate analysis. Was just noting they're maybe not a good fit for more "general" loads.

I don't mind if it's not of interest to 57North, but I thought it might 
be useful to have our own compute/storage cluster and experiment with 
different approaches to HPC. This is what I was setting up initially 
when we were in Union Street with the RackableSystems 2U Opteron 200's, 
which I replaced with Opteron 2,000's that are still running in Italy.

Bye,

   Tony.

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