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US based Raspberry PI Colo (Poll)
MarkTurner
Member
in General
This is a follow on from my posting on EDIS's topic earlier, rather than hijack their topic I wanted to move this to a separate one.
We're not offering this service, but just seeing whether there is interest for a product like this. We did something similar in Atlanta and Los Angeles for Mac Minis, Raspberry PIs could be an extension of that
General poll
- Would you prefer to buy a preinstalled or colo your own RPI?131 votes
- Ship and Colo27.48%
- Buy preinstalled72.52%
- What would your target price be?131 votes
- $2/month70.99%
- $5/month20.61%
- $7/month8.40%
- What bandwidth would you expect included131 votes
- 100GB39.69%
- 250GB19.85%
- 500GB40.46%
- When would you want to do colo/buy an RPI?131 votes
- This month44.27%
- 1-3 months27.48%
- Unknown28.24%
Comments
Tell me where to sign up
I had started a thread about a month ago looking for this service
http://lowendtalk.com/discussion/16524/raspberry-pi-colocation-in-usa#latest
@mitpatterson - the only issue I can see is how to rack them up. There don't seem to be any good rackmount solutions for bulk. I've seen a few that rack up 2 units or 4 units in 1U but we need to be doing about 200 per rack to make it interesting.
For the Atom servers we offer, we have a cradle that lets us mount 8 in 4U, so we can get 160 servers per rack. 80 at the front and 80 at the back; that sort of density just about works.
If this were to be viable then we'd need to be able to bill about $2k/month - so at $2/unit, we'd about 1000 customers, $5/month - 400, $7/month - 285.
I've seen a few higher density, maybe 8 per 1u? Maybe see what EDIS is doing or the other places that do free/low cost pi colo
@MarkTurner buy the know how from @William
@rds100 there are plenty of ways to do it. But it needs to be something that can scale rather than just row upon row of PSUs plugged in.
Right now, we need to see whether there is interest. There is no guarantee it will go beyond that. Our company is very difficult to get a product line approved thats why we have stuck to single portfolio of servers, they come preconfigured, they get racked and then rented.
@mitpatterson: Better not to send your own equipment to anything that is owned by Yomura. They will steal your equipment and money like they did from many, including me, back in 2010. Considering Steve is still the manager, it looks like nothing has changed. Stay away from this company.
@iKocka - you were asked twice for your email address by PM so I could see the history of your allegations. If you're going to make the accusation, then lets get to the bottom of it.
@iKocka - I was just told who you are, going back to 2009, I dont see any orders in that name or the email address for Delimiter. Maybe you signed up with a fake name or different email address?
@MarkTurner: You can ask as many times as you want, but I'm not going to give it to you. I didn't get what I have paid for, opened a support ticket, waited for reply for days and then opened Paypal dispute. In less than 15 minutes somebody replied with a made up story and escalated it without giving me chance to fight back. Your company seems to be very good at ignoring customers. A few days later Delimiter's Paypal account has been blocked, which I proved with the e-mail copy in the other thread. So stop pretending that nothing has happened, because you scammed many people for a lot of money. There is more than enough evidence on other forums such as WHT to confirm my allegations.
@iKocka - so in that case, there is no proof of your allegation. I have been given your name and email by another person here. Your name and email doesn't appear on Delimiter.
So lets leave it like this - you were never a Delimiter customer, you're just trying to get attention.
Before anyone jumps on my comment - there are without question real customers who had issues with Delimiter. But this particular guy doesn't check out.
Now back to the Raspberry PI poll
lego is the solution
I saw that - it was awesome. But not sure we'd be able to do that. We could build the whole rack out of lego. Not sure the fire marshal would approve though.
I have a kid with many of those laying around doing nothing!
Put em in the back, he'll never know.
@iKocka While I appreciate the "warning" as @MarkTurner has said you have provided no proof of these allegations. In addition the pie is less than $40, if it ran off its not the end of the world. Now a several hundred or thousand dollar server would be a different story. In addition it looks like your account has been mostly dormant since May and then all of sudden becomes active again with allegations in this thread and another, That alone seems odd.
