7 ms·

How to colocate your first server at a datacenter

87 points by kvmosx 12y ago

dsplatonov 12y ago
Nice article, thanks, but does it applies to all types of the datacenters?
- caw 12y ago
  I can't see a type of datacenter it doesn't apply to. You pay for transit, power draw, and to a lesser extent rack units. If you get a rack or a half rack with your expected power draw and want to spill past that they'll be charging you extra because that's space they can't sell to someone else. Some datacenters also provide cages, so your hardware is physically separated from other people. That'll cost extra too. The only thing I didn't see a mention of is DC power, whereas your out of the box power supplies on most OEM equipment is for AC. Most of the server supplies nowadays should be able to handle 240V, 208V, and 120V with AC on the same unit, when you go DC you want to consider buying a separate AC power supply for setting up the server in your office (unless you drop ship it to the colo). Make sure you get a very efficient power supply too, because while you can get the most efficient or power miserly server on the planet, an inefficient power supply will increase the draw significantly. You also want to right-size the power supply, because drawing too little power lowers the efficiency (there's an efficiency curve available for most PSUs that are rated).
tempodox 12y ago
How is it a “colocation” if it is your “first server”? In the age of on-line dictionaries no less?
- jqueryin 12y ago
  A colocation center is a type of data center where equipment, space, and bandwidth are available for rental to retail customers. Colocation facilities provide space, power, cooling, and physical security for the server, storage, and networking equipment of other firms—and connect them to a variety of telecommunications and network service providers—with a minimum of cost and complexity. Colocation by no means indicates you have multiple servers that need housing nowadays.
- dasil003 12y ago
  The irony is delicious, you'd have fared much better with the first sentence alone.
- Tomte 12y ago
  Your server is co-located with other customers' servers.
err4nt 12y ago
Thanks for the article, I've seen that term floating around and never knew how to get started. I've been itching to get into the server hosting business as a side thing ever since renting my own KVM VPS. I was blown away by the fact that I can sit there and watch it reboot over screen sharing from my iPad. I treat it as a cloud desktop (runs the latest vanilla Ubuntu) and so of course it was easy to get apache and PHP and Ruby and a whole web server environment up. I do all my work on it, as well as my play. I use Plex to stream myself media, and OwnCloud and other tools to replace Dropbox and even deploy sites. I want to sell people on the idea that it's easy to have a cloud desktop you can access from anywhere, that can also be a web server (not selling web servers that can also have a desktop). I want to sell people on the Idea that with freely available software, we can each have a private cloud with just our data. I'm not quite sure how to get started, and I'm not trying to make a killing with profit, I just don't see people trying to make it simpler for the average Joe to have a cloud desktop and not need to pay to use shared cloud services which then become huge targets for data breaches.
- Tenhundfeld 12y ago
  Not trying to dissuade you or imply this is exactly the same thing, but I wanted to make sure you're aware of Amazon WorkSpaces [http://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/ http://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/], "a fully managed desktop computing service in the cloud."
csbrooks 12y ago
What are the advantages of doing this over just paying for computing power on AWS or some other cloud service? Feels like it would be a very small niche at this point.
- icebraining 12y ago
  Cost: https://blog.serverdensity.com/saving-500k-per-month-buying-your-own-hardware-cloud-vs-colocation/ https://blog.serverdensity.com/saving-500k-per-month-buying-...
- dsplatonov 12y ago
  i think AWS is good, when you're not sure if you will use all resources of your servers or need scalability. If you know your growth rate, what type of resources are used, etc. it will be cheaper to have servers in a datacenter instead of using AWS. Many companies, upon growing, starting to rent a space in datacenter or even build their own.
- gtirloni 12y ago
  AWS comes with a ton of added functionality that may not be relevant to you, especially if you've no need to scale or deploy machines in seconds. That comes at a cost. It's a shallow orange vs. apples comparison, but look at the price of colocating 1/3 rack at Hetzner (119EUR). If you already own the hardware, have no need to use any advanced AWS feature, have the skills to manage it, etc.. sometimes it make sense. For personal and/or SMB needs, it usually not worth the trouble (specially regarding skills to maintain it). So you're right, it's becoming more and more a niche.
- caw 12y ago
  Cloud is definitely better if you need to scale out, but if you need either raw performance, have requirements for particular hardware (e.g. Backblaze with their custom disk shelves, certain hardware appliances, tape backup requirements), or if you want the cheapest cost per month then a colo may be right for you. Remember it's cheaper because you're paying for the sysadmin time and remote hands, versus Amazon with their people. You could also do hybrid approach - colo for core infrastructure and cloud to scale out, but that's more difficult to setup. At a certain scale of colo or with very heavy security requirements you'll find it's cheaper to have your own datacenter.
