Hi, On Mon Oct 24, 2011 at 17:17:19 +0200, Peter Palfrader wrote: > Which brings us to a third part. If we actually wanted to replace everything > that's older than say 3 or even 5 years with new systems, we couldn't afford > it. Not by a long shot.
Debian got a lot of new machines by donations in the past, machines that had been stocked with the best and newest parts at that time. The time we got those donations is over and will most probably never ever come back. These machines don't come cheap if you actually have to buy them one at a time. You get four or six gigs pretty quickly, but if you want what counts of decent amounts of ECC RAM, say 24 or 32 gigs - which isn't too crazy, it's going to set you back around a grand just for memory. And that's nothing compared to storage. You may think disk space is inexpensive these days, and maybe it is if you put your data on 2tb consumer disks you buy from the discounter around the corner, but storage in servers still costs a small fortune (~1-2 USD per gig, on 2.5" 10k SAS disks, and you don't just want a single one of them). Throw in another half grand to a grand for the raid controller or the "optional" battery to enable the existing controller's write cache. Add CPUs, chassis, extended warranty and it's peanuts no more. So far we've bought maybe two and a half machines from Debian money. And that's in all of our history. Maybe we could buy more, but do we have the funds? And if we do, can we justify spending that amount of money if the existing gear still mostly does its job? Cheers, Martin PS: now, you can try to cut down on costs of individual machines by for instance moving storage out of the server itself and making it part of the local infrastructue. I.e. provide storage via iscsi/fc/nfs etc. But these things again don't come for free. You have to get that infrastructure, and it suddenly is a spof. And it requires that new machines get hosted at the place that has the storage. And then it probably isn't as fast as a local raid10. Oh well. Nobody said it was easy :) -- Martin Zobel-Helas <zo...@debian.org> | Debian System Administrator Debian & GNU/Linux Developer | Debian Listmaster GPG key http://go.debian.net/B11B627B | GPG Fingerprint: 6B18 5642 8E41 EC89 3D5D BDBB 53B1 AC6D B11B 627B -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-qa-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20111024160033.gd1...@ftbfs.de