The Big Bounce: New Server Fund Raiser

[Neverend]

Hehe, I smiled reading this!

[Phade]

Hey Everyone!

I’ve been so distracted with putting together the new backup server that I forgot to give you guys the results of the fund raiser. D’oh! ^_^



You all did very well on our quest! We didn’t make our goal completely, but we have a good amount to work with on getting new machines. The backup server has all new hardware and is starting to back things up very nicely.

There are several very happy people with their very special thank you gift for their support! But there is one person who got a message they did not expect. I went out a got an extra spare hard drive, picked a person at random who donated during this drive, sent them a private message saying that they have 24 hours to reply with their address and I will send the drive to them just for donating during this fund drive! If they do not respond, I will pick a different random donator person and give them the same opportunity. And you thought you were just being cool by donating what you wanted to give. ^_^

Thank you again to everyone who donated!! We will keep you posted on what we end up getting!

Phade.

[oldwrench]

Hmmmm..... counting up the number of files, at 10 videos viewed per day, it will take 27 years or more to view them all........ I don't think I'm going to last that much longer.

[Bakadeshi]

Is there a reason no one has mentioned anything about running virtual? With todays advances in the Virtual world, it may be more cost effective to run a single or maybe 2 vmware host machines, and run all the servers you are mentioning as virtual appliances. the benefits include being able to do entire backups of the servers VMDK files that can easily be restored in the event of a crash much easier than a physical server can, Snapshots can be taken each time something is upgraded or changed for added stability and mitigation planning. Additional servers can simply be created as needed, and should any hardware on one of the hosts fail, VMware will automatically move the effected servers to the new host with no downtime.

I work as an Appications Engineer (meaning I design server builds and specifications for applications we use here) for Chicos, and almost our entire infrastructure is run virtual for these reasons. It used to be a physical server simply performed better than virtual, but the performance hit is barely noticeable these days, while the benefits far outweigh the tiny little performance hit you get. Most of our eCommerce site is also run virtual and can keep up with the load, so the load of the org should be able to aswell.

It could very well be the expense is greater, as I do not know the license costs that would be incurred to run vmware on a smaller envirnoment like the org, compared to just running a few physical servers, but it is much cheaper in a larger environment like ours. My question really is if it has been considered.

[Findread]

Any new updates?

[Kagacie]

Any new updates?
I asked some of the mods and none of had an anwser?
if you just took the money and ran , people will find you

[Liquified]

Any new updates?
I asked some of the mods and none of had an anwser?

Now im curious...

[Dr. Derpface, J.D.]

http://www.youtube.com/embed/6MneA9pgLV ... autoplay=1

[MycathatesyouAMV]

Hullo ?

[derobert]

I think Phade has been pretty busy, but I'll bug him to provide a proper update ASAP. Probably early next week.

The new backup server is finally running as of last night. Installing new drives (including a new OS drive) turned out to be much more of a fight than expected, the UEFI firmware had to be beaten into submission. Didn't help that the disk clone tool Phade was using failed, due to an (unused) bad sector on the old drive. Overall, having Phade type into the console to fix it took quite a while. (I sent him a command to run, he took a photo with his phone to send the results back, repeat).

But we now have a reliable video and database backup again. (We sort of had them before, but they were held together with chewing gum and duct tape. Probably more gum than duct tape.)

[mirkosp]

[Phade]

Hey Everyone!

Sorry about the stupidly long delay in replying. Derobert was right, I (and many others on the team) have been really stupidly busy recently.

So.... an update! =^_^=

Like Derobert said, the two of us have been working on getting the new backup server up and running correctly. It has been transformed from an abomination held together by scotch tape and paper mache to a beautiful quiet machine of solid industrial strength cardboard... ummm, fiber board? Plywood. Definitely plywood. ...and bolts! I can stand on the thing and it doesn't break! But seriously, it is much much better than what it was: much more reliable, quiet (Mrs. Phade's favorite feature since the old one sounded like a large and perpetually angry hornets nest), energy efficient (Mrs. Phade's second favorite feature), and should last reliably for a good long time.

We have been evaluating our hosting options: Just getting a new machine and staying where we are, moving hosts with a new machine, and going to a virtual/cloud service. This evaluation process has taken longer than expected since there are so many variables and the Org has specific requirements. We're not quite a "special needs" kinda site, but we do have a fairly efficient front end, fairly hefty database, and a giant gob of storage requirements in the neighborhood of 6TB and growing. All of this needs to happen on a relatively really small budget.

Staying where we are has become less and less desirable as the years have gone by. Our current physical location is in the Washington, DC, area were I used to live. It was convenient at the time to go fix stuff, but now has become expensive compared to other equally reliable hosting cities. Pluses of saying in the current physical location is that Derobert is there to go in and fix stuff whenever things break; minuses is the cost.

Moving to a new location could save us some monthly costs. However if something goes wrong physically, we'll need to have some "remote hands" in there to push our iron around, and that usually costs some cash. Will they be smart enough to diagnose and fix stuff as well as Derobert? Hopefully. Maybe. Possibly. But how much will that cost in the long run in both cash and downtime? Hmmmm...

The virtual machine / cloud thing would forever get rid of us buying, maintaining, and upgrading physical hardware. Super awesome for us! Cloud web front end server: no problem. Cloud database server: not too bad. 6TB+ cloud storage server: outch! That last part is the part that really hurts us in the cloud/VM world. Maybe we could hybrid cloud-physical our stuff. It gets complicated quick.

After checking out lots and lots of places, we are closing in on a solution given our budget. One big goal is to cut our monthly costs for the long run. We are really close to a choice and should have the final decision made after some more testing pans out (we've been really abusing the "Check out our services for the first 30 days for free" thing as much as we can to really see what is behind the curtains).

Again I want to thank everyone for your amazing support! It makes me amazingly glad to see that the AMV community is still alive and kicking and willing to come together to tackle a large goal such as this!!

Phade.

[Sephirothskr]

We love you phade

[Kiriforce]

Touché.

[Farlo]

what about the actual site? updates to it etc, the main page and members section is a confusing mess. Any updates for the side people actually see?