tacticus 12y ago
And no mention of ipv6 at all. at the very least it gives you much easier management of private networks (yay real ip addresses) and there is more and more traffic coming over it (think mobile phones and etc.)
jlawer 12y ago
Couple of bits of advice to anyone doing this: Firstly get your own IPs from your local RIR. Have your co-lo provider publish your routes, but they will be YOUR IPs. if you co-lo provider sucks, you can move and keep your IP space. (This is vital for email, but I recommend it for everyone). Secondly buy a Out of Band Management card with your server (iDrac for Dell, iLO for HP, etc) these cost fairly little and will save you hours of access / remote hands. They will pay for themselves, you can even boot an ISO from your laptop over the internet. Get your co-lo provider to give you an extra uplink for this and give it a separate IP (use one of the providers range) Thirdly consider Mission Critical support on the servers from a solid vendor (In australia I consider the enterprise vendors Dell, HP, IBM and Acer, and of those I will only use Dell or HP). 4 hour response means you don't need as much spare hardware, and you can have things fixed FAST. I have only lost 2 disks in a rack of servers over 4 years. Both had a replacement in place within 4 hours (once at 1am). Fourthly look at a good Virtualization solution. We initially went oVirt (Open source version of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization) but ended up migrating to VMWare. VMWare Essentials Plus costs us $15K for 3 years in extortionate australia prices and is worth every cent. It provides Backup (VMWare Data Protector), Failover, Virtual SAN, Live Migration and a heap of useful features that save huge amounts of time. Finally if your going to grow consider getting a rack (or half / third of a rack). This will likely give you unescorted access to the data centre, and is often not that much more then a few RU of servers (depending on the DC and racking availability).
- techsupporter 12y ago
  I thought you could only get an IP delegation if you were multi-homing and could justify a /24. Is that still the case?
  - jlawer 12y ago
    We did this with APNIC (being based in Australia), and we were able to justify a /24 on a single server without multi-homing. I don't think they allocate less then a /24 so if you have cause for 1 you get the whole /24. That said ARIN and others might be different. For example APNIC will only allow up to a final /22 allocation at the moment, where as ARIN just allocated a much larger block despite being on final allocation rationing.
detournement 12y ago
I am so glad I live in a world where I will never have to do this again for anything but large infrastructure projects. I've colocated servers at major POPs like 111 8th Avenue in Manhattan, Equinix in Seacaucus, One Wilshire in LA. For smaller projects, the convenience of the cloud is absolutely worth the price. For a larger build - like over 10k a month in infrastructure cost the cloud starts to make less sense economically but 'colocating your first server' is not a right of passage anymore - its unnecessary and a huge waste of time. All of the functionality/services you have to provision yourself in colo like - redundancy, backup, remote hands, environmental monitoring, hardware maintenance are just not worth figuring out until there is substantial cost savings to realize.
- pmoriarty 12y ago
  I like to keep control of my data and manage my own systems, instead of using some black box where I'm at the mercy of a cloud provider. You're not going to be able to troubleshoot or optimize down to the hardware level in the cloud. If some cloud service doesn't work or is not available, all you can really do is wait and hope they get it working again, while if you manage your own systems you might have a chance of fixing it or at least finding out what happened and work to prevent it from happening again. Some applications just won't work on the cloud or exhibit mysterious bugs, failures, or bizarre behavior. Security and data ownership is pretty much out of your hands when your servers are in the cloud. You can only hope and pray your cloud provider is doing a good at securing your data and isn't stealing or selling it themselves. You generally have zero visibility in to how security is handled by your cloud provider or whether a security compromise has taken place. And then there's the issue of vendor lock-in, which becomes more and more likely the more unique cloud features you use. Of course, for maximum control, you wouldn't rely on a colo either, and just host your servers in your own server room(s).
- druiid 12y ago
  Mostly agree, although in this case I say mostly because the colo facilities where you can easily rent a single unit of space are far and few between these days. If we were still in an environment where there were tons of hosts like Verio still around, I'd say there's nothing wrong with coloing a single box. For sure once you reach above the $10k/month level there's a very good chance that it will make sense to colo. You can fit a LOT of hardware in a single full rack, and they're like $750/month plus bandwidth and power costs (so around $1200-1700 all said and done per month).
EdSharkey 12y ago
