6 ms·

Why would you call colocation "building your own data center"? You could call it "colocation" or "renting space in a data center". What are you building? You're

Why would you call colocation "building your own data center"? You could call it "colocation" or "renting space in a data center". What are you building? You're racking. Can you say what you mean?

macintux 2y ago
Dealing with power at that scale, arranging your own ISPs, seems a bit beyond your normal colocation project, but I haven’t bee in the data center space in a very long time.
- redeux 2y ago
  I worked for a colo provider for a long time. Many tenants arranged for their own ISPs, especially the ones large enough to use a cage.
- latchkey 2y ago
  One of the many reasons we went with Switch for our DC is because they have a service to handle all of that for you. Having stumbled on doing this ourselves before, it can be pretty tricky to negotiate everything. We had one provider give us a great price and then bait and switch at the last moment to tell us that there is some other massive installation charge that they didn't realize we had to pay. Switch Connect/Core is based off the old Enron business that Rob (CEO) bought... https://www.switch.com/switch-connect/ https://www.switch.com/switch-connect/ https://www.switch.com/the-core-cooperative/ https://www.switch.com/the-core-cooperative/
xiconfjs 2y ago
I have to second this. While it takes mich effort and in-depth knowledge do build up from an “empty” cage it’s still far from dealing with everything from building permits, to plan and realize a data center to code including redundant power lines, AC and fibre. Still kudos going this path in the cloud-centric time we live in.
- j45 2y ago
  Having been around and through both, setting up a cage or two is very different than the entire facility.
  - HaZeust 2y ago
    I think you and GP are in agreement.
- matt-p 2y ago
  Yes, the second is much more work, orders of magnitude at least.
  - motorest 2y ago
    > Yes, the second is much more work, orders of magnitude at least. I feel it's important to stress that the difficulty level of collocating something, let alone actually building a data center, is exactly what makes cloud computing so enticing and popular. Everyone focuses on trivia items like OpEx vs CapEx and dynamic scaling, but the massive task of actually plugging in the hardware in a secure setting and get it to work reliably is a massive undertaking.
    - matt-p 2y ago
      I just honestly don't agree with that at all. That's the easy bit, the bit I don't enjoy is organising backups and storage in general. But it's not 'hard'.
- llm_trw 2y ago
  Do I have stories. One of the better was the dead possum in the drain during a thunderstorm. >So do we throw the main switch before we get electroduced? Or do we try to poke enough holes in it that it gets flushed out? And what about the half million in servers that are going to get ruined? Sign up to my patreon to find out how the story ended.
  - 2y ago
walrus01 2y ago
> Why would you call colocation "building your own data center"? The cynic in me says this was written by sales/marketing people targeted specifically at a whole new generation of people who've never laid hands on the bare metal or racked a piece of equipment or done low voltage cabling, fiber cabling, and "plug this into A and B power AC power" cabling. By this, I mean people who've never done anything that isn't GCP, Azure, AWS, etc. Many terminologies related to bare metal infrastructure are misused by people who haven't been around in the industry long enough to have been required to DIY all their own infrastructure on their own bare metal. I really don't mean any insult to people reading this who've only ever touched the software side, but if a document is describing the general concept of hot aisles and cold aisles to an audience in such a way that it assumes they don't know what those are, it's at a very introductory/beginner level of understanding the OSI layer 1 infrastructure.
- justjake 2y ago
  I think that's my fault BTW (Railway Founder here). I asked Charith to cut down a bit on the details to make sure it was approachable to a wider audience (And most people have only done Cloud) I wanted to start off with the 101 content to see if people found it approachable/interesting. He's got like reams and reams of 201, 301, 401 Next time I'll stay out of the writing room!
  - haneefmubarak 2y ago
    Bro let him at the 401 and higher hahaha!
    - justjake 2y ago
      "Booo who let this guy cook?" Fair tbh We will indeed write more on this so this is great feedback for next time!
  - _kb 2y ago
    Sitting on the front page of HN with a good read, and what is ultimately company promo and a careers link seems like a job well done. It made me read/click. Yes, building a physical DC is much wider scope than colo. This is one part of that, which is also still interesting. The world is built on many, many layers of abstraction which can all take lifetimes to explore. There are non-devs who enjoy learning about software, web-devs who dabble in compilers, systems programmers curious about silicon, EE's that are aspiring physicists, who in turn peek into the universe of pure path (cue yes, that xkcd you're thinking of). A 'full stack' overview of a standalone DC build still has to set a bound somewhere. This was an approachable intro and look forward to reading more from the layers you operate.
