yeah, I realized that I lost my original output (copy&pasted the wrong thing after I closed the VM). tried reproducing, but no servers are available at the time, so I deleted the comment ;(
for those who're curious: I was wondering what kind of 20GB SSDs they're using, they seem to be way slower than virtualized storage.
I was confused for a long time trying to reconcile the claim of "912 computers per rack" with what I observed in the video: 18 servers per cartridge, 16 cartridges per case, so 288 servers per case. I finally realized they must have meant cores: so 4 cores x 18 servers x 16 cartridges = 912 cores per case is probably how I would have put it.
Ballparking the size of the case based on the comparison of a single server to a business card, it looks like they're using roughly a 7U case. Anybody know more about the specs of a case-load of servers? I'd love to know what the power consumption is. If you could put 6 of those cases in a cabinet, that would be some pretty incredible compute density.
I hope they consider selling the system externally. At first blush at least it seems like it would be an ideal setup for hosting colocated trading applications.
You're assuming that when they say "912 computers per rack" they mean 912 4-core servers per rack. It's a reasonable assumption, that's how I interpreted that statement when I read it the first time. Nonetheless, I'm quite sure that that interpretation is incorrect.
If you watch the video carefully, you'll notice that their rack/case contains 16 cartridges, and each cartridge has 18 servers on it. That indicates they have 288 servers per rack. 288x4=912, so I believe that when they said 912 computers per rack, they actually meant 912 cores per rack.
The first and main reason is, that when you have multiple containers/VMs on a single server, what really happens is that "peak" or "burst" CPU matters more, in terms of what the user (whether developer doing testing, or users of a website that are browsing it) sees as performance.
Only in very memory-intensive tasks would these servers outperform (because the memory bandwidth is dedicated to just your server and is not shared). Then again, being able to bump from 2GB to 4GB (provided the application can take advantage of it) of RAM might well minimize the issue due to caching or other optimizations.
Second, 2GB RAM is (sadly) just not enough. As an example, the Zimbra mail server barely runs in 2GB; and many other Java based programs are only fast once they have chewed up a couple hundred MBs of RAM.
I have a VM running my webserver, mumble VOIP, IRC server (inspircd), two IRC bouncers, OpenVPN, Xymon monitoring, bitlbee, and a few other things and it only has 768MB RAM.
Definitely. I've got a centos 6.5 VM that is a master svn server for a multinational with a 22Gb repo and 190 users and does front end http and ssl for 45 requests/second (average with peaks of 200/sec) and it barely touches the CPU (single 3.2 GHz xeon e5 core) and has only 1Gb of RAM.
I have several applications that would run very well on this. I wouldn't be too hasty -- all the world isn't Java or "enterprise" web apps.
The hosting market is huge. There's a niche for this, especially if they can exploit the strengths of bare metal non-virtualized hosting without the cost premium. A $5/month bare metal quad-core would be ideal for a whole bunch of applications.
Wow, this is fantastic. I signed up for a trial and spun up a server. docker works well. A quick review:
1) they have the equivalent of ec2/digital ocean
2) can create volumes that can be attached to instances.
3) can create images and snapshots
4) s3 like storage. not sure about AZs and such.
5) I tried reserving an IP but they seem to be out of it.
Only downside - I would like to know the pricing before I start using this.
If anyone from Online Labs is reading this, please let us know about the pricing!
I wonder how similar this is to their existing dediboxes; I have an €5.99/mo box with them which is some kind of VIA Nano-based Dell that is only sold in Europe:
Nice little setup. It's slow, of course (certainly not fast enough to encode 720p H.264 in real time, for example), and the ARM architecture is bound to be faster.
I wonder if this isn't a little late to market. At this point, the major cloud providers offer such a large array of products and services that add value to their VM capabilities that I find it hard to imagine someone architecting a substantial system on this platform anytime soon.
That said, they will make a juicy acquisition target for someone who wants their tech. So I am not saying they wasted their time either.
We see disruption everyday in the tech community. I do not think that will change anytime soon. They have a compelling product that I personally would like to try.
Well, They are still going to have to figure out how to "Seamlessly" mirror nodes because it's going to suck when half of one of those boards dies. I do wish them the best as my inner nerd loves the idea.
Very pretty. What is the power density of these? 288 nodes/enclosure is pretty dense. Did you design your own enclosure/backplane as well? What are the interconnects?
These would be very interesting for low-latency network-heavy applications if each machine had a 1gbps latency-optimized network connection to the core switch wherever they're hosted. Virtualization might be fine from a throughput POV but I've seen hypervisors impose a fair amount of latency "jitter" on heavily loaded hosts. It's one of the reasons why bare metal servers can be better. I'm thinking core network router functions, certain kinds of games, etc.
Another area where I can see this excelling is high security applications, like having a cloud node that is in charge of signing things with very protected secret keys like some kind of certificate authority. Virtualization has a pretty good security record, but for high-paranoia applications bare metal is better. If you offered the ability to upload your own pre-encrypted image this would be very interesting. Not quite as good as homomorphic encryption, but that's not quite "there" yet -- still too slow to be usable. At the very least you'd have to crack into the hardware and dump the RAM to break into a system and steal a key.
Finally, make stability a high priority. With low power, low heat dissipation, dedicated hardware, and solid state everything you should have an easier path to cheaper "many nines" high-reliability service. That kind of thing is kind of expensive right now in the hosting world so you'd have some pricing power there.
/shameless plug:
ZeroTier One, a network virtualization engine for inter-container and inter-VM networking as well as VPN access, supports 32-bit ARM/Linux as an officially supported platform:
I decided to create an official ARM build and support that platform since there were so many users on Raspberry Pi and similar, but as far as I know these binaries will run on this architecture. I signed up for a preview of Online.Net so I will test once I have a "box." :)
EDIT:
Tested with your free trial via the web terminal, and the ARM build from the above download link works flawlessly as long as you "modprobe tun" first:
the $1.99/month offer was just on the website for a few days ;) (it was a special/crazy offer with a limited stock of servers, something like ~2k servers iirc so it's no longer available, google for "dedibox kidechire")