I colocate my little cluster of servers with Opus:Interactive in Portland, OR. It's neat to look at the homebrew artists with their motley crew of machines all colocated together in racks in the corner followed by many homogenous racks filled with boxes from big name companies. I don't prefer building powerful hardware. I prefer reliable and cheap to build and maxing out the 4U of my rack. I like to think of my servers as "life support for an internet connected harddrive". My CPU's are fanless Intel Atom's with 2GB of ram and I get Mini-ITX motherboards that can be powered by a brick DC power supply. Ultimately, I'll move to Flash hard drives so I'll have no moving parts in my server, but I'm waiting for the price to come down and for reliability to match spinning media.
- techsupporter 12y ago
  I'd like to know more about how you do that. I just looked at Opus' site and the 4U they advertise in Hillsboro is pretty good when compared to what I pay for 1U of hobbyist colo in Seattle. Do you put multiple machines inside the 4U with a switch in the same space? Can I be so bold as to ask for pictures? What kind of physical access do you get? I have a 1U server-grade machine but moving to a more flexible space would be nice, even if it does mean a train trip to go see my boxen.
  - turnip1979 12y ago
    I've been interested in hobbyist colo for a while but the cheapest I've found is over $100 a month. Is this in the ballpark of what you are paying or are there better deals to be had?
    - techsupporter 12y ago
      The rate I'm paying no longer exists and the company I'm with got merged into another one so my point of reference isn't so good. :) That said, there are a couple of companies on Webhostingtalk that have good prices for hobbyist colo if you look in their colocation forums and search for "Seattle." Opus is nice ($129 for 4U and 3A of power with 400GB of transit) and there is a company in Seattle--their name escapes me but I've seen them on WHT--that is $35 for 1U and 1A with 500GB of transit. So, yes, I think you can do better especially if you just want space for a medium-usage 1U.
xeroxmalf 12y ago
Also don't forget to check out the rented dedicated server market too. It provides a good middle ground in cost/power/performance to the extremes of cloud providers and colocation.
- threeseed 12y ago
  I am surprised how few people know about this. It isn't just a "good middle ground". It is an amazing middle ground that allows you to benefit from AWS services (simply choose providers close to AWS data centres) whilst getting substantial performance/cost benefits. I would imagine at minimum you are getting 10x the performance compared to a typical VPS.
- neurotixz 12y ago
  Yes, always compare with rented dedicated, and only go with colo if it makes sense. I did this analysis last year and rented won big time. Never looked back since. Main points in favor of rented dedicated servers: - Much cheaper in my business case (5-10 TB/month by server, only a few high CPU requirements) most dedicated come with bandwidth included - No need to take care of the hardware in case of failure (opening a ticket versus managing the whole process) - Easier to switch machine if needs changes - Scales faster (as quickly then 2-3 hours with decent automation tools, and virtualization) - No switch, firewall, etc (IPMI should always be behind a firewall, never opened on the Internet) - The upfront cost to buy a server was high, and monthly cost of dedicated was actually lower, due to the lack of competition in the colo sector in my area (Montreal, Canada), prices were (and still are) rising quickly, it was hard to predict the long-term costs
  - turnip1979 12y ago
    Maybe it is a Canada thing. I looked at some colos in the Toronto area a few back and found rental prices were about the same as bringing your own hardware. Didn't make sense. I was just looking for a home for some server hardware I have in my garage. Oh well.
    - neurotixz 12y ago
preinheimer 12y ago
I blogged about my own experience with this here: http://blog.preinheimer.com/index.php?/archives/413-Buying-a-Zoo-server.html http://blog.preinheimer.com/index.php?/archives/413-Buying-a...
timthorn 12y ago
The article talks about 1U being a good form factor, but one thing to bear in mind is that cooling fans tend to work harder in a 1U chassis than a 2U, hence drawing more power.
- jlawer 12y ago
  I would also add that in most DCs your never going to have the power capacity to have racks filled with 1RU servers, so 2RU servers are typically not much more expensive to Rack then their slimmer brethren.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
WettowelReactor 12y ago
While the article stress the importance of understanding your power requirements on the server side you also need to be very cognizant of the power restrictions in your colo contract. Often times power draws will be your biggest limiting factor and it is very easy to buy a rack and fill it with equipment that surpasses your max allotted power draw. Depending on your host your only solution may be to buy additional racks to spread out your load even though you don't need the physical space. Another power gotcha comes with the redundant circuits provided. For example if you are allocated 15Amps total that usually means total across both circuits not 15Amps per circuit.
lawncheer 12y ago
Another tip, be cognizant of the difference between sustained drawing amperage, and spikes; when a server starts up, it can spike to 1.5+ amps. I've seen many circuits trip because, while the draw should have been in an acceptable range, spinning up a number of servers at the same time was too much.

