user_Jamesday wrote:
The French donation is a 4U 6CPU Pentium III-750 system with 2GB of RAM and three or four 9GB SCSI drives in a RAID setup; and three 1U Celerons. 2GB for the 4U because it comes with one but the donor is upgrading it to two for us. The other equipment mentioned was for us to consider and the donor would then allocate it among all of the projects which were competing for it. We didn't get it all.
On the technical side, it was decided that the Celerons just aren't suitable for the US site because the US Squids require roughly comparable specifications and the Celerons aren't really fast enough to be page builders, given the shipping costs to get them to the US. So, European Squid caches is the role they best fit. They will need a fairly cheap RAM upgrade to be Squids. These squids will speed things up for those in France and possibly more of Europe who are not logged in, by avoiding the sometimes slow or broken transatlantic links, and for everyone by taking some of the load from the US-based Squids.
That's excellent! Is there currently a colo in Europe, or someone willing to host one? If there isn't one, perhaps we should consider where is a) cheapest to buy colocation (or find a donor?) b) cheapest to buy bandwidth (or find a donor?) c) best-connected to the rest of Europe?
At the moment, I would imagine the best candidates to be London or Amsterdam.
-- Neil