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Has anyone tried to run a data center as a Co-Op?

rzerowan 4mo ago
Would actually be a good biz model for the Colo facilities that keep shutting down as everyone moves to the big cloud providers.Now if they can get their hands on enough GPUs and RAM.
- eru 4mo ago
  Why would it be a good business model?
  - danielheath 4mo ago
    I think it aligns incentives way better (but is almost impossible to set up).
    - eru 4mo ago
      Incentives are pretty easy to align, if you have repeat customers and repetition. McDonald's sells me burgers I expect at a reasonable price, because they want me to come back tomorrow and not go across the street to Burger King.
- orbifold 4mo ago
  can you give examples of colo facilities in SF / New York that are shutting down?
orbifold 4mo ago
I was thinking that would be great, too. What would be the equivalent for the property developer: one gpu server is 450k.
rasur 4mo ago
coopcloud.tech ?
fc417fc802 4mo ago
A data center or a cloud? It's not difficult to find a good data center to colo at. The problem is then you have to bring your own hardware, technicians, and sysadmins. However, if you don't trust cloud providers or inference providers for whatever reason then you probably aren't going to be excited to enter a co-op model where you're still effectively renting access to hardware that you don't directly own. There are already reasonably priced options to rent bare metal from a cloud provider. The only way I see it working is if it's a bunch of medium to large sized businesses getting together to be able to rent out the spare capacity on hardware that they physically control. So an AWS equivalent where each rack is owned by a different company and retail VMs migrate between them transparently. But I question the overall economics of such an arrangement.
- embedding-shape 4mo ago
  > enter a co-op model where you're still effectively renting access to hardware that you don't directly own If we're imagining a co-op, then the participants should all be equal owners in an organisation that owns the hardware itself, otherwise it's not much of a co-op really.
  - fc417fc802 4mo ago
    But at that point you don't have the same sort of security guarantees about the hardware. This isn't like a farming co-op where a single expensive piece of equipment gets passed around to each participant one week at a time. There needs to be either an economic, security, or other advantage to entering into this arrangement for a medium to large sized player that would otherwise be colocating multiple racks in a privately owned datacenter or else renting bare metal instances in bulk from one of the hyperscalers.
    - mattlutze 4mo ago
      Participants as equal owners doesn't preclude security guarantees. The advantage is having a voice in setting direction, investment and ultimate shared incremental profit recovery over the rent capture from hyperscalers. It's an interesting idea really. But it also comes with cooperation, which means trust, and a lot of for-profit enterprises are bad at operating cooperatively outside of 2- or 3- way engagements.

Would actually be a good biz model for the Colo facilities that keep shutting down as everyone moves to the big cloud providers.Now if they can get their hands on enough GPUs and RAM.

eru 4mo ago
Why would it be a good business model?
- danielheath 4mo ago
  I think it aligns incentives way better (but is almost impossible to set up).
  - eru 4mo ago
    Incentives are pretty easy to align, if you have repeat customers and repetition. McDonald's sells me burgers I expect at a reasonable price, because they want me to come back tomorrow and not go across the street to Burger King.
orbifold 4mo ago
can you give examples of colo facilities in SF / New York that are shutting down?

orbifold 4mo ago

I was thinking that would be great, too. What would be the equivalent for the property developer: one gpu server is 450k.

rasur 4mo ago

coopcloud.tech ?

fc417fc802 4mo ago

A data center or a cloud? It's not difficult to find a good data center to colo at. The problem is then you have to bring your own hardware, technicians, and sysadmins. However, if you don't trust cloud providers or inference providers for whatever reason then you probably aren't going to be excited to enter a co-op model where you're still effectively renting access to hardware that you don't directly own. There are already reasonably priced options to rent bare metal from a cloud provider. The only way I see it working is if it's a bunch of medium to large sized businesses getting together to be able to rent out the spare capacity on hardware that they physically control. So an AWS equivalent where each rack is owned by a different company and retail VMs migrate between them transparently. But I question the overall economics of such an arrangement.

embedding-shape 4mo ago
> enter a co-op model where you're still effectively renting access to hardware that you don't directly own If we're imagining a co-op, then the participants should all be equal owners in an organisation that owns the hardware itself, otherwise it's not much of a co-op really.
- fc417fc802 4mo ago
  But at that point you don't have the same sort of security guarantees about the hardware. This isn't like a farming co-op where a single expensive piece of equipment gets passed around to each participant one week at a time. There needs to be either an economic, security, or other advantage to entering into this arrangement for a medium to large sized player that would otherwise be colocating multiple racks in a privately owned datacenter or else renting bare metal instances in bulk from one of the hyperscalers.
  - mattlutze 4mo ago
    Participants as equal owners doesn't preclude security guarantees. The advantage is having a voice in setting direction, investment and ultimate shared incremental profit recovery over the rent capture from hyperscalers. It's an interesting idea really. But it also comes with cooperation, which means trust, and a lot of for-profit enterprises are bad at operating cooperatively outside of 2- or 3- way engagements.