Mainframe Costs, ... expensive, y'think? Options

[Craig]

Okay, given that people were bugging me about the eternal question of how much one of these costs, and given the information in M&M about Hospital prices and how they include a mainframe as part of their cost (even if they are super-wussied Mainframes at half the rating of the hospital) I came up with a set of prices for the things.

[donkay_ote]

You already know what I think. I'd say its too expensive. :(


Spencer

[BitBasher]

I'd say for the high end stuff it may be not expensive enough.

EDIT: A blue 1 is 1.25 mil, which I think is too high, it needs a better dispersion across the board IMHO. Lower end needs to be lower, high end needs to be much higher.

[hobgoblin]

blue should be mom and pop servers, kinda like a raid equiped x86 box of today running a web hotel.

the green one is more elaborate server running stuff like news sites, maybe a webshop and similar (alltho those should be high rateing).

orange is similar to a web banking server.

red is a paranoid system, high security corp and goverment mainfraims. a bank would probably run a orange host as a frontend to the main bank system and run the main bank system on a red one.

then there is the thing that rateing is not so much about security as it is computeing power. more computeing power equals more stuff that can be logged and analyzed. the color defines the level of paranoia coded into the log analyzer system. while a blue may ignore small software crashes unless they come in waves, the red one will trigger invastigative code (ice) after a single crash detection. this is atleast my take on the host rateing...

[Edward]

Remember blue and green moderate rating systems are used by major corporations for day to day work and frequently accessed data stores, there really should be some distinction between a ready access data store with hundreds of terapulses of data and 5000 registered users and the host a public primary education facility uses as there virtual library with a terapulse of data and 100 students if its lucky.

Also I don’t see colour as representing processing speed at all, it represents paranoia level and how dangerous the OS will allow the IC and sec deckers to be.

If you need a formula I think it should be proportional to the sum of the system ratings multiplied by the available active memory (and you need a lot) when designing a host they work out expected load and ensure they have plenty of memory but it is by no means limitless.

Edward

[Moon-Hawk]

Here's a thought. According to SSG pg 131 entertainment level 3 gives you a cheap telecom. All other things at zero, that's a 60 :nuyen: /month lifestyle. Multiply by 100 to buy, and it's 6000 :nuyen: for a cheap telecom. Well, SSG pg 120 tells us that a cheap telecom is Blue 4-8/8/6/6/6 and includes Probe-2.
Also, a street corner dataterm is Green 4-8/8/8/8/8. (nevermind that it runs millions of nuyen worth of IC, that's an investment by Ma Bell and she can make her own copies)

So there's an argument that low rated hosts REALLY shouldn't be that expensive.

[zephir]

Do we have any canon references of how heavy/bulky a mainframe of various colors and ratings is?

[Edward]

For the purpose of hacking that home telecom may be a Blue 4-8/8/6/6/6 but do you think its hardware value is even on the same plait as the host with the same stats that runs the primary data store for Aries software development being used by 500 programmers and storing terapulses of program designs. Shore the Aries host is surrounded by bright red chokepoints with more IC than Antarctica and some very complicated sans but the actual program development host will need a lot of processing power, certainly more than a home telecom or even the street corner dataterm.

Edward

[Charon]

All too expensive IMO considering you are not accounting for software cost.

A 4-Blue cost 8 192 000$. That's the kind of crappy mainframe a public high shcool would have! No way any public school I know of would spend more than 20 grand on their computer system. And that better last them for a few years.

An 8-Red cost 101 250 000$. That's a lot even for a megacorps, considering it doesn't account for IC. A Cascading Black IC with armor and a rating of 10 costs 3 600 000$ for example. Let's not get into construct and SKs. They may make billions, but they have thousands of host. One host for each subsidiary, many hosts linked together for their divisions, even more for the umbrella corp and finally there is the matter of PLTGs.

Let's consider a factory owned by Ares that has an 6-Orange. It would be worth 41 472 000 without ICs. The final cost quite possibly could be higher than the factory itself, for crying out loud! Megas have a lot of money but I can't believe half of their assets on the balance sheet is taken up by computer systems. Shareholders will wonder whether they are in the business of doing business or in the business of killing deckers.

Finally, a dataterm for a private home is usually green 4 if I read SSG correctly. That's 13 122 millions. Without IC. Need I say more?

