RHEA-L Archives

From: <>
Subject: [RHEA-L] Re: Cost of new search engine box
Date: Wed, 11 Feb 1998 18:20:03 EST

This was sent to all the listowners, and I wanted to share with you. I have
not sent any messages to the lists, about outages from Rootsweb, but thought
you might appreciate all the hard work that Rootsweb does for us Brian and
Karen spend alot of money keeping us going, on new machinery, and more memory.
You can't imagine how much memory it takes for all these lists. Pat

<< Hi all -

This is a question that was posed in private e-mail by a member of
the RootsWeb Webmaster/Listowner community. I'm passing along the
question and my answer to everyone because other folks might be
wondering about this. Cheers, B.

-- Your message was:

> Brian Leverich wrote:
>
> > The new search engine box is under construction on my bench now. I
> > can't accurately predict to the day, but if we don't have any
> > further serious disruptions (the power failures last week were sort
> > of the disruptions from Hell ... ) I expect we'll have searches up
> > within a week.
>
>
What's the cost of something like this?

Hi -

The prebuilt VArServer 3000 we have on order from VA Research will
cost us $13,500.

That server is planned to be used as the upgrade to the current
www.rootsweb.com server. The old www.rootsweb.com will replace the
current mailhub.rootsweb.com, which in turn will become a dedicated
DNS/MX server: nothing ever goes to waste at RootsWeb. (:

The handbuilt search engine server, which is slightly larger/faster
than the VArServer 3000, has cost us about:

Server case & heavy duty power supply$ 500.00
Motherboard$ 500.00
Pentium Pro 200 CPUs w 512KB caches[2]$ 1,000.00
128 MB EDO SIMMs[8]$ 3,200.00
RAID-5 caching disk controller$ 1,800.00
Seagate Barracuda 9 GB ultrawide SCSI drives[5] $ 4,500.00
Tape backup$ 500.00
IDE 4GB system drive$ 200.00
3COM 3C900 100Mb ethernet adapter$ 100.00
Video board$ 100.00
CDROM drive$ 100.00
Keyboard & mouse$ 100.00
Misc cables, mounting brackets, & such$ 100.00
----------
$12,700.00

BTW, and folks don't often realize this, it really is *much* more a
matter of money than my time because money can easily substitute for
my time. VA Research servers cost about 15-20% more than the
machines I can handbuild, but buying preconfigured machines saves
oodles of my time. If RootsWeb ran at less of a loss, we'd always
be buying prebuilt servers and using my time that was freed up to do
more useful things like getting whizzier cgi-bin tools set up for
the Webmasters and Listowners. Cheers, B.

--
Dr. Brian Leverich Co-moderator, soc.genealogy.methods/GENMTD-L
RootsWeb Genealogical Data Cooperative http://www.rootsweb.com/
P.O. Box 6798, Frazier Park, CA 93222-6798

>> If there are any who would be interested in contributing to RootsWeb-
check out the Rootsweb Address above of where to send it.

Pat

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