I'm David Berlind with ZDNet and today I'm going to answerthe question of whether or not it's time to throw away your servers. What Imean by that is your physical servers.
Now maybe you're one of those people who figured out thatit's a good time to outsource the physical servers that you once had in yourdata center to some hosting company that does it for you in their data center.Of course the benefits of this are if you're going to run your servers and oneof them goes down or two of them go down, or you have a natural disaster, usuallywhen you outsource it to a hosting company, they make sure that these thingsare constantly running.
They manage them for you in a way that your servers arealways reliable. But at the end of the day, you are still running physicalservers.
Now the question is whether you should take it to a wholeother level when it comes to outsourcing your servers and going to somethingcalled the Elastic Computing Cloud, otherwise known as EC2 from Amazon. Nowwhat's cool about the EC2 or Elastic Computing Cloud is that these servers areactually virtualized in this cloud. There are no real physical machines,they're spread out across a data center that Amazon runs of multiple machines,but they're all virtualized in a way that through a series of APIs that a programmercan access, it can launch and it can also take down these machines at will.
Now why would this be of use to anybody, to be able tolaunch machines and take them down at any time? Well, for starters, if you needthree systems during Christmas but you only need two on the other parts of theyear, you can run three systems during Christmas and through the API turn offone of them, and you don't have to pay for it. Part of the real advantage ofEC2 is that you only pay for what you take.
In addition to the benefit of being able to launch and bringdown computers at whim and also pay as you go, there's another big advantage tothe cost of Amazon's EC2 service.
First, let's look at what it costs to normally run through atypical hosting business, and I'll use my events company as an example. Todaywe pay for servers, we have two servers, and it costs us $350 a month with ourserver hosting company. So if we look at 350 times 12, that gets us to $4,200per year per server. We have two servers, we multiply that times two, and thatgets us to $8,400 per year for server hosting. Now that's a lot of money butit's also peace of mind. After all, I don't have to worry about keeping thoseservers up and running, that's somebody else's headache and we're willing to paygood money for that.
Now let's see what it would cost me if I decided to wipe outthe computers that I was using in my data center hosting company and used oneof the EC2 virtual machines on Amazon's Cloud. We'll go over here and do someinteresting Math and you'll see that there are some really key cost benefits togoing that route.
So let's say we take 365 days a year times 24 hours a day:that gives us 8,760 hours per year of hosting. Now Amazon charges 10 cents perhour for a machine that's the equivalent of a 1.7Ghz X86 box with 1.75Gb RAMand 160Gb of local disk space, for a total of 8,760 hours per year, if wemultiply that times 10 that gets us to $876 per year to run one server.
You toss in the number two, because we're running twoservers, and that gets us to $1,752 per year to run two servers for the entireyear, and you put that up against $8,400 and now just for a small business likemine, we're talking about major savings. That's a huge difference.
What if you're running 50 or 100 servers, and what if you'rebringing them up and bringing them down as you need them? Then you really cansee some incredible benefits.
All of this, though, is required through Amazon's API webservices that developers normally access, so it's not exactly the same as goingto a hosting company: there are some challenges in making it run in this fashion.But nevertheless, the revolution is underway. I think it's soon going to betime for you to throw away your servers and move into the virtual world likeAmazon's EC2.
For ZDNet, I'm David Berlind.
