Re: Repository services and budget

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

Vince Wolodkin allegedly said:
> 
> The numbers below look pretty reasonable.  The only one I would question
> is the NOC support people.  In my experience running a computer center,
> if you want three people you either need to hire 5 or contract with a
> organization who will ensure that you have a qualified person on your
> site every shift every day.  You will also have to cover 7 days a week
> so I might double your number.  By my figures 24 x 7 at roughly $25/hour
> for qualified personnel through a contracting outfit will cost about
> $240,000, bumping the grand total to just over $1.5 million.

The figures left out facility costs (rent, etc), and an important 
component of personell costs -- benefits, workmans' comp, etc.

In other areas the costs seem somewhat inflated.  Still, it's not 
going to be cheap.

And, *somewhere*, DNS has to be running.

However, this is all predicated on maintaining a full database of 
repository information at a central site.  If you do that then this 
kind of a computer center is the inevitable result.  Furthermore, 
from a governance point of view, a central site that maintains all 
this information is naturally a power center, and a focus for 
possible cheating.

But a central site like this is simply not a requirement.  Consider 
the phone company analogy -- the small entity that hands out phone 
numbers doesn't keep track of any customer data -- the 
*only* thing it knows about is phone numbers.  I don't know for sure, 
of course, but it seems obvious that the database of that little 
company consists of (<phone_number>,<phone_company>) pairs, and 
that's it -- well, maybe a date, or something like that.

In our case, the analog would be a database of
(<domain_name>,<registrar>) pairs.  This only needs to be changed when
a name is created, deleted, or perhaps reserved for a short period of
time, so the number of accesses is far, far less than if all kinds of 
whois data is kept there and being constantly accessed.

And furthermore -- i'm sorry to keep harping on this -- you don't 
even need to keep a database at all -- the data can be kept in DNS.  
The only records you need to keep centrally are short term records 
while DNS is being updated.

With this approach a great many of the line items Rick mentions 
disappear.

-- 
Kent Crispin				"No reason to get excited",
kent@songbird.com,kc@llnl.gov		the thief he kindly spoke...
PGP fingerprint:   5A 16 DA 04 31 33 40 1E  87 DA 29 02 97 A3 46 2F