87 points by kvmosx 12y ago

dsplatonov 12y ago

Nice article, thanks, but does it applies to all types of the datacenters?

caw 12y ago
I can't see a type of datacenter it doesn't apply to. You pay for transit, power draw, and to a lesser extent rack units. If you get a rack or a half rack with your expected power draw and want to spill past that they'll be charging you extra because that's space they can't sell to someone else. Some datacenters also provide cages, so your hardware is physically separated from other people. That'll cost extra too. The only thing I didn't see a mention of is DC power, whereas your out of the box power supplies on most OEM equipment is for AC. Most of the server supplies nowadays should be able to handle 240V, 208V, and 120V with AC on the same unit, when you go DC you want to consider buying a separate AC power supply for setting up the server in your office (unless you drop ship it to the colo). Make sure you get a very efficient power supply too, because while you can get the most efficient or power miserly server on the planet, an inefficient power supply will increase the draw significantly. You also want to right-size the power supply, because drawing too little power lowers the efficiency (there's an efficiency curve available for most PSUs that are rated).

tempodox 12y ago

How is it a “colocation” if it is your “first server”? In the age of on-line dictionaries no less?

jqueryin 12y ago
A colocation center is a type of data center where equipment, space, and bandwidth are available for rental to retail customers. Colocation facilities provide space, power, cooling, and physical security for the server, storage, and networking equipment of other firms—and connect them to a variety of telecommunications and network service providers—with a minimum of cost and complexity. Colocation by no means indicates you have multiple servers that need housing nowadays.
dasil003 12y ago
The irony is delicious, you'd have fared much better with the first sentence alone.
Tomte 12y ago
Your server is co-located with other customers' servers.