Your formula doesn't take into account the size of the system. A green-4 host supervising a house and a green-4 host supervising a small factory can't be the same price! They might be as hard to crack but we're not talking about the same amount of hardware.

Personnally, I think the mainframe should be less expensive than the value of the program it runs. I'm guessing the ratio mainframe$ / IC$ should be much smaller than the ratio cyberdeck$ / Utilities$. The cyberdeck has to deal with size constraint. You want your Fairlight excaliber to be much more powerful than a Kraftwerk without taking up more place. You don't really have this issue with mainframes, not to the same degree anyway. Up to a certain point, Instead of buying better, you can just buy more to increase power. And at no point will you pay a premium for having your mainframe fit in a shoebox. It can fill a whole room in the basement, you don't care.

So if the total value of ICs on a system is 25 millions it seems unlikely to me that it's running on a system that costs much more than 3 or 4 millions, for example.

Blue 4 for a high school? 15 000$ I'd say.

Green 4 for a home? 3 000$ Yeah, less than Blue for a school ; it just monitor 8 room! Add in cost of IC and the software doing the monitoring, though.

Orange-6 for a factory? 500K to a million I guess.

Orange-6 for a LTG? 30-35 millions worth of server. I dunno, lots of money though.

Red 6 for a yakuza's home? About 1/10 of of the cost of a deck that would be able to run all the ICs he wants. So, I dunno, 40K to 150K? Plus IC, of course. In that case the software is vastly more expensive than the hardware.

Red 10 for a Megacorp host that is a choke point for the rest of their North America Division? Well, I'm thinking a choke point mainframe is likely much cheaoer than an equivalent rating system doing many different functions. Chokepoint essentially only run big ICs and filter traffic. So maybe it'd cost 1,5 Millions while the Orange 8 handling accounting and finance for all operation in NA actually cost 3 millions. Of course, the chokepoint is running much more powerful and expensive ICs.


Finally, I don't think the color of the host is amajor factor on the price. It's how sensitive the system is. I can set my alarm system to be more sensitive. It'll be better at detecting intruders. It'll make me go mad with false alarm , though.

The major factor are rating and size of the operations requested from it. I can easily conceive that a personal hom computer could be harder to crack than a large and overworked company system. Doesn't mean the home system should be more than a tiny fraction of the larger one.

[Nikoli]

Here's my formula sans street index:

[Charon]

Actually, Green should be 2 and blue 1.

If you were to account for the scope of the computer system, that'd be a pretty good and straightforward evaluation except I would weigh color less and rating more.

[Nikoli]

that's to reflect cost of IC, etc.

[GrinderTheTroll]

I'd think Hosts cost should be a function of Color and Rating as well as Subsystem cost a function of Color and Rating maybe just Rating. These could have the typical 1-3, 4-6, 7-9, 10+ sliding scale.

Security Sheaves (more specifically the IC/Software) should also be considered into cost. As it's been mentioned, this is probably more expensive than the Host.

Blue should probably be achievable by players, maybe even Green. I'd think Orange would be probably too cost prohibited and Red should be too obscure and custom to consider. I'd imagine the upkeep cost/maintenance on Orange/Red would easily cost as much as a Green system.

[GrinderTheTroll]

So I have a little spreadsheet to help me try and tinker with how to compute what a host might cost: Host Costing - worksheet .XLS (~10k)

*** NOTE : You may get a Microsoft security warning about macro's because there is some code in the XLS that I used to compute the sliding cost of ACFIS, so it's okay to enable Macros for this spreadsheet.

Here's a sample:

Blue-4 3/3/3/3/3 = 250,000
Green-4 3/3/3/3/3 = 1,900,000
Orange-4 3/3/3/3/3 = 64,600,000
Red-4 3/3/3/3/3 = 500,750,000

-- OR --

Blue-6 6/6/6/6/6 = 1,650,000
Green-6 6/6/6/6/6 = 5,400,000
Orange-6 6/6/6/6/6 = 102,000,000
Red-6 6/6/6/6/6 = 757,500,000

This simply demonstrates my idea that players probably won't have access to personal Orange or Red systems. I also considered the amount of distributed systems Orange and Red probably represent.

Also note that IC is not factored into this cost.

