Xtra forks out $20 million for 100MB customer mail storage

Forums › New Zealand Broadband › Xtra forks out $20 million for 100MB customer mail storage

juha

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#8473 3-Jul-2006 08:18

Gold plated hard drives and servers? :p

So 2GB on MSN/Hotmail and Yahoo... 2.8GB currently on Google and those providers offer other frills as well like free blogs, small site hosting, forums etc.

Juha

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#40335 3-Jul-2006 09:20

How does that work?
If they have 500,000 email accounts, thats 50,000 GB of data.

Thats 125,000 of these: http://ascent.co.nz/ProductSpecification.aspx?ItemID=346750

Even at retail price thats 125,000 * $701.04 = $87,630

Sure i would expect to be payed big if i was installing 125,000 hdd's and you would need a lot of server space to fit them, but you can see where i'm going with this.

juha

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#40336 3-Jul-2006 09:27

The link you posted goes to an external USB one, but yeah, I see where you're going with the whole thing.

Also, 100MB mailboxes on 200MB data caps... hmm.

Juha

freitasm

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#40337 3-Jul-2006 09:36

I think this is an over simplification of the process. First you have to source the IT integrator, who in turn will help sourcing the IT supplier. Then you need the hardware, location, power, backup power, management software. They'd probably install some RAID server, which are not cheap as external disk.

Then you have the project for testing, then deployment, performance testing, performance tunning, and after a few months a final product/service ready to go.

I've seen lots of small projects (from the user's perspective) go to the realm of millions. Not surprising at all, this is IT.

juha

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#40340 3-Jul-2006 09:41

Xtra should've just outsourced the lot to Google :)

Juha

freitasm

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#40344 3-Jul-2006 09:45

Yep, they could use Google for domains, but... They would probably loose control of the infrastructure, and as soon as the first favorable contract were finished, how much per month would Google charge? Isn't like this in all IT outsourcing? Once you rely on an external provider, their prices go up...

tonyhughes

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#40345 3-Jul-2006 09:50

But Xtra are in bed with Microsoft arent they? Which leads me to ask, why does Xtras WAP portal point you to google for a search, and not MSN Search?

juha

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#40346 3-Jul-2006 09:57

Could be wrong, but hasn't Xtra already outsourced everything? Like Telecom did with its fixed and mobile networks to Alcatelucent? Not even Ferrit is hosted or maintained by Telecom.

Juha

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Jama

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#40352 3-Jul-2006 10:24

Just because gmail is free doesn't mean that there wasn't a huge setup cost sucked up by Google. I take it from all the comments that none of you (Mauricio excluded) have worked on a large scale IT project before. There are probably little things like software licensing. Xtra mail doesn't run on Open Source. And MS is not the supplier.

Cheapskatenz

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#40506 5-Jul-2006 14:40

NokiaRocks: How does that work?
If they have 500,000 email accounts, thats 50,000 GB of data.

Thats 125,000 of these: http://ascent.co.nz/ProductSpecification.aspx?ItemID=346750

Even at retail price thats 125,000 * $701.04 = $87,630

Sure i would expect to be payed big if i was installing 125,000 hdd's and you would need a lot of server space to fit them, but you can see where i'm going with this.

Who did the adding up top???? lol
125,000 * 701.04 = 87 million

Bung

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#40516 5-Jul-2006 16:33

If they wanted to save money there must be some redundant storage left over from the Jetstream Games and Newsgroup servers.

juha

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#40517 5-Jul-2006 16:36

Heh. Bung++

Juha

barf

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#40521 5-Jul-2006 17:05

I don't know if $20 mil is a good price but, I do wonder if Xtra know about free software-based solutions such as openfiler and iSCSI. Saw a (BIG) VMware ESX server network with an iSCSI SAN the other day, I diddn't dare do the maths to see how much they could have saved by using free software.

Slightly OT but I heard on the radio that more than 50% of new server installs worldwide are now Linux installs.

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DonGould

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#41083 14-Jul-2006 17:29

barf: I don't know if $20 mil is a good price but, I do wonder if Xtra know about free software-based solutions such as openfiler and iSCSI. Saw a (BIG) VMware ESX server network with an iSCSI SAN the other day, I diddn't dare do the maths to see how much they could have saved by using free software.

Slightly OT but I heard on the radio that more than 50% of new server installs worldwide are now Linux installs.

Yes there's a bit of thinking to be done here.... also not every customer would require all 100mb.

It would be fun to build a distrubuted file system to put a huge amount of storage on line using nothing more than redundant capacity on office PCs.

Cheers Don

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#41124 14-Jul-2006 19:46

It's been done before. It's called Google. Hardly open source though, because corporate tends to make sure their secrets remain secret.

Google has 100,000 servers.

Any sane ops person would rather go with a fancy $5000 server than a bare $500 motherboard plus disks sitting exposed on a tray. But that's a 10X difference to the cost of a CPU cycle. And this frees up the algorithm designers to invent better stuff.

Without cheap CPU cycles, the coders won't even consider algorithms that the Google guys are deploying. They're just too expensive to run.

Google doesn't deploy bare motherboards on exposed trays anymore; they're on at least the fourth iteration of their cheap hardware platform. Google now has an institutional competence building and maintaining servers that cost a lot less than the servers everyone else is using. And they do it with fewer people.

This is probably the thing that makes Open Source hard to break through in the corporate space. Companies still need to keep the competitive advantage, and some don't understand all the different (and confusing) licensing types.

barf

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#41125 14-Jul-2006 20:15

this is a common misconception MF, open source software does not expose your intellectual property unless you want it to. Dual licencing is popular for this reason. Open Source Software is even now being used as advertising for closed-source products, which are just enhanced versions of the open-source version released for free. This is just like the old 'shareware' business model.

You can't say Open Source isn't breaking through either, corporations have budgets to consider and you can't get anything cheaper than something that's free. it is no wonder Microsoft's share of the server market is declining and netcraft confirms this.

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