Re: Socrates and Arachne Services to be retired

Helen Norris wrote:
> Hi Tom
>
> It is true that some existing clients of Socrates who are receiving service
> for free will be directed to a fee-based service. I would note that the two
> services are not equal, and some clients in this boat will receive a higher
> level service for what is really a small cost. That being said, I agree
> that there are clients who need a lower end service who will not be pleased
> about paying anything at all for a service that they dont need. We are
> hoping that in some cases, they will be able to take advantage of some of
> the free services offered on campus, for example bSpace. In addition, one
> of our projects is to come up with a new, more general Unix service. We
> dont know yet what that service will look like, nor how much it will cost,
> if anything. Decisions about how to pay for a service such as this will be
> escalated from the project team to IST management and the CIO, with comments
> and concerns from the campus included. Well take the comments that we see
> here on Micronet (and in other forums) and also those that are addressed to
> the mailbox cited on the previous email, cosar_at_lists.berkeley.edu, so I
> encourage comments to continue.

There is a sad omission from the "Socrates and Arachne Report"
<http://ist.berkeley.edu/services/tam/socsarachne/Final_SocsArachne_Report.pdf>.
The report appears to have been developed internally by IST, without
customer input. It identifies the concerns of the service provider as
primary, presents the decision to abate the services as fait accompli,
and categorizes the presumed customer needs as "issues" to be dealt with
given the presumptive decision, instead of using those needs for
guidance on the services we should be providing.

Also absent is an analysis of the likely results of abating the socrates
web hosting service. Here is my guess at how people are going to react
to their options:

* bSpace: bSpace was already available for free, and people were doing
web hosting on socrates; this can be taken as prima facie evidence that
bSpace fails to meet the bulk of the needs of this population. I expect
that a percentage of socrates web users will settle for the services
bSpace offers; perhaps 20% of the current socrates population.

* A smaller percentage is invested in their current web sites and tools
and will be willing to pay the (frankly exorbitant) hosting rates for
the Unix web service. ($210 setup plus $30/month--an additional $50
setup plus $18/month for basic MySQL access). I expect only 10% of the
population will be interested in this option.

* A still-smaller percentage will be willing to migrate their current
PHP and CGI sites to technologies supported by the less-expensive
Windows web service ($10/month); less than 10% of the population.

In my estimation, this will leave some 300 current socrates sites doing
something other than using one of the campus' offerings. The other
options include:

* Outsourcing. We already have users who've outsourced their sites to
dreamhost and other hosting services (at 20% of the cost of the IST
services).

* Asking me (and other computing directors) to set up web hosting for
individuals at the unit level. I've already gotten this request; it
would require a significant increase in the amount we are currently
spending. Developing dozens of different web hosting offerings across
units on campus is inefficient.

* Setting up web servers and database servers on desktop machines or
small workgroup servers. This is the option which will be most popular;
we will see a proliferation of insecure, under-managed web and database
servers in faculty offices and labs.

* Getting rid of the sites. Some people will simply stop providing the
information they currently provide on socrates.

None of these options is attractive, advisable, or aligned with the
campus IT strategic plan. I don't think the likely impacts of the
decision to abate the commodity web service on socrates have been
adequately considered in this context.

As a partial aside, I find it implausible that a Unix web hosting
service would cost more than three times as much as a roughly-equivalent
Windows web hosting service; I assume the Unix service is higher-end in
one way or another. The bulk of the demand on campus is for Apache/PHP,
not IIS/ASP: our commodity web hosting offering should be based on the
primary demand.

-- 
Tom Holub (tom_at_LS.Berkeley.EDU, 510-642-9069)
Director of Computing, College of Letters & Science
249 Campbell Hall
<http://LS.berkeley.edu/lscr/>
 
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