TacticalCoder 2y ago
> You could call it "colocation" or "renting space in a data center". What are you building? You're racking. Can you say what you mean? TFA explain what they're doing, they literally write this: "In general you have three main choices: Greenfield buildout (...), Cage Colocation (getting a private space inside a provider's datacenter enclosed by mesh walls), or Rack colocation... We chose the second option" I don't know how much clearer they can be.
- jeremyjh 2y ago
  The title is "So you want to build your own data center" and the article is about something else. Its nice that they say that up front, but its valid to criticize the title.
- quickthrowman 2y ago
  Only one of those options is ‘building your own data center’, and I’ll give you three guesses as to which one it is. I’ll even give you a hint: ‘greenfield’ is in the correct answer.
chatmasta 2y ago
It seems a bit disingenuous but it’s common practice. Even the hyperscalers, who do have their own datacenters, include their colocation servers in the term “datacenter.” Good luck finding the actual, physical location of a server in GCP europe-west2-a (“London”). Maybe it’s in a real Google datacenter in London! Or it could be in an Equinix datacenter in Slough, one room away from AWS eu-west-1. Cloudflare has also historically used “datacenter” to refer to their rack deployments. All that said, for the purpose of the blog post, “building your own datacenter” is misleading.
- matt-p 2y ago
  The hyperscalers are absolutely not colo-ing their general purpose compute at Equinix! A cage for routers and direct connect, maybe some limited Edge CDN/compute at most. Even where they do lease wholesale space, you'd be hard pushed to find examples of more than one in a single building. If you count them as Microsoft, Google, AWS then I'm not sure I can think of a single example off the top of my head. Only really possible if you start including players like IBM or Oracle in that list.
  - chatmasta 2y ago
    Maybe leasing wholesale space shouldn’t be considered colocation, but GCP absolutely does this and the Slough datacenter was a real example. I can’t dig up the source atm but IIRC some Equinix website was bragging about it (and it wasn’t just about direct connect to GCP).
    - matt-p 2y ago
      Google doesn't put GCP compute inside Equinx Slough. I could perhaps believe if they have a cage of routers and perhaps even CDN boxes/Edge, but no general cloud compute. Google and AWS will put routers inside Equinx Slough sure, but that's literally written on the tin, and the only way a carrier hotel could work.
      - chatmasta 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ThatGuyRaion 2y ago
Not saying I don't agree with you but most tech businesses that have their own "Data center" usually have a private cage in a Colo.
- cortesoft 2y ago
  They usually don’t say they are building their own datacenter, though. It is different to say something like, “our website runs in our datacenter” than saying you built a datacenter. You would still say, “at our office buildings”, even if you are only renting a few offices in an office park.
  - bagels 2y ago
    We built an office building would be the analogy.
  - fweimer 2y ago
    Don't the hyperscalers outsource datacenter construction and operation? Maybe it's not clear where to draw the line because the datacenters are owned or operated by disposable shell companies for various reasons.
- ncruces 2y ago
  When you rent an apartment, you can still invite people to your apartment for drinks. But you don't claim to have built an apartment.
vel0city 2y ago
How to build a house: Step 1: sign a lease at an apartment
- Imustaskforhelp 2y ago
  its crazy how this is actually true in terms of this sentiment , they should probably change the name of blog article. HN people are smart
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
inopinatus 2y ago
Come to my office and tell me how it’s not actually my office because it’s leased by my company from the investment vehicle for institutional investors that owns the building that stands on land owned by someone else again that was stolen by the British anyway and therefore calling it “my office” makes me a fool and a liar and I should just “say what I mean”.
- yard2010 2y ago
  The british are always the ones to blame :')
  - arminiusreturns 2y ago
    Yes. (except for when it's the Vatican, etc)
- arminiusreturns 2y ago
  It's more like saying you built the building. (I've bootstrapped datacenters to t2)
- fishstock25 2y ago
  When you invite a girl/guy over, do you say "let's meet at my place" or "let's meet at the place I'm renting"? The possessive pronoun does not necessarily express ownership, it can just as well express occupancy.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - kqr 2y ago
    I wouldn't oppose telling a client "we can meet at your data centre". I would not tell my wife "we need to discuss building our apartment complex" when we are planning interior decorations in our flat.
    - inopinatus 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

