7 ms·

Many years ago (2006 and 2009, respectively) I had to choose European and Asian locations for rsync.net storage arrays. My primary, overriding criteria in choo

by rsync 6y ago

Many years ago (2006 and 2009, respectively) I had to choose European and Asian locations for rsync.net storage arrays. My primary, overriding criteria in choosing locations was what would be the coolest, most interesting place to visit for installs and maintenance. I chose Zurich and Hong Kong. Measured results have exceeded my initial models.

Hallucinaut 6y ago
This is one of those comments that's difficult to interpret the meaning of... until you read the commenter's name. (Love your work)
Johnny555 6y ago
The cloud ruined that fringe benefit, I used to manage servers in London and got to visit them quarterly. But now I manage servers all over the world, and it's impossible to see them physically, even the ones that are hosted nearby. Though all things considered, I don't really miss sitting inside a cold, loud datacenter or standing in front of a tiny KVM monitor for hours just to load CD's to do a software upgrade.
- rsync 6y ago
  "But now I manage servers all over the world, and it's impossible to see them physically, even the ones that are hosted nearby." Did you know that we have "drive up" access ? If your account is in San Diego, you can just drive up to the datacenter and connect to our Ubiquiti LR AP. No Internet required. We had it deployed in Denver as well but we moved datacenters a few years ago and are in a tall high rise[1] with difficult access to ground level or roof for antennae ... [1] The "Gas and Electric" building which is the big carrier hotel in Denver ...
  - Arelius 6y ago
    Any capacity to plug in an good old-fashioned Ethernet cable?
    - rsync 6y ago
      Well, yes and no ... Of course we have switches in our racks and of course we could find a way to plug you in ... However, there would be a lot of administrative overhead just to get you inside the datacenter in question, not to mention how we would clear you and your equipment, etc. We regularly accept bare SATA drives as ingress and we support that process in reverse - most likely we would steer you towards that route ...
  - linsomniac 6y ago
    I imagined when reading "tall high rise" that you were in DG&E. I'm not sure where you were at or if you are looking for something else, but we've long been in "Fortrust", now "Iron Mountain" which is north of downtown. In the past they've been very easy to work with, including at one point I used to have a dark fiber that ran from one of my cabinets to DG&E's meet me, where we used it to connect to Level-3. I know some of their customers have antennas on the outside of the building, though I don't believe I'm supposed to know why so I won't go into details. :-) They have plenty of parking, might be worth investigating. DG&E is a weird and wonderful building. Used to have a client that had a suite in there. For those unaware, it is an old, old building, right next to the building that houses the Denver main telco switch. It was built over a hundred years ago, and has been Denver's largest (? maybe that info is out of date) meet-me room for Internet providers. Being such an old building, you can imagine it has all sorts of problems retrofitting modern requirements for cabling and power generation/backup.
    - rsync 6y ago
      Yeah - I don't love DG&E as a physical plant - I much prefer a very American-style one-story, big parking lot, urban sprawl kind of a datacenter ... The issue is the he.net POP. We did use a fiber interconnect across Denver for several years to the coresite datacenter on (Denver) Pearl St. That was free because of a weird handshake deal we had from back in the day but when it stopped being free we really needed to go to DG&E to get 10gb links from Hurricane ... I will also note that we partner with DenverOnline / Firstlink consulting which has their base inside DG&E so that also made good sense. These are all business and personal relationships that go back to the mid-nineties and the Boulder bandwidth coop - we have a really great service and support infrastructure in Denver.
