I walked into the office of a colleague the other day (the director of our IDT graduate program) and on his office table was a new Xserve blade and a Xserve raid (the Macintosh server with software and storage). Very nice equipment that will allow the IDT students to each have their own accounts and offer many terabytes of storage for streaming media.
“When are we going to have this system online,” I wanted to know. “I am waiting for someone to come to get everything up and running” was the reply.
So, I have been trying to estimate what this combination of hardware, software, and services was worth. Hard to know for certain. There were terabytes of storage in both the blade and the external RAID. The hardware had a very fast CPU. OS X server is not free and then someone was going to set up the entire thing.
I am in my “lab” on a Saturday morning working on my own server (the setup running this blog). It is a G-4 cast-off from a campus lab that I picked up as surplus. I use all open source software – the server, database, blog, and middleware software responsible for this blog and the other applications I run are free. Total cost = $0.
Clearly, I would not want to put my equipment up against the resources now available to the IDT students – no way the combination of software and hardware are close in terms of the users that can be serviced simultaneously, volume of content that can be streamed, storage capacity, etc. Still, $0 is $0 and I actually have and can continue to add more servers of the type I have described. Anything multiplied by $0 is still $0.
I happen to like operating my own hardware and software, but here is the other perspective on the cost issue. The other perspective would recognize that I am up here on Saturday morning. I am spending time doing things that would not be required of the users of more “ready-made” systems AND I have spent a considerable amount of time to get to the point that I am able to keep open source software operating. If I were not interesting in doing this “for fun” and say I was operating these same resources for a K-12 school, what would my time be worth?
My task this morning was to upgrade the blog software that serves the content you are viewing. If you are not familiar with open source, here is a description of why this singular task may be more complicated than you realize. To provide you access to my blog with free software, one of the challenges is to keep multiple free components synched (I don’t mean this as a technical term). The server software (Apache), the database storing blog “pieces” (MySQL), the middleware conntecting the database to the server and providing the processing necessary to assemble blog pages sent via the server (PHP), the blog software (WordPress) and blog software plugins (the add-ons that deal with spam, insert the tags, etc) are all continually upgraded. These upgrades make the software work more effectively and also reduce security threats. I could get everything working and then not mess with the new advances, but the university would be upset if I did not do what I could to reduce security problems. The challenge is that you have to deal with many separate parts and you have to be careful that the parts remain compatible. If you pay attention to only some of the pieces, you often find that the piece you have upgraded assumes a more current version of another piece and your upgrade has in some mysterious way “broken” the entire system. I don’t mean to make this sound impossible – everything went smoothly this morning. My purpose was to identify some challenges that are hidden in the use of open source software.
I learn a great deal doing what I do. I think acquiring the experiences I have allows me a different perspective on the way things work that those who rely on ready made apps simply do not have. Some may feel this knowledge is unnecessary for practitioners. It really is hard to say what is the best way to spend your time.
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