Tracy Reed <[email protected]> writes: > I have a consulting client who has engaged me to look at their > infrastructure and do some analysis and then make a recommendation on > either: > > 1. Hiring their own full-time sysadmin to re-architect everything and > move it to an in-house virtualized environment. > > or > > 2. Outsourcing the whole works to Rackspace and get out of the > business of owning hardware, paying a colo for a rack, and bringing on > a full-time sysadmin.
*key* here is to have multiple providers for everything. Outsourcing is great; but you don't want to get locked into only one provider. The other thing to consider is that renting servers doesn't mean you don't need a guy who knows *NIX. Also, owning your own hardware is a lot cheaper than renting. Sometimes that doesn't matter because hardware isn't a significant part of your cost structure. For me it does, because hardware is a very large portion of my costs. building a 2x2.1Ghz shanghai server with 32GB ram and a mirrored terrabyte? $1200 in parts or so and and some work. (but then, I've got my workstation setup[1]. nothing fancy, but adaquate ESD protection is worth many times the effort if broken servers wake you up.) Renting a dual xeon from rackspace with 16GB ram, I believe, would be close to that much every month. Just to give you some idea, I'm paying around a grand a month for a full rack w/ a small bandwidth commit and 2x 20A circuts. [1] http://prgmr.com/~lsc/luke_opterons.jpg -- Luke S. Crawford http://prgmr.com/xen/ - Hosting for the technically adept We don't assume you are stupid. _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
