Broken Internet?

Fri Mar 16 21:28:14 UTC 2001

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-nanog at merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog at merit.edu]On Behalf Of
> Roeland Meyer
> Sent: March 16, 2001 2:44 PM
> To: 'Adam Rothschild'
> Cc: nanog at merit.edu
> Subject: RE: Broken Internet?
>
> > On Fri, Mar 16, 2001 at 02:34:35AM -0800, Roeland Meyer wrote:
> > But yeah, putting all your eggs in one basket could make for a nice
> > single point of failure.  Or calculated risk.  Your call...
>
> That's my point, small shops don't have much choice. Typical Inet
> start-ups
> are cases where headcount is far less than server count. Granted, most of
> the H/W is in a co-lo.

Why do you think small shops (eg: us, but we are smaller than the average
small shop) use colo?

It strikes me as a lot cheaper to pay $500-1000/megabit/month to Exodus,
AboveNet, Globix et al (my apologies to those from colo providers I didn't
name, I know there are hundreds out there) rather than find a suitable
facility, get a decent power setup, then you need to deal with ARIN, get
yourself some transit providers, etc. Oh, and then you need some operational
staff, too, to reboot your server if it dies, that type of thing. If all
you're planning on doing is connecting your own rack or two's worth of
servers, then you've just spent a lot more money building your own for
little benefit. There's the time factor, too... Most colo providers will
probably let you move in with all your hardware within a month, if not less.
How long does it take to build a real data center?

> <sigh> You guys just don't want to allow a small business to run their own
> data center, do you?
> Can't y'all understand that there are serious business reasons
> for a company
> to do so?

All right, I'm curious here. What do you define as "data center"? If you
mean the facilities with redundant connectivity, diesel generators, enough
UPSes to power the biggest power hogging thing you can find for six hours,
etc, I'd like you to tell me how a small business can afford that.

If, like some people, you define "data center" as a small wiring closet
hooked up by one T1 (or, in your case, DSL, and you're not the first I've
encountered with a DSL-connected "data center") to some random provider,
then I don't think anyone has a problem with you running your own "data
center", although I think your semantics could be argued, and since this is
NANOG, will be argued for about 100 posts minimum.

Vivien
--
Vivien M.
vivienm at dyndns.org
Assistant System Administrator
Dynamic DNS Network Services
http://www.dyndns.org/