On 5/20/2012 6:36 AM, John Slee wrote:
On 8 May 2012 06:17, Anton Cohen<[email protected]> wrote:
Hosting in your own building is frankly silly. The cost of AC cooling and
electricity alone is astronomical. Combined with other data center logistics
like owning your own IPs so you can do BGP with multi-homed internet,
and redundant power, it's pretty crazy for a small company.
Couldn't agree more. $employer has decided to "save" some beans by
moving stuff (~6 racks of servers plus a rack of Netapp FASxxxx filer)
out of our Equinix cage and into an $employer-owned datacentre...
While there may indeed be a saving (they are moving it to one of their
existing sites that already has ~50 fully populated racks in it) and there
will certainly be a lot of consolidation (in virtualisation and storage layers
especially) I don't think they're really comparing apples with apples.
IMHO a more apt comparison would be apples and a 3-year-old's crayon
art that depicts something you'd recognise as an apple if you were the
kid's parent and feeling very generous... Equinix is far, far more serious
in every aspect of their operation, and if $employer were to replicate that
service, it would probably cost them more because they're operating at
such a relatively small scale.
I took a guided tour of the local EQX facility (SY1/SY2) last year. Only
one word for it: _awesome_. Even though I'd already seen bits of it via
$employer's hosting there. And that was not even their most modern
facility, as they hadn't finished building their new Sydney datacentre
(SY3) yet.
It does look very impressive, and it has a high degree of redundancy,
but, it is not very inefficient in terms of cooling. In fact, it doesn't
take much to be more efficient than what Equinix does at most of their
facilities. For every dollar you pay for electricity, you are paying
another dollar or dollar and a half to remove the heat generated. Also,
you pay per power feed not for usage. They have a fixed cost per circuit
that takes into account the electricity and the cooling. If you don't
use the entire allowed amount, you end up throwing money away.
In this day and age, that's a lot of efficiency loss. But, people who go
to Equinix typically aren't paying for efficiency and Equinix recognizes
this. They are paying for flexibility, redundancy, physical security,
and location (in terms of latency to other places and convenience to
major metropolitan areas). The are many shops that may not need this
particular set of variables in their cost equation.
An employer can easily match the level of physical security (simply by
not being in a colo facility which makes physical security all the more
important). An employer may also have a better power rate than Equinix
provides, and can have a better cooling infrastructure without a lot of
effort, though this can be difficult to do in just a generic room. The
Equinix level of redundancy is typically very hard to match, though.
But, not everybody needs this.
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