Colocation UK who do you use?

laughingbuddha · Fri Jun 20, 2008 7:45 pm

Hi,

I'm picking my way through the many colocation companies to find a decent company.

I recently spoke to RedStation who will offer the standard 1u rack, 0.5amp power, and connection wise (cost effective that is) 512kbps dedicated connection with no bandwidth limit.

Now on the other hand RapidSwitch offer the same 1u rack, 0.5amp power, but 100Mbit connection (not sure if its dedicated connection) and 3000Gb bandwidth per month.

Redstation is closer to me as I live near Southampton, and they are based at Fareham. This however will really only matter if a server goes down.

This is what they said to me in there email regarding connection and bandwidth:-

We have a different approach to connectivity. Although RapidSwitch, and many other ISPs, offer a 100Mbps connection, the reality is that you are on the same connection 100's, 1000's or 10s of thousands of other customers are using. This means that as an example if 50 sites on your connection are uploading or downloading media content at any one time, for example a new film trailer release, or peer to per users, there is very little capacity left for everyone else. I'm sure you can imagine there are numerous situations where this can occur. In our experience the high bandwidth users gravitate to suppliers like RapidSwitch for the same reasons you are considering their services, cheap with big bandwidth limits, which makes the problem even worse.

I would really appreciate feedback and advice.

Thanks,

Matt

lordbarrron · Unread post by **lordbarrron** » Sat Jun 21, 2008 6:16 am

It sounds to me as they are giving sound advice to you there.
100mbit in a pool of 100 or more nodes may not prove all that viable, especially if all your neighbours are running youtubes or megauploads.

But you do have to ask yourself this, is 512k enough?
I assume you know the answer to that question as your investing in some specialist solution. I mean you could always set it up in your back room.

Keep looking my advice is dont settle for anything less that what you feel you need.

Sorry i have no specific advice on any collocations but generally the principles of choosing remains constant

laughingbuddha · Sat Jun 21, 2008 7:53 am

Humm, it is a tricky issue. Balancing up dedicated connection (evening if it is a small one) which is close by, with a much higher connection but about 1hr away.

The plan is who every I go for I will use for future server roll outs.

The search continues.

Unread post by **scott** » Sat Jun 21, 2008 10:17 am

When they say 0.5 amp power what are they talking about specifically? My preference is to run 2 dedicated 20 amp circuits per 42U to keep the density down. If they're saying .5amp per U thats probably going to be underpowered (but... encourages you to keep the density down).

I never trust the cooling enough to pack a rack with more than 20 servers. That being said if they're charging a premium per rack then I would go for x2 30 amp circuits per 42U into a pair of 3000w UPS's (if you have them). This way you can run dual power supplies off of independent UPS's, or if possible off of independent breakers.

faris · Unread post by **faris** » Sat Jun 21, 2008 1:37 pm

We are actually in the same situation -we are looking for a new co-lo company.

The issue we have is that we need lots of power. One of our servers takes 1.4 to 1.6A (Dell PE1950 - 1U). Although that one may end up being decommissioned, the others still take 0.8 to 1A each (Dell R200 - 1U).

In other words our machines are power-hungry.

We think we may end up doing the co-lo in Manchester as it is close to us and much cheaper than London.

There's a new data centre being built in the old LG factory in South Wales though. Due for completion at the end of the year. They will have huge amounts of power (and hopefully cooling) due to the nature of the work that used to be done at the original site. But that's too late for us.

I'm currently looking at a company called Melbourn IT which seems affordable but not too "cheap" if you see what I mean.

There are less expensive data centres but they lack things like backup generators - and I can see utility power interruptions happening with more and frequency in the coming years in the UK, and UPS power only last so long.

Faris.

laughingbuddha · Sat Jun 21, 2008 9:10 pm

My server is a HP Proliant DL360 G3. It's running dual PSU (redundent) with 2 x 2.8GHz Xeons, 4GB Memory, 2 x 72GB U320 drives in RAID.

Not sure on the amp draw on that, haven't got anything to hand to measure it.

Of course amp draw does bring up another issue. I will really on the server houses own internet UPS to maintain power. If I add additional UPS units that will mean I start paying for extra rack space, which as this is a new venture (well moving on from my VPS) I don't want to push up the costs too much.

The server is 1u, so I will start with that. I'm hoping to move onto a blade system or sorts, or at least a large server for more storage, cpu's, and memory, but that will come once this one is up.

Matt

laughingbuddha · Sat Jun 21, 2008 9:37 pm

I have just done some digging, and Redstation doesn't fuse there 0.5amp power connection. But if my server really does pull 2 amps, then that will put the price up to £120 per month according to there list plus the data cost.

Still not convinced that a dedicated 512kbps connection is enough, even if it is dedicated.

Matt

faris · Unread post by **faris** » Sun Jun 22, 2008 9:48 am

The question of a dedicated but speed limited connection verses a shared (contended) higher speed connection with a metered use is interesting.

Personally I would not go for a 512k dedicated connection. Why? Well I can do that over a broadband connection! (ignoring reliability and latency issues).

What's more, imagine if you have just one customer who has received a large email (we have lots of customers in that category).

The customer will almost certainly be on a broadband connection that can download at a speed faster than 512k. That means that one customer would consume 100% of your bandwidth while they were downloading.

It might only take 60 to download the email, but scale the whole thing up by a few customers.....and it all goes horribly wrong. 512k might be OK for an individual user, but not for a hosting server with 100s of users.

Of course when you share bandwidth there's always a risk that the supplier won't have enough capacity to deal with the demand. But any co-lo company worth its salt will have plenty of upsteam bandwidth.
They will also have a well balanced internal 100Mb or 1Gb network.

The bottom line, however, is that the days of paying "per U" in parallel with "per Mbit (or byte)" are long gone. It is now more about Amps than "U"s.

You can get a power meter from almost anywhere these days. They plug in to a normal socket, and your applience then plugs into a normal socket on the meter. They show the current draw and various other things on an LCD display.

A modern 1xCPU system with a single 7200RPM drive and maybe 2Gb of RAM might consume 0.4 or 0.5A. But once you have multiple cpus, drives (especially enterprise-class SCSI or SAS 10K or 15K drives) and loads of RAM and god only knows how many fans, things go horrible wrong. That's why the PE1950 takes so much power. It has two dual-core CPUs, 4x 10k SAS drives (although they are slightly lower-power 2.5inch ones) and 4GB of RAM.

Faris.

laughingbuddha · Sun Jun 22, 2008 1:29 pm

I'm just waiting to hear from RapidSwitch on there contention ratio. I have anothe server house near by called, funny enough, Server House which is operated by New Net. Only problem with them is there bandwidth limit is 10GB (starts at). www.newnet.co.uk

Altaire is another one based at Portsmouth. Again there connection to the server is 10Mbps, but the bandwidth limits per month are pritty low at only 25GB. www.altaire.com/hosting/colocation

I think I have to give in and admit that if I'm going to find a good co-lo with good rates, that it won't be near me. RapidSwitch others the best rates and features, plus they only charge an extra £4.00 per 0.5amp of power needed, so getting 2amp of power won't cost the earth.

Matt