Re: [OT] Re: Repost: Anyone using virtual server for mod_perl hosts?
G.W. Haywood writes: On Mon, 12 Feb 2001, Malcolm Beattie wrote: you can run *thousands* of separate Linux images on a S/390 How much, to the nearest order of magnitude, does a S/390 cost? How long is a piece of string? An S/390 can be anything from about $100 on ebay for an extremely old one which would cost more in power, space and cooling and do less in performance than any reasonable person would want unless they're *really* hooked on history and blinkenlights. At the top end you can pay $5 million or more for a top of the range z900 fully kitted out. More usefully, I'll say that I'm after a system which costs around 1000 GBP per virtual server (that would be $1000 at computing prices of $1 = 1GBP). The question is how large a system I have to get to bring down the per-virtual-server price that far. I'm hoping that 150-200 would do the trick but I'm (a) hoping to pay extremely low academic prices and (b) probably being over-optimistic. If you look at http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/zseries/linuxconfig/ you'll see that IBM reckons you can get down to $500 per server (disk not included) by putting 2500 instances on a brand new fancy $1.2 million z900. On one hand, I'd guess you may need to pay for some upgrading if they aren't very lightly used servers but on the other hand, no one ever pays list price (I'm reliably informed). On the gripping hand, it's very difficult getting hold of pricing information at all on these things (as mentioned in my last slide, I think) which is one of the big problems. --Malcolm -- Malcolm Beattie [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unix Systems Programmer Oxford University Computing Services
Re: [OT] Re: Repost: Anyone using virtual server for mod_perl hosts?
On Tue, Feb 13, 2001 at 11:28:20AM +, Malcolm Beattie wrote: you'll see that IBM reckons you can get down to $500 per server (disk not included) by putting 2500 instances on a brand new fancy $1.2 million z900. Assuming all the virtual linux servers were fully loaded with tasks (say apache+mod_perl as an example)... What kind of tradition Intel platform performance would each virtual linux instance be equivalent to? e.g., CPU: ~600MHz PIII? And what about network i/o? Would the z900 network i/o be a bottleneck if all the virtual servers were blasting away? Tim.
[OT] Re: Repost: Anyone using virtual server for mod_perl hosts?
Malcolm Beattie writes: 50 boxes: no problem. 200 boxes: 5 racks or 1U, getting messy. 1000 boxes: admin nightmare. Plus you don't get much too many built-in reliability features with a 1U box. Now consider that you can run *thousands* of separate Linux images on a S/390 box which consists of just one or two frames (i.e. the size of one or two racks). It'll The slides from my talk "IBM Mainframe Hardware from a Linux Hacker's Viewpoint" are now available at http://users.ox.ac.uk/~mbeattie/newcastle2001/index.html There may well be a few errors in the facts and figures (mainly because most of the reason for the talk was gathering together large numbers of facts and figures from disparate sources). However, the attendees seemed to like it, despite the fact that I had to rush through part of it due to lack of time. --Malcolm -- Malcolm Beattie [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unix Systems Programmer Oxford University Computing Services
Re: [OT] Re: Repost: Anyone using virtual server for mod_perl hosts?
Hi guys, On Mon, 12 Feb 2001, Malcolm Beattie wrote: you can run *thousands* of separate Linux images on a S/390 How much, to the nearest order of magnitude, does a S/390 cost? 73, Ged.
