[SAC] Re: [support.osuosl.org #20349] Backup Implementation for OSGeo VMs

[Alex Mandel]

On March 2, 2012 at 2:32 PM Frank Warmerdam <warmerdam at pobox.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 2, 2012 at 8:59 AM, Alex Mandel <tech_dev at wildintellect.com>
wrote:
> > On 03/02/2012 02:45 AM, Martin Spott wrote:
> >> Anyhow I've never understood how OSGeo got into financial obligations
> >> with respect to the hosting at OSL.
> >> When the new servers were purchased, everbody was talking about free
> >> hosting at OSL in the sense of "no matter whatever would happen to
> >> OSGeo, the server infrastructure won't be affected and will continue".
> >> Now recently I realized that OSGeo is paying an annual fee of $3.5k
for
> >> hosting the two servers at OSL - which is pretty contradictory to what
> >> has been communicated before.
> >
> > We are not under obligation to do so as far as I know. We offered a one
> > time contribution for their services and assistance to help ensure
> > future hosting.
>
> Alex / Martin,
>
> Note that it was my intention that we would annually provide a
contribution
> to OSL as a way of showing some appreciation for the services they
> provide even if it doesn't actually cover what we cost them to serve.
> However, it is not an obligation.
>
> I will note the amounts of money Lance mentioned for supporting backup
> seem high to me, and I'm not too keen on getting into a situation with
> high locked in prices for backup services.
>
> Best regards,
> --


I agree that at that price it's not a good idea, but I also think there
might be some room here for negotiation.
Checking Amazon S3 prices, 5 TB would run us $550 per month at the regular
rate. So the price isn't astronomical.
The odd point for me, is that we have multiple VMs based on their advice,
technically we only have 2 machines, if you count clients that way we are
talking 1 TB of space at $100/month, if we need 2 TB then maybe we could
negotiate for say $150-200 a month (1800-2400/yr) which seems much more
reasonable.

We should also realize we don't backup everything this way. The download
server has long operated on make an rsync of it. Many of the old foss4g
websites and uploads contained are archival in nature, not changing. So I
think we should calculate out what's static and what's dynamic.

Basically a full dump of the downloads folder every week seems silly, but a
full dump of various postgres/mysql databases running sites and compressed
on dump seems good, but that won't take the same space it takes on the
running server. So I think estimating disk space based on a full 1:1 of the
complete amount of disks we have is quite an overestimation of our needs.

Just want to make sure we do a good comparison before deciding and factor
things in like "cost" of maintaining the backups.

Thanks,
Alex