err4nt 12y ago

Thanks for the article, I've seen that term floating around and never knew how to get started. I've been itching to get into the server hosting business as a side thing ever since renting my own KVM VPS. I was blown away by the fact that I can sit there and watch it reboot over screen sharing from my iPad. I treat it as a cloud desktop (runs the latest vanilla Ubuntu) and so of course it was easy to get apache and PHP and Ruby and a whole web server environment up. I do all my work on it, as well as my play. I use Plex to stream myself media, and OwnCloud and other tools to replace Dropbox and even deploy sites. I want to sell people on the idea that it's easy to have a cloud desktop you can access from anywhere, that can also be a web server (not selling web servers that can also have a desktop). I want to sell people on the Idea that with freely available software, we can each have a private cloud with just our data. I'm not quite sure how to get started, and I'm not trying to make a killing with profit, I just don't see people trying to make it simpler for the average Joe to have a cloud desktop and not need to pay to use shared cloud services which then become huge targets for data breaches.

Tenhundfeld 12y ago
Not trying to dissuade you or imply this is exactly the same thing, but I wanted to make sure you're aware of Amazon WorkSpaces [http://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/ http://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/], "a fully managed desktop computing service in the cloud."

csbrooks 12y ago

What are the advantages of doing this over just paying for computing power on AWS or some other cloud service? Feels like it would be a very small niche at this point.

icebraining 12y ago
Cost: https://blog.serverdensity.com/saving-500k-per-month-buying-your-own-hardware-cloud-vs-colocation/ https://blog.serverdensity.com/saving-500k-per-month-buying-...
dsplatonov 12y ago
i think AWS is good, when you're not sure if you will use all resources of your servers or need scalability. If you know your growth rate, what type of resources are used, etc. it will be cheaper to have servers in a datacenter instead of using AWS. Many companies, upon growing, starting to rent a space in datacenter or even build their own.
gtirloni 12y ago
AWS comes with a ton of added functionality that may not be relevant to you, especially if you've no need to scale or deploy machines in seconds. That comes at a cost. It's a shallow orange vs. apples comparison, but look at the price of colocating 1/3 rack at Hetzner (119EUR). If you already own the hardware, have no need to use any advanced AWS feature, have the skills to manage it, etc.. sometimes it make sense. For personal and/or SMB needs, it usually not worth the trouble (specially regarding skills to maintain it). So you're right, it's becoming more and more a niche.
caw 12y ago
Cloud is definitely better if you need to scale out, but if you need either raw performance, have requirements for particular hardware (e.g. Backblaze with their custom disk shelves, certain hardware appliances, tape backup requirements), or if you want the cheapest cost per month then a colo may be right for you. Remember it's cheaper because you're paying for the sysadmin time and remote hands, versus Amazon with their people. You could also do hybrid approach - colo for core infrastructure and cloud to scale out, but that's more difficult to setup. At a certain scale of colo or with very heavy security requirements you'll find it's cheaper to have your own datacenter.

tacticus 12y ago

And no mention of ipv6 at all. at the very least it gives you much easier management of private networks (yay real ip addresses) and there is more and more traffic coming over it (think mobile phones and etc.)

jlawer 12y ago

Couple of bits of advice to anyone doing this: Firstly get your own IPs from your local RIR. Have your co-lo provider publish your routes, but they will be YOUR IPs. if you co-lo provider sucks, you can move and keep your IP space. (This is vital for email, but I recommend it for everyone). Secondly buy a Out of Band Management card with your server (iDrac for Dell, iLO for HP, etc) these cost fairly little and will save you hours of access / remote hands. They will pay for themselves, you can even boot an ISO from your laptop over the internet. Get your co-lo provider to give you an extra uplink for this and give it a separate IP (use one of the providers range) Thirdly consider Mission Critical support on the servers from a solid vendor (In australia I consider the enterprise vendors Dell, HP, IBM and Acer, and of those I will only use Dell or HP). 4 hour response means you don't need as much spare hardware, and you can have things fixed FAST. I have only lost 2 disks in a rack of servers over 4 years. Both had a replacement in place within 4 hours (once at 1am). Fourthly look at a good Virtualization solution. We initially went oVirt (Open source version of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization) but ended up migrating to VMWare. VMWare Essentials Plus costs us $15K for 3 years in extortionate australia prices and is worth every cent. It provides Backup (VMWare Data Protector), Failover, Virtual SAN, Live Migration and a heap of useful features that save huge amounts of time. Finally if your going to grow consider getting a rack (or half / third of a rack). This will likely give you unescorted access to the data centre, and is often not that much more then a few RU of servers (depending on the DC and racking availability).