      - linsomniac 6y ago
        Thanks for that reply, loved the geeky details. I'm also an old Boulder co-op user here, I was heavily involved in the Fort Collins version for quite a while, and had various connections including UUCP dialup, SLIP, and T1s to the Boulder co-op. I hadn't realized that rsync.net had drive up service until this thread. Very cool service, even if we don't have it in Denver anymore.
- hinkley 6y ago
  I annoyed my family by chiming in during The Martian about Donald Glover freezing his ass off in the server room: He doesn't have to be cold! If he moved over one aisle he'd be nice and toasty! Last time I was having to go into a server room, hot and cold aisles were still a new thing, so it was just cold everywhere.
  - Kudos 6y ago
    Donald, Danny is his uncle
    - hinkley 6y ago
      Goddamnit. I had it right and outsmarted myself.
    - aidenn0 6y ago
      Danny and Donald are unrelated.
      - Kudos 6y ago
        Man, I should have actually checked when someone told me that D:
- bigiain 6y ago
  I used to regularly schlep hard drives in carry on luggage from Sydney to data centres in Singapore, London, San Francisco, and Dallas - just to spend half an hour in the cold aisle with a screwdriver replacing RAID pairs in production web servers to update more images/pdfs than made sense over the bandwidth we had available to us in the late 90s, and to bring home similarly "too big to download" archival backups. Kept me comfortably in Gold Status with several airlines and the frequent flier miles allowed for a _lot_ of personal travel. (While I miss that a lot, I'm super glad my business isn't reliant on international air travel being a thing these days...)
switch007 6y ago
I’ve nothing against Switzerland (it’s nice) but you’re the first person I’ve ever come across to suggest Zurich (or anywhere in Switzerland) as the coolest and most interesting place in Europe! I’m genuinely interested to hear more.
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  Presumably, it's 'of the list of places with a data-center meeting the specs we require' which, I imagine, limits the range of options somewhat.
  - rsync 6y ago
    No, it really is mostly about skiing (see above). Amsterdam, Frankfurt and (perhaps surprisingly) Marseilles are the places to go if you want to optimize for routing. Equinix has datacenters, with he.net POP, in all three places. You could do a lot worse than standardizing, globally, on EQX datacenters and he.net connectivity ...
    - wahern 6y ago
      How do you handle IPv6 given the squabble between HE and Cogent? Some internal routing and separate peering arrangements?
      - toast0 6y ago
        I'm not sure how rsync.net handles connectivity, but note that chosing to be at an Equinix location that he.net services doesn't necessarily mean using he.net, exclusively, or otherwise. I think both Equinix locations and he.net presence are good indicators of lots of connectivity, and so both together indicates you should have access to many choices of transit (and peering). That said, I have no experience with actually obtaining connectivity at such sites; I have dreams, but no actual need ;)
- rsync 6y ago
  Yes, Zurich is pretty sleepy, but you need to factor in driving distances to skiing ... Zurich is very quick and convenient to any of Chamonix (straight west) Davos/St.Moritz (south), Cervina/Zermatt (southwest) or Südtirol (southeast).
Analemma_ 6y ago
This might set the record as the Pinboard-iest post that didn't actually come from Pinboard.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  Pinboard, the bookmarking system? Did you mean Pinterest?
bigiain 6y ago
This, ladies and gentlemen, is a classic example of the decision making pragmatism required of a "Senior Engineer" over a mid level or junior engineer... ;-)

