Over the past couple days Jessie Smart, our engineering services manager, and I have been bringing up a grid for our webinar tomorrow and I think it provides a concrete example of what utility computing is really all about.

Two guys, one of them a marketeer, are running a system hosted by a partner with 86 processors, 150GB of RAM, 28TB of usable storage and 4.4Gbps of bandwidth to the internet. We’ve never seen the hardware, nor have the folks in the data center seen any of our applications. We now have 33 n-tier applications running, comprised of 297 virtual appliances and 759 volumes - all of which are consuming 64 processors and 67GB of memory.

It hasn’t all gone exactly as planned. First, not all of the servers were ready on schedule. We had a couple servers that kept restarting because of a misconfiguration. Plus, yours truly screwed up and we had to reboot the grid earlier today.

None the less, the total time invested is less than 40 man hours. (But, of course, many of them in a row and late at night.) More importantly, though, it’s 40 man hours from two guys who don’t make a living running servers or applications; Jessie and I have regular roles here that have generated numerous interuptions along the way.

In case you’re tempted, the cost of this system is less than $30K/month.