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Comment by idlewords | Hacker News Reader

All the advantages of a dedicated server without the hassle of saving tons of money.

Many of our customers have asked for this feature so that they can run software that is licensed for a particular piece of actual hardware.

To think of it another way, smaller companies might save money by buying bare metal and renting colo space. But larger companies would spend more just managing the separate bill for the colo, not to mention the logistics of another datacenter.

Given that there is a 10x price difference in some cases, I would doubt this. The bigger a company is, the more sense colo or dedicated makes.

You don't have to manage a datacenter just because you don't go for Amazon. There's tons of companies that will do it for you, at various levels. You want colo space, nothing more ? Fine. You want dedi hosts with a few of your own machines in between ? No problems. On top of that, a lot of dedicated server companies will have spare instance so spinning up new devices is certainly easy enough. Feel free to contact me if you need solutions like this.

I think there's one huge advantage of Amazon : management effectively doesn't get to set policy on the datacenter, so they don't get to screw it up. An internal company department would use something like VMWare and won't let you spin something up without endless approvals, whereas Amazon treats you like a customer.

So it is a feature designed for a silly license scheme?

I don't mean this to sound condescending, but you have a lot to learn about software licensing.

There are many software packages that are licensed to an individual peice of hardware. Tied to that are USB authentication dongles, and even parallel port dongles for some old school commercial software.

That sounds like a silly license scheme to me.

Yep, you sounded condescending.

I think after 25 years in the industry I know a lot about software licensing. Enough to know that just because lots of software packages are licensed that way doesn't change the fact that they are silly.

Silly license schemes are annoyingly common and being able to deal with silly license schemes is a massive killer feature for very many people.

Could you list some examples?

Many Oracle products must be licensed for all the physical hardware they run on, irrespective of VMs (unless you're running OracleVM).

Their example dedicated host adds up to $2'226 per month - had a quick calc on the retail HW cost for a machine like this - should not be more than $6.5k with 2 * E5-2670 v3 12 cores.

What I understand so far - it is physically bundling a fixed amount of virtual machines to a physical host - in the example "dedicated host" 22 * m4.large.

Bundling your virtual machine to one or a series of physical hosts / on the same network segment is a service you can have from quite a few hosting providers (if you ask).

If you opt for a solution like this, it is also most likely that you will run an enterprise scale solution and you will do so for quite some time - at least 6 months upwards.

Keeping that in mind together with a lifetime of at least 2 years for such HW, you will be paying 8 times the HW cost for a 2y lifetime for a management layer (storage / connectivity you pay per GB with EC2).

I guess everybody will have to see how this fits into their business model for non volatile / predictable resource demand or a set of when physical iron might be a better choice (colo or rent).

What if the license of the software you want to run is 100k per physical host? Then being able to run 2 or 4 instances on the same physical host makes the $2226 cost pretty insignificant.

If you have software that costs that much, you will want to run it on hardware optimized for that software. (Does it want lots of GPU cores? I/O? Raw computrons? Does it prefer more cores or more GHz/core?) Unless Amazon happens to have exactly what you want available, you'll be better off putting it in a lab or datacenter.

Maybe, maybe not. Just because software cost a lot does not mean it is super high performance. Some is awful php strung together hacks, but if it does what a customer wants - it may be worth 100k to them.

You are looking at their on-demand rates, which means no commitment. You can do this for a month or even a few days. If you know you will need infra for 1 year or more you can use reserved rates. Right now those are not yet publicly available for Dedicated Instances, although the post mentions you can contact them if you want early access. With reserved rates the price should be 70% less for a 3 year commitment (speculating based on the post). A huge difference.

But I can still for most things get lower prices on a month by month basis than the price a 3 year commitment to Amazon gets you. And that's before paying their outright extortionate bandwidth prices.

If you have to hire an extra person to manage the new hardware, then you aren't saving money.

wake up

In my experience, moving people off EC2 cuts down on the ops time they need, it doesn't increase it.

For one of my clients that I manage multiple racks in two different locations for with 150+ VMs, "managing the hardware" comes out to about 1-2 days a year in aggregate to bring new hardware in and wire it up (most of that is travel) + 20-30 minutes to investigate the very few issues we can't diagnose and fix via IPMI. I pop a server in, attaches power and ethernet, checks that the IPMI is reachable and that it sees the PXE server, and beyond that "managing the hardware" comes to yanking the occasional dead harddrive and inserting a new one, and ever now and again to confirm a server is dead.

