trollage (Re: Akamai server reliability)

Tue Nov 29 02:39:33 UTC 2005

On Mon, 28 Nov 2005, Deepak Jain wrote:

> I'm sorry, isn't that exactly what an airbill *is* paying for -- to get the 
> equipment on site?

They also frequently need boxes power cycled.  It got to be so frequent 
that we "gave them" a remote reboot switch for all their gear and told 
them how to use it.  They still kept emailing us for reboots until I 
finally used a contact at akamai to get the remote reboot info properly 
placed.

We've had our share of failed boxes, DOA boxes, boxes with components 
literally falling out of them on arrival, etc.  I suspect it's just a sign 
of the box building having been farmed out to the cheapest available 
source.  When you're building boxes in really large volume, what's a few 
missing screws here there? :)

> The man hours (really, we are talking about less than a single hour to 
> replace a server including all the mounting and repacking). The one man hour 
> that they need (no more than 6 a year by the look of it) should offset the 
> value the ISP is getting from not buying bandwidth to get to the content and 
> for the improved performance they get.

I wouldn't count on that.  With bandwidth prices continually falling, and 
the ISP business changing (at least for us, dialup/DSL is dying, hosting 
is taking off, and now instead of having spare outbound capacity to sell 
to Akamai), we do more outbound than inbound, so the servers really don't 
save us anything except maybe a bit of latency.

> If that model doesn't work for the ISP in question, they should ask Akamai to 
> pull their gear.

Think of the man hours that'd take, ripping them out, boxing them up, etc. 
:)

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  Jon Lewis                   |  I route
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