Why would you call colocation "building your own data center"? You could call it "colocation" or "renting space in a data center". What are you building? You're racking. Can you say what you mean?

macintux 2y ago

Dealing with power at that scale, arranging your own ISPs, seems a bit beyond your normal colocation project, but I haven’t bee in the data center space in a very long time.

redeux 2y ago
I worked for a colo provider for a long time. Many tenants arranged for their own ISPs, especially the ones large enough to use a cage.
latchkey 2y ago
One of the many reasons we went with Switch for our DC is because they have a service to handle all of that for you. Having stumbled on doing this ourselves before, it can be pretty tricky to negotiate everything. We had one provider give us a great price and then bait and switch at the last moment to tell us that there is some other massive installation charge that they didn't realize we had to pay. Switch Connect/Core is based off the old Enron business that Rob (CEO) bought... https://www.switch.com/switch-connect/ https://www.switch.com/switch-connect/ https://www.switch.com/the-core-cooperative/ https://www.switch.com/the-core-cooperative/

xiconfjs 2y ago

I have to second this. While it takes mich effort and in-depth knowledge do build up from an “empty” cage it’s still far from dealing with everything from building permits, to plan and realize a data center to code including redundant power lines, AC and fibre. Still kudos going this path in the cloud-centric time we live in.

j45 2y ago
Having been around and through both, setting up a cage or two is very different than the entire facility.
- HaZeust 2y ago
  I think you and GP are in agreement.
matt-p 2y ago
Yes, the second is much more work, orders of magnitude at least.
- motorest 2y ago
  > Yes, the second is much more work, orders of magnitude at least. I feel it's important to stress that the difficulty level of collocating something, let alone actually building a data center, is exactly what makes cloud computing so enticing and popular. Everyone focuses on trivia items like OpEx vs CapEx and dynamic scaling, but the massive task of actually plugging in the hardware in a secure setting and get it to work reliably is a massive undertaking.
  - matt-p 2y ago
    I just honestly don't agree with that at all. That's the easy bit, the bit I don't enjoy is organising backups and storage in general. But it's not 'hard'.
llm_trw 2y ago
Do I have stories. One of the better was the dead possum in the drain during a thunderstorm. >So do we throw the main switch before we get electroduced? Or do we try to poke enough holes in it that it gets flushed out? And what about the half million in servers that are going to get ruined? Sign up to my patreon to find out how the story ended.
- 2y ago

walrus01 2y ago

> Why would you call colocation "building your own data center"? The cynic in me says this was written by sales/marketing people targeted specifically at a whole new generation of people who've never laid hands on the bare metal or racked a piece of equipment or done low voltage cabling, fiber cabling, and "plug this into A and B power AC power" cabling. By this, I mean people who've never done anything that isn't GCP, Azure, AWS, etc. Many terminologies related to bare metal infrastructure are misused by people who haven't been around in the industry long enough to have been required to DIY all their own infrastructure on their own bare metal. I really don't mean any insult to people reading this who've only ever touched the software side, but if a document is describing the general concept of hot aisles and cold aisles to an audience in such a way that it assumes they don't know what those are, it's at a very introductory/beginner level of understanding the OSI layer 1 infrastructure.

justjake 2y ago
I think that's my fault BTW (Railway Founder here). I asked Charith to cut down a bit on the details to make sure it was approachable to a wider audience (And most people have only done Cloud) I wanted to start off with the 101 content to see if people found it approachable/interesting. He's got like reams and reams of 201, 301, 401 Next time I'll stay out of the writing room!
- haneefmubarak 2y ago
  Bro let him at the 401 and higher hahaha!
  - justjake 2y ago
    "Booo who let this guy cook?" Fair tbh We will indeed write more on this so this is great feedback for next time!
- _kb 2y ago
  Sitting on the front page of HN with a good read, and what is ultimately company promo and a careers link seems like a job well done. It made me read/click. Yes, building a physical DC is much wider scope than colo. This is one part of that, which is also still interesting. The world is built on many, many layers of abstraction which can all take lifetimes to explore. There are non-devs who enjoy learning about software, web-devs who dabble in compilers, systems programmers curious about silicon, EE's that are aspiring physicists, who in turn peek into the universe of pure path (cue yes, that xkcd you're thinking of). A 'full stack' overview of a standalone DC build still has to set a bound somewhere. This was an approachable intro and look forward to reading more from the layers you operate.