by rsync 6y ago

Hallucinaut 6y ago

This is one of those comments that's difficult to interpret the meaning of... until you read the commenter's name. (Love your work)

Johnny555 6y ago

The cloud ruined that fringe benefit, I used to manage servers in London and got to visit them quarterly. But now I manage servers all over the world, and it's impossible to see them physically, even the ones that are hosted nearby. Though all things considered, I don't really miss sitting inside a cold, loud datacenter or standing in front of a tiny KVM monitor for hours just to load CD's to do a software upgrade.

rsync 6y ago
"But now I manage servers all over the world, and it's impossible to see them physically, even the ones that are hosted nearby." Did you know that we have "drive up" access ? If your account is in San Diego, you can just drive up to the datacenter and connect to our Ubiquiti LR AP. No Internet required. We had it deployed in Denver as well but we moved datacenters a few years ago and are in a tall high rise[1] with difficult access to ground level or roof for antennae ... [1] The "Gas and Electric" building which is the big carrier hotel in Denver ...
- Arelius 6y ago
  Any capacity to plug in an good old-fashioned Ethernet cable?
  - rsync 6y ago
    Well, yes and no ... Of course we have switches in our racks and of course we could find a way to plug you in ... However, there would be a lot of administrative overhead just to get you inside the datacenter in question, not to mention how we would clear you and your equipment, etc. We regularly accept bare SATA drives as ingress and we support that process in reverse - most likely we would steer you towards that route ...
- linsomniac 6y ago
  I imagined when reading "tall high rise" that you were in DG&E. I'm not sure where you were at or if you are looking for something else, but we've long been in "Fortrust", now "Iron Mountain" which is north of downtown. In the past they've been very easy to work with, including at one point I used to have a dark fiber that ran from one of my cabinets to DG&E's meet me, where we used it to connect to Level-3. I know some of their customers have antennas on the outside of the building, though I don't believe I'm supposed to know why so I won't go into details. :-) They have plenty of parking, might be worth investigating. DG&E is a weird and wonderful building. Used to have a client that had a suite in there. For those unaware, it is an old, old building, right next to the building that houses the Denver main telco switch. It was built over a hundred years ago, and has been Denver's largest (? maybe that info is out of date) meet-me room for Internet providers. Being such an old building, you can imagine it has all sorts of problems retrofitting modern requirements for cabling and power generation/backup.
  - rsync 6y ago
    Yeah - I don't love DG&E as a physical plant - I much prefer a very American-style one-story, big parking lot, urban sprawl kind of a datacenter ... The issue is the he.net POP. We did use a fiber interconnect across Denver for several years to the coresite datacenter on (Denver) Pearl St. That was free because of a weird handshake deal we had from back in the day but when it stopped being free we really needed to go to DG&E to get 10gb links from Hurricane ... I will also note that we partner with DenverOnline / Firstlink consulting which has their base inside DG&E so that also made good sense. These are all business and personal relationships that go back to the mid-nineties and the Boulder bandwidth coop - we have a really great service and support infrastructure in Denver.
    - linsomniac 6y ago
      Thanks for that reply, loved the geeky details. I'm also an old Boulder co-op user here, I was heavily involved in the Fort Collins version for quite a while, and had various connections including UUCP dialup, SLIP, and T1s to the Boulder co-op. I hadn't realized that rsync.net had drive up service until this thread. Very cool service, even if we don't have it in Denver anymore.
hinkley 6y ago
I annoyed my family by chiming in during The Martian about Donald Glover freezing his ass off in the server room: He doesn't have to be cold! If he moved over one aisle he'd be nice and toasty! Last time I was having to go into a server room, hot and cold aisles were still a new thing, so it was just cold everywhere.
- Kudos 6y ago
  Donald, Danny is his uncle
  - hinkley 6y ago
    Goddamnit. I had it right and outsmarted myself.
  - aidenn0 6y ago
    Danny and Donald are unrelated.
    - Kudos 6y ago
      Man, I should have actually checked when someone told me that D:
bigiain 6y ago
I used to regularly schlep hard drives in carry on luggage from Sydney to data centres in Singapore, London, San Francisco, and Dallas - just to spend half an hour in the cold aisle with a screwdriver replacing RAID pairs in production web servers to update more images/pdfs than made sense over the bandwidth we had available to us in the late 90s, and to bring home similarly "too big to download" archival backups. Kept me comfortably in Gold Status with several airlines and the frequent flier miles allowed for a _lot_ of personal travel. (While I miss that a lot, I'm super glad my business isn't reliant on international air travel being a thing these days...)

switch007 6y ago

I’ve nothing against Switzerland (it’s nice) but you’re the first person I’ve ever come across to suggest Zurich (or anywhere in Switzerland) as the coolest and most interesting place in Europe! I’m genuinely interested to hear more.

pbhjpbhj 6y ago
Presumably, it's 'of the list of places with a data-center meeting the specs we require' which, I imagine, limits the range of options somewhat.
- rsync 6y ago
  No, it really is mostly about skiing (see above). Amsterdam, Frankfurt and (perhaps surprisingly) Marseilles are the places to go if you want to optimize for routing. Equinix has datacenters, with he.net POP, in all three places. You could do a lot worse than standardizing, globally, on EQX datacenters and he.net connectivity ...
  - wahern 6y ago
    How do you handle IPv6 given the squabble between HE and Cogent? Some internal routing and separate peering arrangements?
    - toast0 6y ago
      I'm not sure how rsync.net handles connectivity, but note that chosing to be at an Equinix location that he.net services doesn't necessarily mean using he.net, exclusively, or otherwise. I think both Equinix locations and he.net presence are good indicators of lots of connectivity, and so both together indicates you should have access to many choices of transit (and peering). That said, I have no experience with actually obtaining connectivity at such sites; I have dreams, but no actual need ;)
rsync 6y ago
Yes, Zurich is pretty sleepy, but you need to factor in driving distances to skiing ... Zurich is very quick and convenient to any of Chamonix (straight west) Davos/St.Moritz (south), Cervina/Zermatt (southwest) or Südtirol (southeast).

Analemma_ 6y ago

This might set the record as the Pinboard-iest post that didn't actually come from Pinboard.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago
Pinboard, the bookmarking system? Did you mean Pinterest?

bigiain 6y ago

This, ladies and gentlemen, is a classic example of the decision making pragmatism required of a "Senior Engineer" over a mid level or junior engineer... ;-)