[OSGeo-Discuss] Relationship between Telascience and the OSGeo

[Frank Warmerdam]

Landon Blake wrote:
> Frank wrote: "In addition to the servers provided by Telascience we also
> have two rented
> servers at Peer1 (svn, trac, drupal, and mailman are on one of these
> servers).
> We are paying nearly $15K/yr for these two servers."
> 
> Wow! Does our traffic require two dedicated servers like this?

Landon,

The arrangement at Peer1 was made primarily with the goal of having
a reliable decent server able to support svn/trac and related project
services.  The second server is primarily serving as a backup though
the wiki is hosted there.

We are contemplating dropping use of the second Peer1 server to save
funds.

> Frank wrote: " So far geospatial data hosting has been accomplished via
> the servers at
> Telascience.  OSGeo has not to-date provided any resources of it's own
> (ie. budgeted for) in support of hosting geodata.
> 
> Large scale geodata hosting is pretty demanding from a computational,
> disk space and bandwidth point of view and it would be likely be
> cost prohibitive for us to pursue it in a big way on commercially
> priced servers like the ones at Peer1."
> 
> Is it the space requirements that make geodata hosting demanding, the
> bandwith requirements for download, or both?

Both.  Bandwidth overages at Peer1 can mount up to be expensive very
quickly, so we already host our most bandwidth intensive applications
(download.osgeo.org and existing geodata services) at telascience.

I'm presuming the hosted data would be made available as web services
(WMS, WCS, etc) not just a download site.

> Frank wrote: " There is some question in my mind just how central the
> *hosting* of
> free geodata is to our mission."
> 
> It would be great to get this clarified.

Clarifying such a matter is not trivial in an organization with
many different ideas like OSGeo.

> I had originally asked this question because I might be able to make a
> small donation to support free geodata hosting. I was trying to figure
> out which organization would be the best suited for the donation. Sounds
> like it should go to telascience. We'll see how my taxes works out this
> year. :]

I'm not sure if telascience accepts public donations or not, nor whether
it is 501(c)3 which might matter for tax purposes.

Best regards,
-- 
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | Geospatial Programmer for Rent