Subject: Re: [vserver] vserver scalability
From: Eugen Leitl <eugen@leitl.org>
Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2010 16:37:05 +0200

On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 11:04:46AM +0100, Ed W wrote:

> There is a guy who does Mac Mini hosting which seemed like an almost 

You probably mean http://www.macminicolo.net/

> interesting idea.  They list at a price more expensive than a bunch of 
> supermicro Atom machines, but given that they use the 25W core2 part and 
> have been really built for low power it seems like you might gain quite 
> an advantage in power/cooling costs?  They also seem to have a high 

Not really. The Mac minis have no IPMI, do not integrate well into
racks so you'd need shelves, which means you'd have to build your
own data center. I also doubt they beat Atom in OPS/J. Back-to-back short
rackmounts ventilate well by convection (smoke funnel effect). 
In terms of performance/price they're not really that good (and have
gotten worse with the latest Mac mini). They do not have 24/7/365
specced hardware (notebook hard drives). Etc.

> density and of course if you are CPU bound rather than RAM bound then 
> the Core2 is likely vastly faster than an Atom?

If you're CPU bound, you just buy more cheap boxes, and charge 
power users more.
 
> I can only assume that these boxes survive reasonably well in a hosting 
> environment because someone else is already doing it...

I would like to see their failure rate. I presume the main reason to
run Mac mini is to cater to OS X users on the cheap. The OS X server
Mac mini is even less attractive in terms of price/performance.
 
> Anyway, so many ways to skin a cat...

There are many feline species. My target are people who
value a thin FLOSS wrapper about raw physical resources
(address space, bandwidth, computation, storage). Proprietary
components would be only in the way here.
 
> Ed W
-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="leitlhttp://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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