
Online Labs Designed Its Own ARM Servers To Take On AWS, DigitalOcean - bmoresbest55
http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/13/online-labs-designed-its-own-arm-servers-to-take-on-aws-digitalocean/
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azinman2
I'd like to see them create some zones outside of Europe. For me its a deal
killer to have US-based traffic leave the continent.

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mikmak
there are plans for this ;)

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scott00
I was confused for a long time trying to reconcile the claim of "912 computers
per rack" with what I observed in the video: 18 servers per cartridge, 16
cartridges per case, so 288 servers per case. I finally realized they must
have meant cores: so 4 cores x 18 servers x 16 cartridges = 912 cores per case
is probably how I would have put it.

Ballparking the size of the case based on the comparison of a single server to
a business card, it looks like they're using roughly a 7U case. Anybody know
more about the specs of a case-load of servers? I'd love to know what the
power consumption is. If you could put 6 of those cases in a cabinet, that
would be some pretty incredible compute density.

I hope they consider selling the system externally. At first blush at least it
seems like it would be an ideal setup for hosting colocated trading
applications.

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niluje
Each server has 4 cores. So a rack contains actually 3648 cores, not 912!

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scott00
You're assuming that when they say "912 computers per rack" they mean 912
4-core servers per rack. It's a reasonable assumption, that's how I
interpreted that statement when I read it the first time. Nonetheless, I'm
quite sure that that interpretation is incorrect.

If you watch the video carefully, you'll notice that their rack/case contains
16 cartridges, and each cartridge has 18 servers on it. That indicates they
have 288 servers per rack. 288x4=912, so I believe that when they said 912
computers per rack, they actually meant 912 cores per rack.

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patrickg_zill
I predict failure.

The first and main reason is, that when you have multiple containers/VMs on a
single server, what really happens is that "peak" or "burst" CPU matters more,
in terms of what the user (whether developer doing testing, or users of a
website that are browsing it) sees as performance.

Only in very memory-intensive tasks would these servers outperform (because
the memory bandwidth is dedicated to just your server and is not shared). Then
again, being able to bump from 2GB to 4GB (provided the application can take
advantage of it) of RAM might well minimize the issue due to caching or other
optimizations.

Second, 2GB RAM is (sadly) just not enough. As an example, the Zimbra mail
server barely runs in 2GB; and many other Java based programs are only fast
once they have chewed up a couple hundred MBs of RAM.

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feld
I have a VM running my webserver, mumble VOIP, IRC server (inspircd), two IRC
bouncers, OpenVPN, Xymon monitoring, bitlbee, and a few other things and it
only has 768MB RAM.

last pid: 91361; load averages: 0.28, 0.28, 0.25 up 9+19:03:28 14:37:36 74
processes: 1 running, 73 sleeping CPU: 0.0% user, 0.0% nice, 0.0% system, 1.2%
interrupt, 98.8% idle Mem: 38M Active, 512M Inact, 133M Wired, 8404K Cache,
87M Buf, 32M Free Swap: 2000M Total, 71M Used, 1929M Free, 3% Inuse

2GB is enough to run a LOT of things.

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custardcream
Definitely. I've got a centos 6.5 VM that is a master svn server for a
multinational with a 22Gb repo and 190 users and does front end http and ssl
for 45 requests/second (average with peaks of 200/sec) and it barely touches
the CPU (single 3.2 GHz xeon e5 core) and has only 1Gb of RAM.

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jstsch
This looks lovely. Requested an invite. All signs are green for the race to
the 1€/month server.

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xxdesmus
[https://www.atlantic.net/cloud-hosting/](https://www.atlantic.net/cloud-
hosting/)

$0.99/month VPSs now. Not a dedi though of course.

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general_failure
Wow, this is fantastic. I signed up for a trial and spun up a server. docker
works well. A quick review: 1) they have the equivalent of ec2/digital ocean
2) can create volumes that can be attached to instances. 3) can create images
and snapshots 4) s3 like storage. not sure about AZs and such. 5) I tried
reserving an IP but they seem to be out of it.

Only downside - I would like to know the pricing before I start using this.

If anyone from Online Labs is reading this, please let us know about the
pricing!

I will give the API a try tonight.

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niluje
Unfortunately I can't tell you about the pricing now. We'll tell you more very
soon!

About the API, you can give a look to your Python SDK
([https://github.com/online-labs/ocs-sdk](https://github.com/online-labs/ocs-
sdk)) or to the CLI one of our users developed
([https://community.cloud.online.net/t/getting-started-
manage-...](https://community.cloud.online.net/t/getting-started-manage-
online-labs-from-command-line/412))

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lobster_johnson
I wonder how similar this is to their existing dediboxes; I have an €5.99/mo
box with them which is some kind of VIA Nano-based Dell that is only sold in
Europe:

[http://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server/dedibox-
scg2](http://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server/dedibox-scg2)

Nice little setup. It's slow, of course (certainly not fast enough to encode
720p H.264 in real time, for example), and the ARM architecture is bound to be
faster.

