[AusNOG] So who's read an RFC or Internet Draft?

[Mark Smith]

On 11 October 2015 at 17:38, Mark Smith <markzzzsmith at gmail.com> wrote:
<snip>

>
> I think there are a number of advantages of starting out with a
> horizontal scaling approach. Because you're dividing up the problem
> into lots of smaller problems, then they individually are usually
> easier and cheaper to solve. The equipment you perform the function
> with tends to be more commodity, and therefore cheaper individually
> because they're less specialised and more easily available (e.g., on
> the shelf at your distributor, and in your hands tomorrow, rather than
> needing to be manufactured on demand and in your hands in 3 months
> time). You do have increased numbers of points of failure, however the
> consequence of failure is reduced. As the "units of capacity" are
> smaller, it becomes easier to more accurately target capacity upgrades
> to where they're needed, without inadvertently providing more capacity
> where it isn't needed.
>

<snip>

> I think the main question to answer with horizontal scaling is what is
> the size of the units you're dividing the problem up into. It depends
> a lot on the problem, however I think there are two things to
> consider. Firstly, what is the capacity of common, commodity and
> off-the-shelf devices that could be used to solve the problem?
> Secondly, what sort of impact is tolerable in the event of failure, as
> your unit of expansion, when horizontally scaling is also likely to be
> your unit of failure?
>

So I think this is another example of how horizontal scaling down to
commodity unit sizes has advantages:

"How This Battery Cut Microsoft Datacenter Costs By A Quarter"
http://www.theplatform.net/2015/03/13/how-this-battery-cut-microsoft-datacenter-costs-by-a-quarter/