On Wed, Feb 21, 2024 at 8:02 PM Brent Legg wrote: > Saying an IXP can be built for $8k is enormously confusing to many > policymakers
Only if someone tries to confuse them by referring to a datacenter as an IXP.
So, please don’t do that. $8k is a reasonably-up-to-date global average cost
for new IXP formation.
> Does it need to be a facility that networks can rely on to remain “up” in the
> wake of adverse events? Yes.
Why?
> Resilient from power outages? Yes.
Why?
> Resilient from cooling equipment failures? Yes.
Why?
> Resistant to wind damage? Yes.
Why?
> Is “best effort” good enough? No.
Why? And what do you think is better than “best?"
> Then does it need to be professionally managed? Yes.
Why? And this is really a big one. I know why Hunter needs it to be managed
by someone else to fit his model, but how would that advantage anyone in
Wichita? It’s perfectly ok for different people to have fill different niches
and have different business models. Hunter likes neutral datacenters with a
lot of interconnection, and I do too. Having an IXP in such a datacenter is
enormously advantageous to the datacenter, and makes its financial outlook much
better. Hunter is trying to move fast and cover a lot of ground. Which is
great. Solving problems at scale is great. But he’s solving a datacenter
problem, not an IXP problem. The IXPs are simply a way of making it more
likely that the datacenters will thrive. Which is great. For the datacenters.
But if you’re trying to drop a hundred tiny datacenters off the back of
trucks, and you’re moving fast, and you want an IXP in each one as soon as
possible, doing the four to eight months of work typically necessary to
organically organize an IXP in each location simply doesn’t scale. So,
outsourcing this to something like DE-CIX makes sense for Hunter. But it
doesn’t particularly make sense for DE-CIX, and it doesn’t particularly make
sense for Wichita, or any other specific community of network operators. Will
it work? In some places, sure. Roll the dice enough times and you’ll win some
of the time. But being one of many bets, some of which will fail, isn’t
particularly reassuring to any specific community. As long as Hunter doesn’t
make an _exclusive_ agreement with DE-CIX, I don’t see this as particularly
problematic. But I’m not sure you appreciate what a bad thing “professional
management” is for APBDC. Just look at Manchester.
> Where should it be built? Where a concentration of eyeball traffic already
> exists that can grow a peering ecosystem faster than it might otherwise, and
> that is also proximate to existing fiber plant, and where diverse manholes
> can be placed on the edge of public right-of-way.
> In the case of Wichita, that’s at Wichita State University.
That’s one possible location, and again, it’s optimal for Hunter’s specific
datacenter construction model, but it’s not optimal for an IXP site.
> Creating a secure, neutral, resilient interconnection facility with proper
> cooling, power systems, lockable cabinet space, diverse manholes and POE
> isn’t cheap. The whole project is actually more than the $5M grant we
> received. We’re putting in over $800k in cash, plus additional in-kind match.
No argument there, and it seems quite reasonable to build this sort of
very-small purpose-built datacenter in places that don’t already have one. And
I have no problem with the use of public funds to make it happen. I do have a
problem with people mis-labeling it as an IXP, because that, as you so rightly
pointed out, confuses policy-makers. Who might mistakenly think that by
funding the construction of datacenters, they’d helped the IXP situation
somehow. There’s no problem with helping datacenters, but datacenters and IXPs
are radically different things, with different and not-aligned purposes and
utterly unrelated business models. Confusing policy-makers and leading them to
think that IXPs can be helped by throwing money at them causes a lot of
problems. Which I wind up having to straighten out, so it makes work for me,
and my time can be better spent on productive things.
So, good on you for getting more small datacenters into third-tier markets!
But please stop confusing policy-makers by calling them IXPs, or implying that
they have something to do with IXPs. There’s a possibility that some of them
will be located in places that aren’t sub-optimal for IXPs, and that would be
nice, but those would be generally be sub-optimal for datacenters, so I don’t
recommend that you try to do that.
-Bill
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