Comments Locked

13 Comments

Back to Article

  • FunBunny2 - Thursday, July 28, 2011 - link

    I recall that Fusion-io is said to sell a considerable portion of its output to Facebook. It would be interesting to know how they're being used: cache or primary storage.
  • Atom2 - Thursday, July 28, 2011 - link

    For computing resources equal to hardware which can be hired on internet for about 1000 USD of rent per month, the cloud services charge roughly 10 000 USD +. With all this sharing and increased use of resources, one would expect the prices would be lower if 10 people share the same server rather than higher. In that sense the cloud services seem to ride on a hype, but it is hard to imagine a drop in price by 10x in order to become commercially viable in the future. Why are current cloud prices so far out of all proportions?
  • alent1234 - Friday, July 29, 2011 - link

    the economics only make sense for smaller companies

    this year we bought some new servers. dual 5650 xeons, 72GB RAM, 4 hour warranty, etc. $15000 per server. Amazon doesn't have these specs yet and if they did it would cost you a lot more money. say you buy 3TB of storage for a big database that doesn't need screaming I/O. it's $600 for a 500GB SAS drive and you buy 5 or 6 of them. so your total server cost is less than $20,000. you run one server and back it up. if it breaks you wait for HP to come and fix it.

    if this was amazon or another cloud provider they would have to have the resources for this on at least 2 servers because if one dies it has to fail over. that means they have to buy more hardware than you do. and if you buy your regular HP branded enterprise drives then the cloud guys are buying SAN storage which is a lot more expensive for faster failover.

    this is why they aren't cheaper. it only makes sense for smaller companies who don't have a lot of cash to do this since the smaller payments are easier to handle. if they grow then they will buy their own hardware.
  • Guspaz - Friday, July 29, 2011 - link

    That's not really what EC2 is for. You tend not to buy a small number of huge nodes; EC2 nodes are far less powerful than equivalent nodes from their competition (like Linode) anyhow. Nor are you supposed to be caring about hardware warranties, or even the disk configuration. With EC2, the application should be designed to scale horizontally on many relatievly small instances, and hardware failures should not be handled by trying to replace a machine in a certain amount of time, but by simply spinning up a new instance to replace it.
  • bobbozzo - Thursday, July 28, 2011 - link

    accross
    fondations
  • Ryan Smith - Thursday, July 28, 2011 - link

    Fixed. Thanks.
  • DriftEJ20 - Thursday, July 28, 2011 - link

    The spambots are starting to get pretty bad :-[
    Something tells me the majority of Anandtech readers aren't fiending for knockoff Nike's.

    I can't even imagine how many shell casings could stay visible in an FPS with 512GB of RAM. I enjoyed seeing what the Facebook dataroom looks like, thanks :]
  • awaken688 - Friday, July 29, 2011 - link

    I'm not even in the world of cloud computing and found this very interesting. I'm definitely looking forward to more of these.
  • seanp789 - Friday, July 29, 2011 - link

    I think there is a misunderstanding on how MySQL and Cassandra are related. Cassandra is not a management system for MySql.

    MySql - Relational Database
    Cassandra - Distributed Key-Value Store (NoSql)

    These are 2 completely independent types of data stores with very different programming models.
  • mikhailgarber - Friday, July 29, 2011 - link

    Another article conveniently ignoring the difference between "real" databases and noSQL. There is a reason why relational databases are difficult to scale horizontally. This is the price to pay to store your data in highly consistent, predictable manner, with referential integrity and transactions. Cassandra et al are designed to scale schema-less, eventually consistent, non-durable data. Would you like your financial data to be stored as reliably as your Facebook comments? You can't compare the two systems directly even worse is to pretend that NoSQL is somehow more advanced. It is different.
  • KentState - Sunday, July 31, 2011 - link

    Exactly. I think it's funny how the article quickly glosses over how vastly different noSQL and a RDMS are. Companies like FB and Amazon still use relational databases for systems like user accounts, content and fulfillment. Even FB has had a hard time using Cassandra for much else besides comments.
  • mike8675309 - Friday, July 29, 2011 - link

    A great article which highlights the fact that you don't get to some of these solutions by just slapping mysql or SQL Server on a box and sticking it in the cloud.
  • JoeTF - Sunday, July 31, 2011 - link

    Really, those 'experts' have not answered a single question posed to them.

    Guy asks about storage requirements of Google cloud, and answer is all about Facebook and their CPU use. Idiot answering it hasn't even mention words "storage" or "Google" in his answer.

    Fucking answer bot would have done better.

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now