08:23 pm, 31 Aug 05
wikimedia drive
The wikimedia foundation has a 2005 budget summary up. They want, among other things, $125k for hardware for this quarter alone. (The earlier budgets indicate they've already used $150k this year...)
Where is all that money going? It makes no sense to me.
Mental math says that LJ on 50 servers at $2k each is still $100k, and that's for the entirety of LJ, not just for a single quarter. Sure, there's some extra stuff like load balancers and switches but this is still not a recurring cost. (And my usual complaints: wikipedia is mostly reads and those reads are for basically static pages, etc.)
Where is all that money going? It makes no sense to me.
Mental math says that LJ on 50 servers at $2k each is still $100k, and that's for the entirety of LJ, not just for a single quarter. Sure, there's some extra stuff like load balancers and switches but this is still not a recurring cost. (And my usual complaints: wikipedia is mostly reads and those reads are for basically static pages, etc.)
Here's a list of servers they actually bought.
Also, if they're dumping memory for memcached/something into the webservers that might bump them above $2k a pop.
I'm still having a hard time figuring where they'd be spending all of that? I'm pretty sure they use shit like perlbal, and don't pay the Oracle tax, which wouldn't be a hardware budget anyway. Routers? Racking equipment? Console servers + cables? VGA capable remote controlled KVM's?
Mind you, I do drop four times that per quarter without blinking right now, but I know exactly how we're wasting all of that money. SANs, proprietary NAS, load balancers chew up money just as fast as Oracle Enterprise licenses. I'd figure a place like wikipedia wouldn't be using any of those.