techsupporter 12y ago
I thought you could only get an IP delegation if you were multi-homing and could justify a /24. Is that still the case?
- jlawer 12y ago
  We did this with APNIC (being based in Australia), and we were able to justify a /24 on a single server without multi-homing. I don't think they allocate less then a /24 so if you have cause for 1 you get the whole /24. That said ARIN and others might be different. For example APNIC will only allow up to a final /22 allocation at the moment, where as ARIN just allocated a much larger block despite being on final allocation rationing.

detournement 12y ago

I am so glad I live in a world where I will never have to do this again for anything but large infrastructure projects. I've colocated servers at major POPs like 111 8th Avenue in Manhattan, Equinix in Seacaucus, One Wilshire in LA. For smaller projects, the convenience of the cloud is absolutely worth the price. For a larger build - like over 10k a month in infrastructure cost the cloud starts to make less sense economically but 'colocating your first server' is not a right of passage anymore - its unnecessary and a huge waste of time. All of the functionality/services you have to provision yourself in colo like - redundancy, backup, remote hands, environmental monitoring, hardware maintenance are just not worth figuring out until there is substantial cost savings to realize.

pmoriarty 12y ago
I like to keep control of my data and manage my own systems, instead of using some black box where I'm at the mercy of a cloud provider. You're not going to be able to troubleshoot or optimize down to the hardware level in the cloud. If some cloud service doesn't work or is not available, all you can really do is wait and hope they get it working again, while if you manage your own systems you might have a chance of fixing it or at least finding out what happened and work to prevent it from happening again. Some applications just won't work on the cloud or exhibit mysterious bugs, failures, or bizarre behavior. Security and data ownership is pretty much out of your hands when your servers are in the cloud. You can only hope and pray your cloud provider is doing a good at securing your data and isn't stealing or selling it themselves. You generally have zero visibility in to how security is handled by your cloud provider or whether a security compromise has taken place. And then there's the issue of vendor lock-in, which becomes more and more likely the more unique cloud features you use. Of course, for maximum control, you wouldn't rely on a colo either, and just host your servers in your own server room(s).
druiid 12y ago
Mostly agree, although in this case I say mostly because the colo facilities where you can easily rent a single unit of space are far and few between these days. If we were still in an environment where there were tons of hosts like Verio still around, I'd say there's nothing wrong with coloing a single box. For sure once you reach above the $10k/month level there's a very good chance that it will make sense to colo. You can fit a LOT of hardware in a single full rack, and they're like $750/month plus bandwidth and power costs (so around $1200-1700 all said and done per month).

EdSharkey 12y ago

I colocate my little cluster of servers with Opus:Interactive in Portland, OR. It's neat to look at the homebrew artists with their motley crew of machines all colocated together in racks in the corner followed by many homogenous racks filled with boxes from big name companies. I don't prefer building powerful hardware. I prefer reliable and cheap to build and maxing out the 4U of my rack. I like to think of my servers as "life support for an internet connected harddrive". My CPU's are fanless Intel Atom's with 2GB of ram and I get Mini-ITX motherboards that can be powered by a brick DC power supply. Ultimately, I'll move to Flash hard drives so I'll have no moving parts in my server, but I'm waiting for the price to come down and for reliability to match spinning media.

