10 ms·

Great. If they figure out the ordering system, it could be interesting. Last time (3 months ago) to install 200 servers (that they claim to have up in 120sec) w

by doh 10y ago

Great. If they figure out the ordering system, it could be interesting. Last time (3 months ago) to install 200 servers (that they claim to have up in 120sec) would take 9 weeks, even if with our long term commitment.

jsmthrowaway 10y ago
If you're installing 200 servers that's not a dedicated order. That's a colocation. Why on earth would you order 200 from OVH? That's what, 4 whole cabinets if you squeeze? Do people really order whole cabinets through a sales system clearly designed for 1U to 3U at a time? You really expected four cabs in 9 weeks with no involvement on your part? Of course they need 9 weeks and that's actually pretty good, considering what my procurement timetables look like for facilities my company owns. Shit, I can't even get 52U to the loading dock in 9 weeks.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  > Why on earth would you order 200 from OVH? You don't know what you don't know.
  - tmikaeld 10y ago
    OVH treats VIP customers very differently than its one-cheap-box-hire customers. EDIT: As suggested below by toomuchtodo, at this level of deployment - Colo would be cheaper.
    - toomuchtodo 10y ago
      > So I really don't see any problem with 200 boxes from OVH. Its not cost effective compared to hiring ops and colo'ing it yourself. Once you're large enough, you hit tipping points: * When to move from cloud to dedicated equipment * When to move from dedicated equipment to someone else's colo (usually Equinix, but lots of providers in this space with varying levels of "warm fuzzies", which would cover on site techs, power and network redundancy, diesel commitments, and so on) * When to move from someone else's colo to your own datacenter (or in the other direction, depending on business requirements) It also helps that US tax code (Sec 179) provides gracious depreciation schedules for physical compute/network/etc, which means that profit spread between cloud providers and you running your own gear goes back into your business or into your pocket Disclaimer: 15 years of ops experience, including selling hosting to Fortune 500 companies as well as helping companies move from cloud to on-prem as well as the other way around. I've had to run cost/benefit analysis for this most of my career.
      - tmikaeld 10y ago
        I assumed that we where talking dedicated hardware here and not cloud. We know from experience that public cloud is a huge money sinkhole compared to running your own cloud on bare metal (we use proxmox). I'm sure you know operating costs better than we do though, we don't have our own Datacenter.
        Veratyr 10y ago
        I think what he's saying is that 200 boxes from OVH is dedicated and that 200 boxes is well past the point where you should switch from dedicated to colo. The cloud part was just an example of a tipping point and not the main point of the comment.
        toomuchtodo 10y ago
        Yes! Thanks for pointing this out.
        tmikaeld 10y ago
        Ah, ok, well I don't have any experience with the accumulated costs at this level of deployment.
      - astrodust 10y ago
        The OVH costs are often not a huge premium over self-leased equipment, especially when you factor in power, co-location fees, and other overhead. There's a sweet spot between 1 server and some number, say into the hundreds, where OVH is still cost effective. Beyond that you'll absolutely want to roll with your own gear because you can negotiate for a whole cage instead of partial racks.
      - doh 10y ago
        Depends where are you based. OPS in the Bay Area is above 100k/year which need to be added to the price of servers. Also one person has a huge bus factor so you essentially need two people (if one is sick or on vacation). Now you're at 200k+ annually without having any server installed. 200 servers (at least the one we were interested in) would cost us around $22k on OVH each month. That means if I remove the personal that I would have to hire, the cost of servers is now down to $6k/month (200/12). For that money you can't really find a better option. In our case, where we are running thousands of severs on any given time, the flexibility is much more important than price. So we built our service around pre-emptible instances on GCE (the same as spot on AWS). You can't beat dedicated server in performance, but it's close enough and they're making for it by having a great infrastructure.
    - jhgg 10y ago
      How does one become an OVH VIP?
      - tmikaeld 10y ago
        They have extra level(s) of support for long-time/larger customers. https://www.ovh.com/fr/support/service-client/support-vip.xml https://www.ovh.com/fr/support/service-client/support-vip.xm... Edit: English here under support button https://www.ovh.ie/support/contact-us/ https://www.ovh.ie/support/contact-us/
      - FraKtus 10y ago
        We have one server with them as VIP and very happy about it, they react fast on support with a special team dedicated... we asked a quote for this server and they proposed several solutions.
- doh 10y ago
  We couldn't get any number of any servers. I asked for 10 servers that they are boosting to be up in 120s. Nope. I asked for 20 random servers in same range. Nope. After 4 days of back and forth we ended up nowhere. They stop responding after lunch time PST so the communication was delayed by 24 hours in every single instance.
joshmn 10y ago
That's more in line for colocation than just a hosted solution. They probably don't have that much hardware laying around that's unused.
- doh 10y ago
  I understand. But we couldn't get even 10. We got too spoiled by Google Cloud.
  - vidarh 10y ago
    That's why the big cloud providers charge what they charge - you're basically paying for them to have a huge excess capacity ready and waiting. If you want to take advantage of the prices of providers like OVH, use colo or dedicated servers from those kind of providers for "base load" for their cost, and tie in cloud resources for traffic spikes or batch jobs. EDIT: As pointed out elsewhere, though, 200 servers is way above the point where hiring - or contracting with someone - to rack and maintain your own equipment in a colo should be at the very least considered, with some caveats (e.g. location - rack space rental is largely correlated with local land prices, so if you're in a property hotspot dedicated servers maybe remain cost-effective vs. colo facilities within short enough travel up to larger numbers of servers.
astrodust 10y ago
Their ordering system isn't the biggest hassle. It's their billing system that's absurd.

