Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
> Inside Second Life's Data Centers
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
>| Second Life runs on 2,000 Intel and AMD servers in two co-location
>| facilities in San Francisco and Dallas. The company has a commitment
>| to open source, with servers running Debian Linux and the MySQL
>| database. Linden Lab chose Debian Linux because the software is
>| suited to scaling massively with a small IT staff, said Linden
>| Lab CTO Cory Ondrejka.
> `----
>
> http://informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=197800179
>
Not bad - 100,000 peak capacity using 2,000 servers, 50 users/machine.
If each machine is around 2 GHz-ish, then we're looking at 40 MHz of
processing cycles per user (ish). Accepting, of course, that there'll
be overheads and so on.
Also, the cost of build can be estimated, too. If we said about
$1,000/blade, 20% of that for storage, 10% for chassis and networking,
and a man-day to build and install the blade & its software, then you're
looking at $2.5M in hardware, and 2,000 man-days to build, or about 10
man-years, or 10 people for 1 year, and so on. Say each person costs
$150,000 pa on average, then your final bill looks like:
$2.5M capex
$1.5M opex for year one. Not so bad.
If you grow at 20%/year in users, then you'll need to invest:
$0.5M capex/pa and
$0.3M opex/pa on build plus whatever the maintenance costs are,
although I would imagine that in reality, your 10 people would need to
keep going, so your real opex bill would be $0.5M but growing at 20% per
year, and your Opex would be $1.5M, and probably grow at 20% per year,
too.
So, $4M in year 1, $2M in year 2, $2.1M in year 3, $2.2M yr 4 and $2.4M
in yr 5. Total bill for trading for 5 years is $12.7M.
So, how can you get revenues over that period which can at least help
the business break even? You need an income of about $2.5M per annum,
which is no small cost.
How could you get the costs down? If you use off the shelf cheap
computers, your blade and storage costs could be reduced massively, at
the risk of system failures, but let's say you did, then you're looking
at about 40% of the original capex costs, which will get you down to
maybe $1.65M pa. To get it any less you need to pay your people less
or just have fewer of them. If you could do it with 5 people, *and* use
cheap servers, you'd be looking at $0.85M pa, so a revenue of $1M pa
would be healthy, at least.
Remarks welcome!
--
| Mark Kent -- mark at ellandroad dot demon dot co dot uk |
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