Wrong tread
1. Off-Topic:
I always wonder why people have to jump in every thread and express their dislike about LET/LEB. Yet, they stay here. Maybe they have too much time. Or they don't realise that this is just a random website. It's just a tab in your browser, just some pixels on your screen. If you don't like it, move on. Close the tab. Make your own.
This website is owned by somebody else. He is not a state nor a club. It doesn't matter who he is. It's private property. And in most states of the world people have fought decades that private property stays private. And private property really means what it says: it means that the owner can do whatever he wants with it. Unless it's a state-owned property, the owner can use it how he likes (in-line with the respective law), he can convert it, close it down, sell it. Unless you are bound by a contract to the owner, there is simply no right you can claim. So use the site as a random source of information or don't.
But jumping on threads and expressing your dislike about the site is anything but cool. It's simply lame and annoying for those who know how to get along with somebodies else property and the internet.
2. On-Topic:
The easiest way would be to get hold of standard 1U-plates. Putting several standard-powered USB-hubs in it and align all the RPis on the front for network access. The good thing about a standard 1U-plate is that you can customize the inner layout. RPi don't need much cooling, natural air-flow is enough. There are even some powered-USB-hubs that have power-switches for each USB-port. You can even find an arduino-hack where you can switch the USB-power of connected RPis on and off from a browser. So you could even provide a hard-reset without manual intervention once a RPi freezes.
I am interested in a Rpi colocation service. Price/performance ratio is not competitive with a VPS, but it could be a good off site backup solution, maybe with an external high capacity USB drive. Data will be on dedicated, private, non shared hardware that is hopefully cheap to ship. Il will avoid the pitfall of excessive restore time
of typical web based backup solution. The price of shipping back the Rpi and/or drive should be known in advance, of course.
Existing commercial comparable "disaster recovery with shipping" solutions are expensive:
Backblaze asks for $189 for a 3 Tb drive shipping, on top of the regular subscription.
Amazon asks for $80 per drive + shipping costs + s3 service fees + the cost of drive itself.
exchanging a drive or tape cartridge on a dedicated server means remote hand fees, plus all the costs of a dedicated server.
I believe that a properly managed Rpi-based solution could be significantly more affordable. In the range of $10/month maybe, plus the one-off low purchase cost of Rpi and USB drive.
Regarding your hypotetical scenario for $2 colocation price at 1000 RPI per rack: it will not happen. A single Rpi draws between 1 and 5 watts of power. You will have to put a 48 port switch and 48 RPi on each 1U rack plate (no easy feat), then draw up to 10 Kw of heat out of this contraption. The $5/month price point with 400 RPI per rack is more plausible to achieve with off-the-shelf components, and will still involve a non trivial customization effort.
huh? Thats by far not what we do - We have remotereboot and centralized PSUs...
@William - I was not inferring you did. But have seen plenty that just do that.
I've never really understood why there is a market for raspberry PI hosting, I mean why not just host it at your house, it takes barely any power
Some countries don't have 24/7 Internet connection, not to mention how slow the connection is.
It doesn't just need power, it also needs network connection. Do you have 100Mbit Internet at home? May be you do, but most people don't.
Put him to work building you a lego rack.
What's the point honestly? I can get a much more powerful VPS for that price.
How much traffic can you push through one of them anyways?
This is the iperf benchmark (bidirectional transfer on TCP) on two RPi connected to the same LAN segment:
This is the same benchmark, two RPi connected over a fiber WAN link capped at 20 Mbits/sec on the router Vlan:
Usb port and ethernet interface are connected to the same Usb root hub inside the RPi system on chip controller: network speed is reduced while reading/writing to the USB disk.
You might have noticed that we're here on LowEndTalk. A place where people try to get the most out of the smallest. Just to be able to buy something big is not the topic here.
@mitpatterson @skagerrak @pcan - I got approval to pilot this in Atlanta. The site manager is a bit of Raspberry PI aficionado so very interested to do something.
To make this fly, we need to be billing $5/month and will include 100Mbps port, 320GB traffic in the bundle.
You can't order this yet, it needs to be 'productised' but green light for a 12 month pilot.
I will update this thread once there is something concrete, but it will happen in Mid January I expect.
I submitted my opinion to the poll but i still think selling vps is more profitable and clients gets more resources with vps even though resources might be shared.