[MLB-WIRELESS] OT: Green community datacentre

[Fenn Bailey]

> 
> No way I'm paying $80 a month to run my pc's (even if I am in 
> New York but you get my point)
> 

Hhehe... Fair call :)

It's totally not worth it unless you're planning on utilizing the hosting
itself for something that makes the cost worthwhile. It's a very expensive
solution for virtualhosting a few websites :)

It's a very cheap solution for hosting virtual dedicated servers though (for
example)!

Which brings up a couple of calculations that perhaps demonstraights why I'm
vaguely interested in this idea.

Take this site as fairly standard datacentre pricing (this is very close to
most facilities):

http://anchor.com.au/co-location-pricing.py

So, let's look at what we'd get as a shared user of a community DC (with
slightly scaled up capacity):

4Mbps @ 85% average utilization (tough, but possible to achieve) is
1.07TB/month or 100GB/month/user for 10 users, which is not a heap, but IS
generous for the $'s discussed. Adding an extra 512Kbps adds 20GB extra per
month for every user.

At anchor, this service would be:

 - 1/4 rack: $400/month
 - 100GB data (inbound) est 6c/MB = $6144
 - Total: $6544/month

Let us assume that due to the symmetric nature of ethernet and the
asymmetric nature of traffic that the out:in ratio is closer to 8:1, so we
can really only achieve 12.5GB of data outbound/user:

 - 1/4 rack: $400/month
 - 12.5GB data (inbound) est 7.5c/MB = $960
 - Total: $1360/month

Either way, the equiv of spending $82.50/month on power/cooling and even
$500/month on data all of a sudden seems slightly more attractive (or at
least not entirely insane).

I'm still very unsure whether the idea is even vaguely feasible or worth it
in the slightest, but I find the exercise interesting at least.

Apologies to all if this is considered distracting OT noise on the list.
Happy to take it off-list if so, but I think these types of discussion are
worth it as an exercise of community-practicality.

Cheers,

	Fenn.


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dean Collins [mailto:Dean at cognation.net] 
> Sent: Tuesday, 6 February 2007 3:06 PM
> To: Fenn Bailey; melbwireless at wireless.org.au
> Subject: RE: [MLB-WIRELESS] OT: Green community datacentre
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