All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
The KiloServe Model
raindog308
Administrator, Veteran
With all this talk of KS recently...
I seem to recall they were using 48-core AMD CPUs. I don't remember what the storage was. I know SuperMicro makes 96-core configs, too.
I wonder if it would be interesting to have a "completely dedicated core" model. I don't run a VPS company so I don't know what would be needed underneath to make that work (if you can pin a core to particular VPS - I know you can with VMware but I'm not sure about Xen/KVM/etc.) Say you charge $7/month for 1 CPU completely dedicated to you, plus some amount of RAM, disk, bandwidth. To get sufficient I/O, perhaps a mix of SSD and HD. If the CPU isn't in use by the customer who "owns" it, it's sitting idle.
I guess it depends on what the virt software can do.
My thought was to offer fixed units - $7 per CPU with accompanying ram, disk. Customers buy by the CPU, and you're getting a nearly dedicated server. You want a bigger one, you buy another unit which comes with another CPU/ram/disk.
I don't know if 47 or 95 (leaving one for the underlying virt OS) VPSes at $7 per CPU would be profitable.
Just thinking out loud. Don't have the spare $10K or 20K to start a VPS company at the moment :-)
Comments
We have been considering something like this, however it would be nowhere near LEB pricing as we would be hosting four "quarters" per physical machine. Something like this is what we had planned:
4GB RAM
60GB SSD Storage
1x Dedicated 3.3GHz vCPU
2.5TB Data Transfer (IN/OUT)
100Mbit Full-Duplex Connection
Up to 7 free IPv4 addresses (With justifcation)
Up to 16 free Ipv6 addresses (Without justification)
Permanent KVM over IP access with virtual media support
£35.00/pcm
So pretty much like a VDS, I like the idea.
I had a discussion about this here: http://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/6566/quarter-server-vetting
It degraded into "BUT OVH IS CHEAPER" as usual despite getting more resources and not being in France...
We grabbed the domain quarterservers.com as well :P
AMD's 64 core can be done cheaply, the problem is with the setup as a whole. SM 2U 6272x4 (16x4 core) + 128GB RAM can be done for like 6-7K without drives and raid controller. The drives and the raid is the killer. To run 63 VMs that are expected to basically "rape" the CPU, IO needs to be sustained, which means either SSDs or lots of drives. It gets expensive very quickly in order to scale IO to 63 VMs. 6x 480GB SSD + RAID card would set you back 5K, almost 80% the cost of the server itself. If using hard drives, probably need 16 drives on RAID10 to sustain that kind of IOPS, which probably costs about the same. At 12K USD per server, with 12 months ROI you need to make $1000/month excluding running costs. 143 servers to ROI in 12 months assuming colocation+bw is free.
BlueVM I believe offers quarter servers, Ash's deal doesn't look too bad as well, and in worse case anything fails you just have 4 customers to deal with, instead of 63.
How would you split IPMI to 4 clients?
Will each one have access to the physical node?
(Unless this is another way of saying "KVM Virtualization" :P )
You got it sir
There's a shoe for every foot.
I like the quarter server model, and while this theory may be more economical in terms of getting the most out of physical space, I also worry about bottleneck at various IO points. A dedicated CPU carries with it the implication that you can push more, but sharing the system with that many people would likely require the same types of limits that a shared CPU OpenVZ node would. I'm sure 4U node packed with SSDs and maybe even splitting the traffic across two NICs would do the job though.
Quite the investment.
Haven't used one, but BlueVM have been doing quarter/half servers for a while =o
Thanks.
Yes. We do quarter servers/semi-dedicated in KVM wrappers. Which is essentially a dedicated server with a max of 3 others on it. Meaning all the resources can only be used by you.