Just for fun and maybe someday for real, if you were building the ultimate hosting system (within reason) what would you build? Anything goes from clusters to private clouds. List the hardware and software you would go with and the target market you would host with the system (ie. Shared hosting, VPS hosting).

i prefer a lot of dedicated servers which have lots of virtual private servers .

dedi's with vps nodes on them. definitely

Agreed, that's the way to roll.

Within reason? That's relative to your situation. I'd be researching latest data center designs.

Hook me up with a few HP Pods and I'd be all set

The HP Pods are self contained data centers in a box. They are basically prewired, air-conditioned, humidified and stocked with servers that are in a 20' container (the same you see on the backs of trucks).

The model makes it ideal for expansion. Of course, you still need IT staff, server monitoring staff and then sales people to sell the equipment. I think as Steve pointed out the "within reason" is something that will trip people up. Is $50 Million within reason, or is $1 Million within reason - depends on what you're getting.

I used to have a Blade system that was really a great system. Price was around $45k for 16 blades, but much like the folks selling the Cloud type setups where you can enable and disable processors, you could do the same with the blades (and that was 4 years ago!)

These days, I'd much rather not have to deal with hardware at all and instead leave that to others and just focus on the marketing aspect of things.

What do you use instead of the blades now?

Indeed, those HP PODs to DC junkies is like candy to fat kids.

Agree on this.

Pricing on datacenter infrastructure has decreased dramatically from what it used to be years ago. It was always a space concern in years past, but these days, space is not an issue. Hardware is cheaper, space is cheaper, bandwidth for that matter is cheaper.

We went back to using 1u rack servers, but the half rack machines rather than full size. This actually allows you to put TWO 1u machines on the same shelf if you wanted to. We don't, but the option is there if space was a concern.

Blade technology is still there, and still in use by many places, but pricing is so cheap on the "normal" equipment, and easier to replace when things go wrong, that many people have moved away from blades back to 1U systems or even regular old mini towers on baker racks like years ago.

Blades blades blades! Definitely worth the investment.

I love using blades, I had 5 but due to my company falling apart I had to shut it down and stop using them, Now I use 2u servers I have about 4 of them.

yes expect POWER POWER POWER _ man those things eat POWER

I prefer a hybrid approach of using dedicated servers, SAN storage arrays with some virtualization and both public and private cloud services. This takes into account some real world objectives like having instantly scalable resources without the capx. I have a number of clients that use public cloud to serve up static content while their core operations reside in virtualized dedicated servers. Works great and is cost effective.

I would put myself in to the could world. I think people who get in at the deeper level of cloud computing now are going to find themselves in a really nice place down the road.