STH Colocation Number 2 Build Log

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T_Minus

Build. Break. Fix. Repeat
Feb 15, 2015
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Out of curiosity, have you experienced problems with their uptime or something?
I don't have anything there yet, but it's not a high-end data center, or high-end bandwidth. That's why.

Their prices reflect this, they know it... it's not a bad thing, but I wont put a client doing a half-mill in sales per-month at a data-center like Joes. That's just my 02.
 

T_Minus

Build. Break. Fix. Repeat
Feb 15, 2015
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which joes? the joes datacenter in kansas city?
Joe's Datacenter - Joe's Datacenter
Joe’s Datacenter is located at 1325 Tracy Ave in Kansas City Missouri 64106

Maybe they respond very fast to phone calls, but that's a MAJOR PITA so online ticketing/e-mailing is top priority for me for support so I can continue doing more things and Joe's so far as NOT a client has taken 1-2 weeks to reply to my SALES E-MAILS which is concerning. Their reply, and answers were great it just took forever, and for SALES that's scary, let alone support. (Which I haven't used or needed).

I hope their customer ticket/support online is better than sales e-mails.
 

Hank C

Active Member
Jun 16, 2014
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I happened to live in KC and trying to see if there is a cheap colo just for my lab. Just like Patrick is doing with his second colo...
 

TType85

Active Member
Dec 22, 2014
630
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43
Garden Grove, CA
I love this article series you are doing.

At my work we are nearing the end of our data center contract. It seems to be a lot more expensive here (Irvine, CA) for a good facility. We deal with bank/real estate/financial data for some large banks so by contract we need to be in a place that has all the proper security and certifications in place. Our current facility costs us around $2200/mo for a half rack in Irvine, CA and a 1/3 rack in Denver (DR site) with a cross connect between. We also have a dedicated 100MB connection that is around $1200/mo.

I have been investigating moving to Azure or AWS as our actual infrastructure requirements come out to just about $2000/mo. We are leaning towards Azure as we are a Microsoft-centric shop (except our current vm's are in ESXi). I believe we can structure our environment and have a good, testable disaster recovery setup that our clients require. For me it will take the hardware issues out of my hands. Our budget is tiny so our production hardware is what I can piece together from the second hand market and when it fails, I have to fix it.

I am looking forward to the rest of these articles.
 

rnavarro

Active Member
Feb 14, 2013
197
40
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I've been looking at HE or LV (which DC did you use?) or JOES for a cheap place to stick some boxes... Also checked out some others that quoted me $1400+ for a 1/2 rack 100mbit :X

How are you liking HE? Their prices seemed fair? Not much of a drive for me either.

We're in the midst of possibly upgrading our home from a single T1 to a 20mbit dedicated fiber connection through ATT, but not sure they pulled fiber far enough... ugh.
I've got my gear hosted at Datacate in Sacramento.

Pretty decent price for what I get, been there for 1.5 years and no issues!
 
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Patrick

Administrator
Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
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Updated the first post with a new pic. It has the Supermicro Xeon D-1540 system and Intel NUC on the shelf.
 
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wildchild

Active Member
Feb 4, 2014
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I love this article series you are doing.

At my work we are nearing the end of our data center contract. It seems to be a lot more expensive here (Irvine, CA) for a good facility. We deal with bank/real estate/financial data for some large banks so by contract we need to be in a place that has all the proper security and certifications in place. Our current facility costs us around $2200/mo for a half rack in Irvine, CA and a 1/3 rack in Denver (DR site) with a cross connect between. We also have a dedicated 100MB connection that is around $1200/mo.

I have been investigating moving to Azure or AWS as our actual infrastructure requirements come out to just about $2000/mo. We are leaning towards Azure as we are a Microsoft-centric shop (except our current vm's are in ESXi). I believe we can structure our environment and have a good, testable disaster recovery setup that our clients require. For me it will take the hardware issues out of my hands. Our budget is tiny so our production hardware is what I can piece together from the second hand market and when it fails, I have to fix it.

