Comment by AgentK20 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AgentK20 | Hacker News Reader

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I'm curious as to the specific reasoning behind perpetually pushing towards higher per-machine bandwidth. Is it primarily backed by squeezing more usefulness (and therefore decreasing costs elsewhere) out of existing hardware, or is it more of a "Hey let's try and do this" exercise?

Reason I say is that for most smaller operations I'd assume that you'd be more cost effective with dev time to just throw a few more servers at the problem than to go through all the effort to squeeze a few more percentage points of efficiency out of hardware, although I suppose when you're operating at that scale a 1% efficiency gain is enough to justify an entire developer's salary.

Because it is fun! But the real answer is: To improve density. Eg, less networking, less power and less cooling and rack space.

My understanding is that IX interconnects at 40Gb/s cost not much less than interconnects at 100Gb/s. And if we're going to connect a machine at 100Gb/s anyway, it is better to be running it at 100Gb/s than 50 or 60Gb/s. We need fewer network ports.

These OC appliances are deployed in ISP racks, and based on the specs they A) aren't cheap to make and B) are probably 4U based on the support of 44 SATA SSD's. I don't work for Netflix or an ISP, but part of the goal is to probably reduce the total expense (since they just GIVE these to ISP's who have enough Netflix traffic) as well as minimize the footprint. A single 100Gbe connection could easily plug right into an ISP's core router or distribution switch and take up minimal space in a datacenter, but you'd need to eat 3 40Gbe ports to get the same performance and X*2U amount of extra rack space to give a horizontal solution.

When you pass, say, $100k/m, in OpEx be it cloud, colo, whatever it's time to start thinking about this. I'd say the problem is the exact opposite: many top tech businesses have done an abysmal shareholder value thing by ignoring cloud/server sprawl.. tech leadership deficit.

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