Donations

Good day everyone,

If you've hit this page, you're hopefully either curious about donating to the recurring costs of goo.im, or curious about helping us to purchase new hardware to continue to be the front-line serving for all of your android-rom needs!

At this time, as of 2/17/2012, goo.im is looking to purchase hardware to fund our future expansion into getting our own colocation-space so we can keep running costs low, and continue to improve the site for not only the developers who use this, but the users who download from it as well!

So, what're we looking at, at this time?  Well, we're looking at mostly used hardware, as the budget for new hardware from Dell (Who else do you buy servers from these days...) is a bit high for what we think we can raise.

goo.im is primarily composed of fiveservers, three head end distribution servers, which handle the direct serving of files, our buildbox, and the primary storage server.  What we're looking at, at this time, is moving to the following setup:

Rom Distribution

  • Storage
    • PowerEdge 2950
    • 6x SAS 1Tb Hard-drives, in a Raid-5, running XFS.
    • 16 Gb ram (Possibly 32 if we can get it)
    • 2x Xeon Quad Core E5345's
    • Serves as main goo site server, as well as the canonical repository of all our roms
    • 1,887.00$ as designed, mostly in the Hard-Drives (What a shocker!)
  • Head-End
    • PowerEdge 1950
    • 2x SAS 36Gb 15k RPM drives in raid 1
    • 16 Gb ram (NFS Caching)
    • 2x Xeon Dual Core 5050's
    • Serves all files via lighttpd, making disk usage extremely tiny
    • 657.00$ as designed
  • Common
    • Both servers would have DRAC5's for remote monitoring and configuration of servers.
    • Both servers would be plugged into a private network for internal traffic
    • Infiniband is looking to be a large part of this, for the next section (Shiny, we know.)

So, what makes Goo-Inside.me all joyful and goo-ey for the developers and android persons?  Well, it's the build server.  The joyus glory of a high speed box that's dedicated to nothing but building android roms as fast as we humanly can make it.  Yes, it's delicious.  We love it too.  We promise.  So, what do we have planned for this, if we move?  Well, we're looking at building ourselves an expandable, 80 core, 120 Gb ram cluster, designed to do nothing but build android, and more android, with a side of android.

Build Cluster

  • Head-End
    • PowerEdge 1950
    • 2x 146Gb SAS 15k RPM drives - Raid 0, explained below
    • 16 GB ram - This server can also be part of the compute cluster.
    • 2x Xeon Quad Core E5345
    • DRAC5, just for good measure ;)
    • Head-End for the processing cluster, handles all major work loads and logins.
    • Provides the PXE, DHCP, NFS for all child nodes, ensuring they can come online properly, and have OS'
    • 998.00$ as designed
  • Compute Nodes x 10
    • DCS23's, similar to a PowerEdge 1950, but built for high density computing
    • 0x Hard-Drives - These are PXE boot systems, with the OS image NFS mounted
    • 12 Gb ram
    • 2x Xeon Quad Core 5462
    • Compute Node, not alot to say here.
    • Pricing pending, see below.

So, notes about these systems, as the 1950 will be serving as the NFS root for all of the children, for the build cluster only, it's important for it to be extremely fast, and be able to get the initial mounts done, once that's complete?  It no longer matters, and the system is now completely happy to do nothing else but build roms.  So, why the raid 0?  Well, we're bit of speed freaks around here, and the NFS serving the OS image, needs to be able to spin up and give the clients what they need extremely quickly, which is why we want to go down this route.  As for the compute node pricing, we're looking at a custom order of servers, as normally, these come with 4Gb ram, and 1 250Gb sata drive, which we want upped, and removed, as applicable, so we're looking for quotes on these still.  To put it in perspective, a stack of 10, at the default configuration is 3500$, pretty much the cost of everything else combined, so we're working around this carefully.  This cluster is slated to use storage from the main systems, to provide the disk-space required for rom builds.


Goo is looking for donations to raise somewhere around 10,000$, so we have some overhead, and if hardware is needed, to improve the system (Infiniband 10gbe anyone?) we have some play room.  As well, this would help cover any setup fees, and cover the first month or so worth of colocation, as the colo bill is looking to be right around 1,100/mo after everything is said and done.  It's not cheap, but we feel it's important to take these steps to help ensure that goo will remain around for as long as android does, and continue to provide a quality product that appeals to developers, and end users!