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Open Compute Project Comes Under Fire
judgecorp writes: The Open Compute Project, the Facebook-backed effort to create low-cost open source hardware for data centers has come under fire for a slack testing regime. The criticism was first aired at The Register where an anonymous test engineer described the project's testing as a "complete and total joke." The founding director of the project, Cole Crawford has penned an open letter in reply. The issue seems to be that the testing for standard highly-reliable hardware used by telcos and the like is very thorough and expensive. Some want the OCP to use more rigorous testing to replicate that level of reliability. Crawford argues that web-scale data centers are designed to cope with hardware failures, and "Tier 1" reliability would be a waste of effort.
And there is the rub. NEBS testing (telco-level) is horrifically expensive and - for DC applications - totally unnecessary. NEBS servers have to withstand that because they are often the *only* server performing a certain function in the CO. Not anywhere near the same use-case.
While I was working at Amazon we were told to expect hardware failures and to build our software around it. I have a couple of friends doing hardware testing for AWS and all of their hardware is of extremely low quality and has major visable issues such as bowing, flimsy connectors, and little to no hardware redundancy in the hardware itself(no dual power supplies or hot swappable anything). This really isn't a surprise at all, its just where the industry is going.
I don't think I'd ever go to the cloud because it's cheaper or more secure or more reliable. The main benefit that I see is flexibility.
If your loads are stable and known in advance, it's likely cheaper to buy hardware and staff people to take care of it. On the other hand if loads spike wildly from one day to the next the cloud makes perfect sense. Need a thousand cores of compute power right this second? Amazon/Google/Rackspace/HP would be happy to rent it to you.