From: Herbert Poetzl (herbert_at_13thfloor.at)
Date: Thu 31 Oct 2002 - 14:09:00 GMT
On Thu, Oct 31, 2002 at 09:08:29AM -0500, Dave wrote:
> On Wed, 2002-10-30 at 16:52, Mefford, Aaron wrote:
>
> > As to the specific post, I am not sure that the hard line of not overbooking
> > is a good idea. While for many applications it would be a correct solution
> > there are some where it will not. Every ISP over allocates their available
> > resources. People do not care to pay for dedicated resources.
> > Additionally, with most services now being offered via resellers, it seems
> > unreasonable to not allow the reseller the same option. For instance, if I
> > sell virtual private servers, and joe buys a VPS with the intention of
> > selling individual web sites run within the VPS, I may or may not want to
> > allow Joe to oversubscribe his disk space, possibly even on a per VPS basis.
>
> If you allow overbooking of quota, then you could very easily do without
> quota at all. I'll try to explain why:
>
> Overbooking anything is a recipe for disaster which will happen sooner
> or later. I'm not talking about quota alone. Overbooking network
> connectivity or airplane tickets or disk space or any other limited
> resource is like selling an item you don't actually own. It can look
> appealing to sell 100gigabytes of space when you own only 50, but will
> create you much more problems when every customer decides to use what
> they're paying for. It is called bad business practice.
agreed on that, but I consider it some kind of
bad trend, which will go away soon ...
> Believe, you don't want to sell 100gigs with 50% guarantee (it's a pure
> joke).
they actually do with the bandwidth *G*
> Also, the point of using quota is to be able to delegate space
> allocation to the system in an automatic and guaranteed way. If you
> overbook, you'll have to look constantly on the disk space and allow for
> downtime for disk upgrade when necessary.
but don't forget that soft quota can and should be
used as a kind ofoverbooking, but within statistical
limits ...
for example if you have 1000M userspace and 20 users
you could either give them 50M hard limit or
40M hard and 60M soft quota, and usually it will work
out fine ...
best,
Herbert
>
> Dave.
>