[3059] in SIPB-AFS-requests
FY98 budgeting and AFS
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Wed Jul 15 13:29:24 1998
Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1998 13:29:21 -0400
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: sipb-machine-room@MIT.EDU, sipb-afsreq@MIT.EDU
(Nothing contained below is urgent, but please do take a look at the
bullet points at the bottom if you don't have time to read the whole
thing.)
No one is asking us to draw up an FY98 budget yet, but I want to talk
about it now because of AFS spending. So far we're looking at
something like:
UPS equipment $5-7K
Shelving units probably less than $5K
Backup equipment unknown
News unknown; guess $10-15K
RTFM et al unknown, probably not very high
WWW unknown
The $10-15K guess for news is based on the hypothesis that we would
get a second processor for new-beacon and SCSI controllers and disk
units for new-bed. Backup equipment hasn't been discussed yet, but
given a 36GB expansion of the SIPB cell this summer (and possibly a
~72GB expansion later this year) we may need to buy better backup
equipment.
I mainly want to talk about AFS right now. ASO has recently qualified
some 72GB Box Hill RAID units, which cost about $23,000 apiece. I
think it would make our cell easier to manage if we started to
transition to these units instead of maintaining a plethora of small,
differently-sized disks. And, of course, RAID units would make the
cell a lot more reliable.
A bottom-of-the-line Sun Ultra 30 (250MHz, 128MB, 4GB internal disk)
to host such a beast would cost us about $8K, including about $400 for
a differential SCSI adaptor. (/mit/ghudson/tmp/sunws.ps has the
current price workstation price list; class A carries an expected 45%
discount; a 300Mhz machine would cost us about $10K.) We could
conceivably run one of these RAID units on a Sparc 5 (costing only
about $600 to get an SBus adaptor), but Box Hill doesn't recommend
that according to Mike, so there might be loading issues.
So, AFS spending could conceivably happen at a variety of levels:
$24K One RAID unit, one SBus controller for sparc 5
$31K One RAID unit, one Ultra 30
$62K Two RAID units, two Ultra 30s
$93K Three RAID units, three Ultra 30s
With some in-betweens possible, or increases if we get spiffier Ultra
30s. So from my point of view, the upper bound on our desired AFS
spending is about $100K, which is through the roof compared to
previous years.
So I would like to:
* Get opinions from AFS maintainers about buying RAID units.
Does anyone think it's a bad idea? Do we want to restrict
ourselves to only one of them this year (even if we don't
have to for financial reasons) because they're new?
* Find out if any other services (especially WWW) expect to
want to make major expenditures during FY98.
* Get an idea from IS as to what the pushback will be on
SIPB's spending. I'm guessing that we can get away with
$31K of AFS spending (given that we spent more than that on
news last year) but not $93K. But if $62K is possible, I'd
like to know about it.
My guess is that given usenet expenditures, we will want to aim for
the $31K figure.