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angrybits
I wonder if this isn't a little late to market. At this point, the major cloud
providers offer such a large array of products and services that add value to
their VM capabilities that I find it hard to imagine someone architecting a
substantial system on this platform anytime soon.

That said, they will make a juicy acquisition target for someone who wants
their tech. So I am not saying they wasted their time either.

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bmoresbest55
We see disruption everyday in the tech community. I do not think that will
change anytime soon. They have a compelling product that I personally would
like to try.

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mikmak
you can ask @online_en to get an invite on twitter, it's free during beta

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lbotos
Well, They are still going to have to figure out how to "Seamlessly" mirror
nodes because it's going to suck when half of one of those boards dies. I do
wish them the best as my inner nerd loves the idea.

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jacquesm
Very pretty. What is the power density of these? 288 nodes/enclosure is pretty
dense. Did you design your own enclosure/backplane as well? What are the
interconnects?

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pjc50
_How much does it cost?

The preview is free! You should expect good prices as we designed our own
hardware for the cloud._

Yes, but how much does it cost?

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justincormack
Yeah I am wondering. You can only run 2 machines on the preview as well.

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mikmak
if you have a valid test case, feel free to ask the support team for more,
they can give you more easily

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justincormack
Thanks! Its ok for now...

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danellis
The cards look really nice. Too bad they're not selling those and their shelf.

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sargun
What processor did they use in order to put ECC on an ARM board?

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Moter8
[http://i.imgur.com/oDMLLtM.png](http://i.imgur.com/oDMLLtM.png)

>The C1 server is a 4-cores ARMv7 CPU with 2GB of RAM and a 1 Gbit/s network
card. It is designed for the cloud and horizontal scaling.

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mehh
Do they provide Load Balancers akin to what AWS does?

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edouardb
It is in the roadmap.

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mehh
Front of the queue I hope :)

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api
Some immediate thoughts:

These would be very interesting for low-latency network-heavy applications if
each machine had a 1gbps latency-optimized network connection to the core
switch wherever they're hosted. Virtualization might be fine from a throughput
POV but I've seen hypervisors impose a fair amount of latency "jitter" on
heavily loaded hosts. It's one of the reasons why bare metal servers can be
better. I'm thinking core network router functions, certain kinds of games,
etc.

Another area where I can see this excelling is high security applications,
like having a cloud node that is in charge of signing things with very
protected secret keys like some kind of certificate authority. Virtualization
has a pretty good security record, but for high-paranoia applications bare
metal is better. If you offered the ability to upload your own pre-encrypted
image this would be very interesting. Not quite as good as homomorphic
encryption, but that's not quite "there" yet -- still too slow to be usable.
At the very least you'd have to crack into the hardware and dump the RAM to
break into a system and steal a key.

Finally, make stability a high priority. With low power, low heat dissipation,
dedicated hardware, and solid state everything you should have an easier path
to cheaper "many nines" high-reliability service. That kind of thing is kind
of expensive right now in the hosting world so you'd have some pricing power
there.

/shameless plug:

ZeroTier One, a network virtualization engine for inter-container and inter-VM
networking as well as VPN access, supports 32-bit ARM/Linux as an officially
supported platform:

[https://www.zerotier.com/download.html](https://www.zerotier.com/download.html)

It's also possible to use it with Docker very easily:

[https://github.com/davide/docker-zerotier](https://github.com/davide/docker-
zerotier)

I decided to create an official ARM build and support that platform since
there were so many users on Raspberry Pi and similar, but as far as I know
these binaries will run on this architecture. I signed up for a preview of
Online.Net so I will test once I have a "box." :)

EDIT:

Tested with your free trial via the web terminal, and the ARM build from the
above download link works flawlessly as long as you "modprobe tun" first:

[http://i.imgur.com/FmB9ndK.png](http://i.imgur.com/FmB9ndK.png)

Then I pinged my laptop on the desk next to me, which also happens to be on
the "Earth" virtual LAN. Fun stuff. :)

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notastartup
Can this match Digital Ocean's pricing? At $5/month it's hard to beat.

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dylz
This is the company that sold full dedicated servers for $1.99/month ex vat

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notastartup
I cannot find that price anywhere on their site. Where did you get that from?

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mikmak
the $1.99/month offer was just on the website for a few days ;) (it was a
special/crazy offer with a limited stock of servers, something like ~2k
servers iirc so it's no longer available, google for "dedibox kidechire")

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notastartup
rats...missed out on it

even the 5.99 euro /month offer seems much more generous than digitalocean.

