[COLUG] Local colocation of server

[William Yang]

Robert Grimm wrote:
> I like Cera.net because the generator runs on natural gas. 

Diesel and natural gas both have different up and down sides.  I'm
always concerned about natural gas, because the technology doesn't


> I don't have
> to worry about the diesel running out because the snow is too deep for
> someone to get to it before it goes empty. They do have a bandwidth
> limit of 1TB per month, but that can be raised. What does Flexible offer
> that makes it better? I don't have a huge array of expensive servers or
> any high bandwidth sites to host, so Cera.net is good for now, but in
> the future, I may need a better place.

What does Flex offer that Cera doesn't?  I've only visited Cera.net
once, but the biggest difference is probably climate control and level
of redundancy.

Take this with however much salt you want:  I've had equipment burn out
in colo space before because of cooling issues.

I did a walk-through tour of Cera.net recently.  On Friday, October 19,
at about 3 in the afternoon with the outdoor temperature at about 70f,
the site maintained a raised floor server room temperature that seemed
uncomfortably warm for people, let alone computers.  When I walked into
the room, I was immediately struck by how warm the air was.  My "feel of
the skin" estimate of the server room temperature was conservatively
around 85f (they told me that they don't track this kind of thing, which
frankly disturbed me).  There did not appear to be any in-room fire
supression.  Humidity also seemed high.  On the tour, Anthony told me
they were going to add a new cooling unit soon, so this warrants some
re-evaluation.

Thing is, there are some design issues with how Cera.net's set their
data center up, which requires them to have significantly more cooling
to maintain a reasonable temperature.  They mix hot and cold air, and
don't have the tonnage (including their planned tonnage) to really keep
the temperature down doing that.

In contrast, Flex is located in the BlueMile data center downtown.  This
was a dot-com data center (multi-million dollar build) that went bust
and got bought up a song and turned toward the disaster
recovery/colocation business.  This has pretty much everything I've ever
seen in a high-end data center (dry fire supression pipes, raised
floors, under floor cooling, overhead wiring, center-wide UPS, diesel
generator backed, fob and passcode physical access to the building and
the data center, caged racks, multiple redundant network feeds from
different providers, and the like.  I've been in the data center
numerous times -- night, day, hot, cold, whatever, in small groups (1-3)
or large groups (~30) -- and it's always the same cool temperature and
humidity.

Both Cera and Flex are priced at $100, but the packages are slightly
different.

Big diffs:

		Flex		Cera
Bandwidth	50GB		no limits (1TB?)
Space		2U		looked like 4U - "one box"
Addresses	justify		8
Power		good		looked good
Cooling		good		barely adequate
Support		good		looked reasonable

I've been successful getting more IP addresses from Flex by asking and
having a good reason.

So...  between the two, it really seems to be a question of how much you
value the facility and environmentals versus bandwidth costs.  A best
fit really is going to depend on what you want/need.

	-Bill
-- 
William Yang
wyang at gcfn.net