SCN: SCNA general meeting 6/9.

[sc at sdf.lonestar.org]

On Mon, 11 Jun 2012, Randy Groves wrote:
> ... we are hugely at the mercy of SPL and their network 
> connection. I was not privy to any discussions specifically 
> on this issue, but in the past there have been (via hearsay)
> statements by the library to the effect that if we start
> becoming a drain on the resources, we may be asked to leave.

Randy,

Unless there's a crunch looming at the Library right away, the
HTML pages (all of the Web site as such) could stay on the Web 
server at the Library, while any multimedia files or other large
data files could be served from an SCN server in another data
center, e.g. files.scn.org. That way, if there were to be a big
increase in data transfer, almost all of it would happen outside
the Library's network.

Starting small with one external server and an inexpensive
network connection could get SCN's feet wet with developing some
additional capacity outside the Library. Here in Seattle there's
a tentacle of something called 100TB.com that provides high
bandwidth connections, and there probably are other similar
operations. Something like that now seems to cost a few hundred
dollars a month and up. I'm completely unfamiliar with this, and
who knows exactly how much of the stated maximum data transfer
would actually be usable in practice. But if, say, 10TB were to
be inadequate for SCN in the near future I would be surprised.

In the very beginning, just to play with some things, maybe even
start with a VPS instead of setting up a colocated server. A
little unmanaged VPS at the place we're using costs $10/month
and allows a maximum data transfer of 300 GB/month, though how
optimistic that figure is I don't know. With the blog we're
using 15 GB/month on some sort of "cloud server" - don't ask me
exactly how cloudy it is. If we went from 32kbps MP3s to 640x360
video at 500kbps, that'd up the monthly transfer from ~15 GB to
~250 GB/month, which would probably mean moving to a bit larger
VPS than the little one mentioned above.

Anyway, have some fun and experiment. After a while the result
might be that SCN would be better prepared to expand, and to
cope with the Library's limitations at some point further on.

Rod
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