TacticalCoder 2y ago

> You could call it "colocation" or "renting space in a data center". What are you building? You're racking. Can you say what you mean? TFA explain what they're doing, they literally write this: "In general you have three main choices: Greenfield buildout (...), Cage Colocation (getting a private space inside a provider's datacenter enclosed by mesh walls), or Rack colocation... We chose the second option" I don't know how much clearer they can be.

jeremyjh 2y ago
The title is "So you want to build your own data center" and the article is about something else. Its nice that they say that up front, but its valid to criticize the title.
quickthrowman 2y ago
Only one of those options is ‘building your own data center’, and I’ll give you three guesses as to which one it is. I’ll even give you a hint: ‘greenfield’ is in the correct answer.

chatmasta 2y ago

It seems a bit disingenuous but it’s common practice. Even the hyperscalers, who do have their own datacenters, include their colocation servers in the term “datacenter.” Good luck finding the actual, physical location of a server in GCP europe-west2-a (“London”). Maybe it’s in a real Google datacenter in London! Or it could be in an Equinix datacenter in Slough, one room away from AWS eu-west-1. Cloudflare has also historically used “datacenter” to refer to their rack deployments. All that said, for the purpose of the blog post, “building your own datacenter” is misleading.

matt-p 2y ago
The hyperscalers are absolutely not colo-ing their general purpose compute at Equinix! A cage for routers and direct connect, maybe some limited Edge CDN/compute at most. Even where they do lease wholesale space, you'd be hard pushed to find examples of more than one in a single building. If you count them as Microsoft, Google, AWS then I'm not sure I can think of a single example off the top of my head. Only really possible if you start including players like IBM or Oracle in that list.
- chatmasta 2y ago
  Maybe leasing wholesale space shouldn’t be considered colocation, but GCP absolutely does this and the Slough datacenter was a real example. I can’t dig up the source atm but IIRC some Equinix website was bragging about it (and it wasn’t just about direct connect to GCP).
  - matt-p 2y ago
    Google doesn't put GCP compute inside Equinx Slough. I could perhaps believe if they have a cage of routers and perhaps even CDN boxes/Edge, but no general cloud compute. Google and AWS will put routers inside Equinx Slough sure, but that's literally written on the tin, and the only way a carrier hotel could work.
    - chatmasta 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ThatGuyRaion 2y ago

Not saying I don't agree with you but most tech businesses that have their own "Data center" usually have a private cage in a Colo.

cortesoft 2y ago
They usually don’t say they are building their own datacenter, though. It is different to say something like, “our website runs in our datacenter” than saying you built a datacenter. You would still say, “at our office buildings”, even if you are only renting a few offices in an office park.
- bagels 2y ago
  We built an office building would be the analogy.
- fweimer 2y ago
  Don't the hyperscalers outsource datacenter construction and operation? Maybe it's not clear where to draw the line because the datacenters are owned or operated by disposable shell companies for various reasons.
ncruces 2y ago
When you rent an apartment, you can still invite people to your apartment for drinks. But you don't claim to have built an apartment.

vel0city 2y ago

How to build a house: Step 1: sign a lease at an apartment

Imustaskforhelp 2y ago
its crazy how this is actually true in terms of this sentiment , they should probably change the name of blog article. HN people are smart

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

inopinatus 2y ago

Come to my office and tell me how it’s not actually my office because it’s leased by my company from the investment vehicle for institutional investors that owns the building that stands on land owned by someone else again that was stolen by the British anyway and therefore calling it “my office” makes me a fool and a liar and I should just “say what I mean”.

yard2010 2y ago
The british are always the ones to blame :')
- arminiusreturns 2y ago
  Yes. (except for when it's the Vatican, etc)
arminiusreturns 2y ago
It's more like saying you built the building. (I've bootstrapped datacenters to t2)
fishstock25 2y ago
When you invite a girl/guy over, do you say "let's meet at my place" or "let's meet at the place I'm renting"? The possessive pronoun does not necessarily express ownership, it can just as well express occupancy.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- kqr 2y ago
  I wouldn't oppose telling a client "we can meet at your data centre". I would not tell my wife "we need to discuss building our apartment complex" when we are planning interior decorations in our flat.
  - inopinatus 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]