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Comment by RyanKearney | Hacker News Reader

I was interested up until I read this little number in the newsletter I got from them:

>In addition to 96GB of RAM, each of these servers contain 32 cores (at 2.0GHZ each, 64.0GHZ total), writes at over 3 Gbit/s and reads at over 4 Gbits/s.

You would think a company like Storm would know you don't just add up the cores to get 64Ghz.

Also, for what it's worth, we just ordered 3 physical servers from Dell, 96GB of RAM each, dual xeons for a total of 32 cores, and dual 10Gbps fiber channels to hook up to our SAN. So yeah, the price seems pretty high...

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I've run raytracing clusters with 4000 cores. It basically scales linearly. So for this task, or any massively parallel compute-bound task, you pretty much can just add up the cores.

Also, I would rent them by the hour, because if a service has 500 machines available right now, I can get the job done in an hour, instead of 500 hours. Or 10 hours instead of 7 months.

Not something I can do with purchased hardware.

For pay by the hour services where you can scale up a ton of instances, then destroy them when you're done and only pay for time used, then yeah it's more cost effective to do it that way. However, this is about a monthly payment of nearly $1000 for a server you're supposed to have for a long time (there's no order it for 3 hours, then kill it and only pay for 3 hours of time used). If we were comparing EC2 instances to purchased hardware then yeah, that argument would be better suited.

I don't think that's right. Their website says this:

    For your convenience, all Storm on Demand services are 
    billed hourly. This flexibility allows you to create and 
    destroy Storm Servers as you need them, and only pay for 
    the time you need.

https://www.stormondemand.com/servers/whystorm.html

It would appear you can bring up a server for 3 hours, and just pay for that.

Ah, I knew they offered pay as you go (I tried them out before) but I assumed this was a sort of "dedicated only" server type that required you to pay monthly since I didn't see the hourly rate anywhere, just "$xxx / month".

Can you point to the product page at Dell, and give an idea of the price?

IIRC our R610's (96GB, 12 Cores @ 3GHz) were around $7K a piece.

256GB/32 Core/1.8GHz R910s are around $22K last I looked. This stuff really is stupid cheap in comparison to renting.

You'd need to talk to a Sales person to get that kind of pricing, but the general rule is to discount MSRP by at least 30% when you're working with a major vendor.

Very helpful. Thanks!

I just ordered a 32GB, 2x4-core, 4x600GB velociraptor machine for $5000. Add the fibre channel and extra RAM and I bet it cost $7-9000 per box.

Unfortunately I can't, since I wasn't the one that wrote up the PO for it. I just asked how much the equipment cost I had to install out of curiosity.

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