Meanwhile with EC2 I see most of the same non-hardware issues (e.g. kernel panic, applications occasionally spinning out of control and taking a server down) that are just as trivial to handle via IPMI as via the EC2 console, but we also have to engineer around things like the lack of solid, stable, directly attached RAID arrays, which we don't need to worry about with the bare metal servers.

And no, EBS does not count - the number of times volumes have gotten stuck in attached state on a failed instance terrifies me. It also can't in any way match directly attached SSD RAID setups for performance which is another reason why it ends up taking more ops time: You end up with setups that simply take more vms to compensate for platform limitations.

I absolutely think EC2 is great for things like large batch jobs etc. where your requirements vary wildly, but most people don't even have enough daily variance for that to get anywhere near compensating for the cost of EC2 (and nothing stops you from deploying hybrid approaches - in fact I'm working on hybrid approaches mixing bare metal servers with EC2 to handle batch jobs and load spikes now)

Except, of course, that for anything important you'll want redundancy and failover in the face of hardware failure, so you'll need two of those $6.5k servers.

The same (kind of specious) argument applies to the AWS case.

Maybe - I have a number of services that can tolerate a small amount of downtime if they fail, during which I would spin up a replacement AWS server. 99% of the time I'm only paying for the one machine that's running. These would all need dedicated hardware failovers if they weren't hosted in AWS (the same system does have hardware components, and they either have redundant failovers that are mostly idle, or for clusters we run at 66% capacity to allow for failure. Either way, it's often not true that one hardware instance can be substituted for one AWS instance, unless you don't care about long downtime when the hardware fails).

Are there any good, dependable, modern alternatives if you don't want to deal with the hardware, and also don't need "scale on demand"? The only name I know is SoftLayer, which is certainly not cheap.

Hetzner.de is a good place to rent a dedicated machine that is fairly configurable.

I know Hetzner, but I didn't think they had any datacenters in the US.

I don't believe they do. If you want a US datacenter, consider LeaseWeb. They're a Dutch company but offer servers in DC and San Jose.

Looks alright, but their server selection is a bit limited (and hard to navigate, just a big list that doesn't even filter properly).

For example, if I want 128GB RAM and SSD disks, their prices suddenly go up to thousands of dollars per month because they're all some kind of beefy Dell or HP, whereas Hetzner can give me a single-processor, 6-core Xeon E5-1650 3.4GHz + 128GB RAM + 960GB SSD for $123/mo. LeaseWeb has cheaper SuperMicros, but they either max out at 32GB, or they don't have SATA disks. They're skewed very differently: With Hetzner you can't pick "less RAM, lots of CPUs" and LeaseWeb doesn't have "lots of RAM, fewer CPUs, SSDs".

A vendor like this needs to offer a much wider range of specs to be worth investing one's entire infrastructure in, to be honest.

I thought we were talking about "where do I get a dedicated server"? If you're serious about moving your entire infrastructure onto dedicated hosting, you have to pick up the phone and negotiate a deal. The off-the-shelf options are pretty limited, as you point out.

Is that entirely true, though? I'm too small a fish to be in the position to negotiate much. And besides, at my scale, there's no reason "negotiation" can't be expressed as simple mechanical rules (fixed-length contracts, volume discounts, usage tiers, etc.). Off the shelf is what I want, not some bullshit corporate sales thing.

There's thousands of choices, most have been in business since before AWS has existed, and almost all of them will give you much better (2x-16x) bang for your money (Even on a small order, you can (or could) negotiate SoftLayer's down by ~50%).

Ones that I'm personally familiar with: Hivelocity in Florida ReliableSite in NY WebNX in LA 100TB (a SL reseller in some locations, and they own their own in others) OVH (lower quality, lower price, great for various workloads, NA data center) Hetzner (Germany)

Yes, that's why I'm asking. There's surely tons of potential differences, in reliability, redundancy options, turnaround time for new boxes, selection of configurations (including recently released hardware and things like GPUs), networking options, backbone connectivity, software services, multiple data centers (so you only need to pay/deal with one vendor) etc.

Well, dedicated hardware for EC2 makes sense for certain workloads (eg when you need more predictable performance), considering that you can use them alongside other AWS services (EBS, RDS, Route 53, S3, etc). Plus allocating 'bare metal' VMs on demand via script/API is a big plus.

It would be interesting to see how much you can squeeze the dedicated hardware with the largest EC2 types though.

This is very far from 'bare metal'.

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