[mfb]

i think that, similar to decks, the rating and security value should be seperate from active and storage memory. active memory should determine how many users can use the host at one time, and how much IC can be loaded onto the system. the utility of storage memory is obvious.

that way, Joe Computer Guy can set up a little host box for his home network without dropping tens of thousands of nuyen, but Joe's Computers, Incorporated, has to pay big bucks to put up a large-scale blue host for their autofactory.

[Charon]

I remind you all that the sample home computer system provided in SSG (p.120) is a Green-4 8/8/8/8/8. It cannot possibly be worth 21 600 000$ as I calculated GtT's spreadsheet (nice work btw).

Take the size of the system into account.

It goes both way. The PLTG of Seattle might just be Green-4 6/8/6/6/6, but I'm pretty sure the cost of the hardware to run it is superior to the cost of the hardware running the Shiawase hosts at their tower in Tacoma. Sure, it's a helluva harder to hack the latter that the former, but that's not the point.

[Eyeless Blond]

Well here's my (preliminary) take on it.

"Hosts" are just a collection of specific programs, controlled by a single master processing program and run on a cyberterminal. Basically a Host is no different logically from a Matrix user's Icon. The term "mainframe" exists mainly to differentiate the (usually more expensive) cyberterminals that run Host programs from the cyberterminals that run end-users' Icons, much in the same way that "cyberdeck" refers to a cyberterminal with a Masking and Evastion program running. The cost of a control program for a Host is therefore roughly analogous to the cost of an MPCP. Take the Security Value of the desired host, times a multiplier based on your security code (1 for Blue, 2 for Green, 4 for Orange, 8 for Red). The cost of the Host Control Program (HCP) is equal to the cost of an MPCP with this rating. Therefore, for example, an Orange-8 HCP would cost the same as a rating 8*4 = 32 MPCP (4,595,712 Y).

While an Icon consists of the Persona programs Bod and Sensor (and occasionally Masking and Evasion), Hosts have Subsystem programs. The pricing on these run directly parallel to the HCP. Take the Subsystem rating, multiply by the Security Value multiplier listed above. The cost of the Subsystem program is equal to the cost of a Persona program with that rating. So, for example, a Control subsystem of 12 on an Orange system would cost 6,682,328 Y.

Of course this is all just a base price. Beyond the cost of the core programs, the host must have additional Active Memory to support the users who will be logging in and out. At the bare minimum this comes to 1,000Mp of Active Memory for each active user, not including server-side programs, environments, and IC. For systems that support several hundred or even thousand users this can become quite expensive; a 500-user factory mainframe for example requires 3.75 million nuyen in Active Memory just to support the users, let alone the IC and utilities and other things that normally run on such a host.

More to come if I have time.

[GrinderTheTroll]

Host is a generic term for the system. It could be one machine or 1000, probably represents many databases, programs, datafiles, you name it. Assuming it's all on one machine unplays probably alot of what makes up a host IMO.

An abstract Host concept stays inline with SR's more abstract nature, the "exact" items that make up "the host" are less relavant than the attributes that define how we can interact with it in SR.

Knowing the cost of ownership, maintenance, operating cost would be more useful than knowing "how much MP active memory" a particular machine has.

[mfb]

except that we're talking about how much it costs to acquire a host, in which case the actual physical makeup becomes important.

[Zeel De Mort]

Nikoli's formulas seem to work reasonably well to my mind, after punching in a few random host details. Haven't tried Grinder's yet, although they seem a little too high at the higher end. The finer detail is a good thing though.

Maybe some kind of system like there is with frames/agents, where you get so many points to spend on different things. In this case you buy a host of a particular colour and security value, and from that get to allocate so many points in ACIFS, memory, or any other attributes as appropriate.

Then you could spend further money to upgrade these if you wanted the ACIFS to be higher than normal for that rating of host.

Maybe someone's done that already. I should really check out that .xls sheet. :)

[GrinderTheTroll]

[mfb]

possibly. to some limited degree, though, i think it should be possible to put the same host one several lower-rated machines, or one higher-rated machine.

[Charon]

[GrinderTheTroll]

[mybrainhurts]

I always assumed that hosts were absolutely massive, which tended to justify their expense, and as such, most small businesses/schools etc didn't have their own host but rather rented a section of a host, most likely with preset security measures, which is how it was affordable.

So corp A has a blue 4 host, rents out space on it to x number of customers and installs some low level IC on each rented sector, which costs the corp next to nothing since there's only a few unique IC's used on every single blue host this corp owns.