virtually perfect

Hardware sucks.

It breaks, it takes up space, it gets hot. It need to be backed up, power conditioned, locked safely away. Todays red hot rocket is tomorrow's rickety broken down boat anchor.

Hardware sucks.

Warning this might be a techie article by the time I get thru it so if that kind of talk makes you throw up, stop reading now!

My dream is to turn the server room into a locker for sailing stuff. So for the past two years I have pursued and reviewed alternatives to owning and maintaining my own servers. Over those two year many companies have popped up to offer spaces that we can park our own servers, full servers for rent, shares of servers or virtual servers for rent.

Each of them got me all excited when they appeared.

Maybe this would be the 'one'? Nope, no ,and neit.

Inflexible, termed contracts, expensive, slow to respond to requests...the list is endless.

Naturally the answer came from the world's largest book store - obvious now I think about it.

Amazon has this ridiculously large computing environment spread over the world, (well US and Europe anyway). It runs their books and things business. But it turns out that it has a lot of disk drive space sitting around idle. So they figured out how to rent out drive space, securely, to anyone that want it.

The service is called S3 -check it out here.

The amazing thing about it is that you pay for only what you use and it costs - get this - $0.15US per GB per month - 15 CENTS a gig per month for always available, secure, internet accessible storage.

When I came across this I prodded our IT department to migrate the 80gbs of active Ellwood data into S3. Now I'm Diamond Jim blowing $0.15 x 80 = $12US a month for my firm's data storage needs (double that figure to back it up)

The book store people then decided that they had a lot of excess processing power kicking around too. And of course they figured out how to let people using it too.

At first it was UNIX. My hopes were dashed. UNIX is nice but I have WINDOWS applications to run. SQL Server, Amicus, TimeMatters, Summation, PCLaw all that stuff - WINDOWS or nothing for me.

I fooled with it and it was cool but I had no use for it.

Recently things have changed.

Amazon has implemented a dead simple to use virtual Windows Server environment that works, its FAST and FLEXIBLE and best of all ITS CHEAP!

The service is called Amazon EC2, check it out here.

Being the conservative wall flower that I am, my first setup was a dual processor quad core XEON virtual server with 8gbs of RAM and 2TB (yes TB) of storage running Windows Enterprise 2003 and Standard SQL. Cost? A FULL $1.20US per HOUR.

You want five of them? No problem, just change the 1 to a 5 in this little box when you are starting up and now, you are dropping a full $6US an hour. Hey big spender...

My standard server configuration is a dual core Windows 2003 server standard, cost $0.125 (that's 12 and half cents) an hour.

You access this servers in the Amazon cloud via Remote Desktop.

You can buy a static IP address for it. You can create private tunnels between various servers. It is amazing.

I have a complete virtual network in the cloud. A honking server and a series of workstations (that are these low end windows 2003 servers), using drive mappings and file shares, SQL and all the rest. It's all in the cloud and when we turn them off - the cost is ....ZERO! Alleluia, Alleluia!!!!

Backups are also remarkably easy. You simply tell the "AWS" interface you want a snapshot of a given machine, drives and all.

I LOVE IT!!!

So, I am girding myself to spring this directive on the IT department - no more hardware servers. Production servers go into the cloud (including stuff like Citrix servers too!) Testing servers? Cloud. Workstations? Cloud. Mail Servers? Cloud.

They're gonna love me ;-)