[9294] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Cost vs benefit of internet services
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Edward Vielmetti)
Tue Dec 28 00:46:53 1993
Date: Tue, 28 Dec 93 00:46 EST
From: emv@garnet.msen.com (Edward Vielmetti)
To: com-priv@uu.psi.com
some small notes
TCP/IP service belongs in dedicated equipment (smart terminal
servers), not at the host. Good servers that do slip and ppp
run about $75-$100 per port plus the cost of course of your modems.
A dialup shell account user needs about a mip of processor and
about a megabyte of memory. (If you recall the old "3M" workstation,
the "megapixel" they already have.) A similar slip or ppp user
will require perhaps oh a third of that since most of the user
interface code runs on their own box. You can route a *lot*
of mail-only traffic with a small fraction of that per concurrent
user equivalent.
: Barry, if your comment above is correct, then your hardware costs nerly
: $2,000 per user for a maximum number of users (150 users logged in to a
: system costing more than $250,000). If that's correct, than you or your
: users would almost be better off buying a 386 clone with hard drive, modem,
: and monitor from Price Club (for less than $2,000) than that big chunk of
: iron :-)
The $2000 systems have ISA bus (yuck) and indifferent I/O. If you
make it instead a $8000 system with a reasonable bus and good I/O
controllers and BSDI you can easily support 30 users, maybe 40.
Just make sure you keep adding memory so that you don't start to
swap.
Can you build a cluster of these that will support 150 users? I
certainly think so, at least for $250K, probably for a fraction
of that.
Beware the killer micros,
Edward Vielmetti, vice president for research, Msen Inc. emv@Msen.com
Msen Inc., 320 Miller, Ann Arbor MI 48103 +1 313 998 4562 (fax: 998 4563)
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