Hardware provisional budget

See Q3 and Q4 2004 hardware order worksheet for next planned order.

200,000-dollar order

Let's dream a bit and see how could 200,000 dollars for the next 2 years help.

50 Apaches at $1200 7 Apaches at the moment, doubling every 6-8 months at the moment—that's 3 times doubling in 2 years. Will be less in two years probably, world population is limited, so 50 Apaches at $1200	$60,000
3 big wikicommon servers with 4TB of storage each, RAID1, $30,000 each.	$90,000
3 search db's, $10,000 each	$30,000
Housing, 2 additional 19" racks, $2(212)*750	$36,000
3 additional 24 port GBit switches at $3000 each	$9000
Total	$225,000

165,000-dollar order

Asked for an estimate of what would prevent the need for donation requests at the current frequency; Jamesday estimated this as likely to be enough six months from July 2004:

Three database servers like Ariel, each holding 1/3 of the site. $12,300 each for two more.
Three to six read only database query servers (to offload the main ones). Say 3U dual Opteron 244s with 4GB of RAM (4 modules, can upgrade to 8GB), a pair of 200GB IDE drives, room for four more drives. The RAM is key here—saves much of disk load. $4000 each (the RAM is about $1000 of that). These avoid having to buy more of the very expensive disk setups in the main database servers.
Three to six read only database search servers. Same as query servers. $4,000 each.
Three storage servers for images/video and server logs. Dual Xeon 2U SATA RAID 5 with 6 of 12 bays filled for 1000 GB of disk space each. $5000 each. These should last a year or two beyond the end of the time, with added drives.
Ten to twenty web servers. Dual Opterons in 1U cases with a gigabyte of RAM (for memcached caching mainly). $2600 each.
Three to six Squid cache servers. Move the current 1U web servers to this job, raise RAM to 4GB for about $1000 each and replace with the web servers above, 1 per two moved.
Gigabit ethernet between core systems. Call it $5000. May be less.
Two 32-port terminal servers with cabling at $2200 each. These let the developers see what happens if a computer which is restarted doesn't boot properly. If they do boot and connect to the network, there are already ways to do it. Saves asking Jimbo or the colo staff to do it at 4AM when they don't necessarily know what is or isn't normal.
Remote power controllers to allow restarting hung systems. Ballpark $3000, may be more or less.

Total bill for all of this comes to around $165,000. The database side is probably more than necessary to cope with the load the web servers can handle and I expect that it could handle doubling the number of web servers—but I don't know which parts of the database setup will be hotspots first, so if you want a fixed budget I have to assume all of them. And I also have to ignore the programming improvements I'm hoping for, because they might not happen or might take longer than expected.

Thoughts

Cisco Catalyst 2948G-GE-TX 48-port gigabit switch [1], managed switch, runs CatOS, does SNMP, etc. Costs $62.05 per port (current switches are $30.16/port). Might be worth considering. —Kate | Talk 11:05, 2004 Oct 1 (UTC)

Get Apples and MacOSes! lysdexia 23:40, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC)

No, wait for the Core 3 Duo, those will be so godly you will only need one server for every 20 AMD servers -86.43.88.90 01:44, 11 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]