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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joe NYC who wrote (107677)	8/17/2000 2:33:28 PM
From: Tushar Patel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

I have seen first hand how these decisions are made at several different companies (both very large (>100 servers web server farm) and relatively small(under a dozen servers web server web farm)) It goes something like this. The peak load we have ever experienced is x hits. Growth (as measured by hits) is growing at some rate y. We never want to have the CPU utilization exceed some number z. This will compute to a server farm where on a typical day, the utilization will be very low. For example, lets say annual growth rate (measured by hits) is 100% (this is actually low for many sites). Now, lets say that the peak load was twice the average rate. Also say that you never want your CPU utilization to exceed 50%. Under these assumptions, for the peak rate to be at 50% or below over the next year, on an average day, the utilization needs to be 12.5% or below (so you can go to 25% to handle the 100% growth and then to 50% when you hit a peak). Remember, this 12.5% is the utilization on an AVERAGE day. On many other slow days, utilization will be even lower and lead you to think that the servers are mostly idle. However, if you want to be able to handle all the business that comes your way (rather than turning it away) and account for expected growth and peak cycles, you will have no choice but to have this additional capacity even though on a typical day, you might find the servers being mostly idle. This is why the "Surge Economy" ads that Intel is running make so much sense. tushar

To: Joe NYC who wrote (107677)	8/17/2000 7:31:00 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

The companies end up buying a lot of overpriced exotic stuff like Sun servers. Then, later when only 10 people per day show up, this exotic hardware is basically running idle. With some sites it would not be because of an illusion but because of peek demand vs. average demand. It might occasionally need many times the average throughput, so if the server is bought to meet projected peek demand, it will be mostly idle much of the time even if the projections are accurate. Tim