OSUOSL (Oregon State University Open Source Lab) operations proposal

Background

• OSUOSL provides a variety of services to a variety of open-source projects. They get rave reviews.
• OSAF currently hosts most services (on 8 machines) at ISC in Redwood City.
• Whole-cluster power outages at ISC have occurred for OSAF 3-6 times a year; there is no on-site generator, so power is not redundant beyond UPS power.
• OSAF operations has a need for improvements which mesh with OSUOSL capabilities:
  • Better colo: redundant power, remote hands
  • 24x7 coverage
  • Managed services (people with root access and some app knowledge)
  • Hosted services (perhaps svn, perhaps mysql, etc)
• There is an opportunity to sponsor a student inside OSL, with possible benefits to OSAF.
• OSAF is opening channels of collaboration elsewhere with OSUOSL, perhaps on product features or research. Ted Leung and Scott Kveton talk.

Recommendation

OSAF should start a hosting relationship with OSUOSL. It's a high-quality service, it's free of obligation, and it can help improve areas of OSAF operations.

Further, we should sponsor some or all of a student's work.

Proposal outline

• OSAF purchase a machine, prepare it to host multiple virtual machines, and ship it to Oregon for hosting.
• Move some critical OSAF services incrementally to OSUOSL hosting.
• OSAF subsidize some fraction of an OSU student wage to provide OSAF operations services.
• OSUOSL and OSAF continue an ongoing relationship of this type.

The Future

• OSAF will be able to create new "virtual" machines hosted on good bandwidth on demand, creating flexibility in development.
• As additional physical machines are needed to handle load of OSAF growth, additional colo machines would be placed into Oregon's care as a default procedure. Some ISC machines may be physically migrated to OSUOSL.
• OSAF would be able to migrate services to Oregon resources flexibly without physical machine shuffling.
• OSAF would incur whatever recurring what it chooses in exchange for whatever arrangements are agreed-upon.
• OSAF will have an additional set of resources to call upon during community growth and in some cases, the ability to direct student work supporting that growth.
• OSAF will maintain a hosting relationship with our current Hosted @ ISC partner. Multiple colos provides better capacity, flexibility, and availability as long as we'd long.
• The 2nd-order effects of being associated with OSUOSL and the wider community will provide benefits to OSAF and OSUOSL; interesting side-conversations and serendipity may create a few pleasant surprises over the years.

The People

• Jared Rhine, OSAF operations manager
• Scott Kveton, OSUOSL associate director
• Jason McKerr, OSUOSL operations manager
• Corey Shields, OSUOSL systems lead
• Ted Leung, original OSAF contact with Scott
• Mitch Kapor, capital budget authorization

Open issues

• Can the capital budget for the foundation machine be secured?
• How much of a student might OSAF sponsor and what services does that translate to?
• OSAF has need for operational scripting; what sort of student resources might be available?

Hardware specification

• Supermicro AS2020A-T (Dual Opteron, 6 SATA), redundant power, sliding rails
• 2x Opteron 265 (dual core)
• 3Ware 9550SX-8LP hardware RAID 5+hot-spare
• 6x WD4000YR 400Gb disk drives (1.5Tb usable)
• 6x 1Gb ECC DDR333 CAS3 2.5V registered
• DVD-R slim + floppy slim
• IPMI 2.0 card (power on/off + console-over-lan)
• Xen 2.0.7 + Linux 2.6.15 + Debian Sarge dom0 + Debian Sarge/Etch domUs