techsupporter 12y ago
I'd like to know more about how you do that. I just looked at Opus' site and the 4U they advertise in Hillsboro is pretty good when compared to what I pay for 1U of hobbyist colo in Seattle. Do you put multiple machines inside the 4U with a switch in the same space? Can I be so bold as to ask for pictures? What kind of physical access do you get? I have a 1U server-grade machine but moving to a more flexible space would be nice, even if it does mean a train trip to go see my boxen.
- turnip1979 12y ago
  I've been interested in hobbyist colo for a while but the cheapest I've found is over $100 a month. Is this in the ballpark of what you are paying or are there better deals to be had?
  - techsupporter 12y ago
    The rate I'm paying no longer exists and the company I'm with got merged into another one so my point of reference isn't so good. :) That said, there are a couple of companies on Webhostingtalk that have good prices for hobbyist colo if you look in their colocation forums and search for "Seattle." Opus is nice ($129 for 4U and 3A of power with 400GB of transit) and there is a company in Seattle--their name escapes me but I've seen them on WHT--that is $35 for 1U and 1A with 500GB of transit. So, yes, I think you can do better especially if you just want space for a medium-usage 1U.

xeroxmalf 12y ago

Also don't forget to check out the rented dedicated server market too. It provides a good middle ground in cost/power/performance to the extremes of cloud providers and colocation.

threeseed 12y ago
I am surprised how few people know about this. It isn't just a "good middle ground". It is an amazing middle ground that allows you to benefit from AWS services (simply choose providers close to AWS data centres) whilst getting substantial performance/cost benefits. I would imagine at minimum you are getting 10x the performance compared to a typical VPS.
neurotixz 12y ago
Yes, always compare with rented dedicated, and only go with colo if it makes sense. I did this analysis last year and rented won big time. Never looked back since. Main points in favor of rented dedicated servers: - Much cheaper in my business case (5-10 TB/month by server, only a few high CPU requirements) most dedicated come with bandwidth included - No need to take care of the hardware in case of failure (opening a ticket versus managing the whole process) - Easier to switch machine if needs changes - Scales faster (as quickly then 2-3 hours with decent automation tools, and virtualization) - No switch, firewall, etc (IPMI should always be behind a firewall, never opened on the Internet) - The upfront cost to buy a server was high, and monthly cost of dedicated was actually lower, due to the lack of competition in the colo sector in my area (Montreal, Canada), prices were (and still are) rising quickly, it was hard to predict the long-term costs
- turnip1979 12y ago
  Maybe it is a Canada thing. I looked at some colos in the Toronto area a few back and found rental prices were about the same as bringing your own hardware. Didn't make sense. I was just looking for a home for some server hardware I have in my garage. Oh well.
  - neurotixz 12y ago

preinheimer 12y ago

I blogged about my own experience with this here: http://blog.preinheimer.com/index.php?/archives/413-Buying-a-Zoo-server.html http://blog.preinheimer.com/index.php?/archives/413-Buying-a...

timthorn 12y ago

The article talks about 1U being a good form factor, but one thing to bear in mind is that cooling fans tend to work harder in a 1U chassis than a 2U, hence drawing more power.

jlawer 12y ago
I would also add that in most DCs your never going to have the power capacity to have racks filled with 1RU servers, so 2RU servers are typically not much more expensive to Rack then their slimmer brethren.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

WettowelReactor 12y ago

While the article stress the importance of understanding your power requirements on the server side you also need to be very cognizant of the power restrictions in your colo contract. Often times power draws will be your biggest limiting factor and it is very easy to buy a rack and fill it with equipment that surpasses your max allotted power draw. Depending on your host your only solution may be to buy additional racks to spread out your load even though you don't need the physical space. Another power gotcha comes with the redundant circuits provided. For example if you are allocated 15Amps total that usually means total across both circuits not 15Amps per circuit.

lawncheer 12y ago

Another tip, be cognizant of the difference between sustained drawing amperage, and spikes; when a server starts up, it can spike to 1.5+ amps. I've seen many circuits trip because, while the draw should have been in an acceptable range, spinning up a number of servers at the same time was too much.