by doh 10y ago

jsmthrowaway 10y ago

If you're installing 200 servers that's not a dedicated order. That's a colocation. Why on earth would you order 200 from OVH? That's what, 4 whole cabinets if you squeeze? Do people really order whole cabinets through a sales system clearly designed for 1U to 3U at a time? You really expected four cabs in 9 weeks with no involvement on your part? Of course they need 9 weeks and that's actually pretty good, considering what my procurement timetables look like for facilities my company owns. Shit, I can't even get 52U to the loading dock in 9 weeks.

toomuchtodo 10y ago
> Why on earth would you order 200 from OVH? You don't know what you don't know.
- tmikaeld 10y ago
  OVH treats VIP customers very differently than its one-cheap-box-hire customers. EDIT: As suggested below by toomuchtodo, at this level of deployment - Colo would be cheaper.
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    > So I really don't see any problem with 200 boxes from OVH. Its not cost effective compared to hiring ops and colo'ing it yourself. Once you're large enough, you hit tipping points: * When to move from cloud to dedicated equipment * When to move from dedicated equipment to someone else's colo (usually Equinix, but lots of providers in this space with varying levels of "warm fuzzies", which would cover on site techs, power and network redundancy, diesel commitments, and so on) * When to move from someone else's colo to your own datacenter (or in the other direction, depending on business requirements) It also helps that US tax code (Sec 179) provides gracious depreciation schedules for physical compute/network/etc, which means that profit spread between cloud providers and you running your own gear goes back into your business or into your pocket Disclaimer: 15 years of ops experience, including selling hosting to Fortune 500 companies as well as helping companies move from cloud to on-prem as well as the other way around. I've had to run cost/benefit analysis for this most of my career.
    - tmikaeld 10y ago
      I assumed that we where talking dedicated hardware here and not cloud. We know from experience that public cloud is a huge money sinkhole compared to running your own cloud on bare metal (we use proxmox). I'm sure you know operating costs better than we do though, we don't have our own Datacenter.
      - Veratyr 10y ago
        I think what he's saying is that 200 boxes from OVH is dedicated and that 200 boxes is well past the point where you should switch from dedicated to colo. The cloud part was just an example of a tipping point and not the main point of the comment.
        toomuchtodo 10y ago
        Yes! Thanks for pointing this out.
        tmikaeld 10y ago
        Ah, ok, well I don't have any experience with the accumulated costs at this level of deployment.
    - astrodust 10y ago
      The OVH costs are often not a huge premium over self-leased equipment, especially when you factor in power, co-location fees, and other overhead. There's a sweet spot between 1 server and some number, say into the hundreds, where OVH is still cost effective. Beyond that you'll absolutely want to roll with your own gear because you can negotiate for a whole cage instead of partial racks.
    - doh 10y ago
      Depends where are you based. OPS in the Bay Area is above 100k/year which need to be added to the price of servers. Also one person has a huge bus factor so you essentially need two people (if one is sick or on vacation). Now you're at 200k+ annually without having any server installed. 200 servers (at least the one we were interested in) would cost us around $22k on OVH each month. That means if I remove the personal that I would have to hire, the cost of servers is now down to $6k/month (200/12). For that money you can't really find a better option. In our case, where we are running thousands of severs on any given time, the flexibility is much more important than price. So we built our service around pre-emptible instances on GCE (the same as spot on AWS). You can't beat dedicated server in performance, but it's close enough and they're making for it by having a great infrastructure.
  - jhgg 10y ago
    How does one become an OVH VIP?
    - tmikaeld 10y ago
      They have extra level(s) of support for long-time/larger customers. https://www.ovh.com/fr/support/service-client/support-vip.xml https://www.ovh.com/fr/support/service-client/support-vip.xm... Edit: English here under support button https://www.ovh.ie/support/contact-us/ https://www.ovh.ie/support/contact-us/
    - FraKtus 10y ago
      We have one server with them as VIP and very happy about it, they react fast on support with a special team dedicated... we asked a quote for this server and they proposed several solutions.
doh 10y ago
We couldn't get any number of any servers. I asked for 10 servers that they are boosting to be up in 120s. Nope. I asked for 20 random servers in same range. Nope. After 4 days of back and forth we ended up nowhere. They stop responding after lunch time PST so the communication was delayed by 24 hours in every single instance.

joshmn 10y ago

That's more in line for colocation than just a hosted solution. They probably don't have that much hardware laying around that's unused.

doh 10y ago
I understand. But we couldn't get even 10. We got too spoiled by Google Cloud.
- vidarh 10y ago
  That's why the big cloud providers charge what they charge - you're basically paying for them to have a huge excess capacity ready and waiting. If you want to take advantage of the prices of providers like OVH, use colo or dedicated servers from those kind of providers for "base load" for their cost, and tie in cloud resources for traffic spikes or batch jobs. EDIT: As pointed out elsewhere, though, 200 servers is way above the point where hiring - or contracting with someone - to rack and maintain your own equipment in a colo should be at the very least considered, with some caveats (e.g. location - rack space rental is largely correlated with local land prices, so if you're in a property hotspot dedicated servers maybe remain cost-effective vs. colo facilities within short enough travel up to larger numbers of servers.

astrodust 10y ago

Their ordering system isn't the biggest hassle. It's their billing system that's absurd.