I am looking forward to the rest of these articles.
we just did our 4rth instance...
azure is getting there, however there are some network quirks you have to think about/take care of.
when you are running bgp and have express route thing will get easier.

also have some good intel that their networking gateway setup is to undergo a major overhaul
 

wildchild

Active Member
Feb 4, 2014
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miniknight if you are referring to my post; yes , the usa as a country has been live for about 9 months now... europe 6 and brazil will go live in about 3 weeks... so that would make a total of 6 unstances
 

TType85

Active Member
Dec 22, 2014
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Garden Grove, CA
we just did our 4rth instance...
azure is getting there, however there are some network quirks you have to think about/take care of.
when you are running bgp and have express route thing will get easier.

also have some good intel that their networking gateway setup is to undergo a major overhaul
I don't want to Hi-jack this thread so I might start another one, but what network quirks have you seen? I have been able to successfully set up a Point to Point VPN setup between Azure and my current data center without much issue.
 

wildchild

Active Member
Feb 4, 2014
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layered networking which leads for some applications to unexpected result.
"dynamic" vpn tunnels... rather strange bgp implementation
untill recent the unability for static ips on vms

to name a few ;)
 

Patrick

Administrator
Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
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Made a little pivot. Going to use docker and be very trendy, but the performance really is better. Did some testing of the RAID 1 arrays in the main box the drives were:
Fusion-io 353GB cards
Intel DC S3700 400GB
Intel DC S3500 800GB
Toshiba Toshiba THNSNJ480PCS3 480GB

Quick results:
Code:
r@intel-e5-2699v3:/media# dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/fusionio/testfile bs=4096 count=100000 oflag=dsync
409600000 bytes (410 MB) copied, 25.0752 s, 16.3 MB/s
r@intel-e5-2699v3:/media# dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/s3700/testfile bs=4096 count=100000 oflag=dsync
409600000 bytes (410 MB) copied, 41.6934 s, 9.8 MB/s
r@intel-e5-2699v3:/media# dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/s3500/testfile bs=4096 count=100000 oflag=dsync
409600000 bytes (410 MB) copied, 41.3145 s, 9.9 MB/s
r@intel-e5-2699v3:/media# dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/toshiba480gb/testfile bs=4096 count=100000 oflag=dsync
409600000 bytes (410 MB) copied, 48.5509 s, 8.4 MB/s
 

ItsChrisG

Active Member
Feb 3, 2015
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In downtown LA (Wilshire corridor), that size rack is $800/mo with 40A of power
$800 for 40A will be in a pretty crappy datacenter more than likely, along with crappy support, crappy connectivity options, etc.
You might get away with a 1-time deal or very limited quantity of cabs at that price in a place a bit better, but finding $800/40A day in/dayout in a quality DC isnt likely at all.
 

Shadow.X

New Member
May 8, 2015
22
10
3
When running i/o tests did you test openvz or kvm with virtio on proxmox? When using kvm make sure to use virtio for hard disk and ethernet.

Virtio is paravirtualized and is much faster.

Made a little pivot. Going to use docker and be very trendy, but the performance really is better. Did some testing of the RAID 1 arrays in the main box the drives were:
Fusion-io 353GB cards
Intel DC S3700 400GB
Intel DC S3500 800GB
Toshiba Toshiba THNSNJ480PCS3 480GB

Quick results:
Code:
r@intel-e5-2699v3:/media# dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/fusionio/testfile bs=4096 count=100000 oflag=dsync
409600000 bytes (410 MB) copied, 25.0752 s, 16.3 MB/s
r@intel-e5-2699v3:/media# dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/s3700/testfile bs=4096 count=100000 oflag=dsync
409600000 bytes (410 MB) copied, 41.6934 s, 9.8 MB/s
r@intel-e5-2699v3:/media# dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/s3500/testfile bs=4096 count=100000 oflag=dsync
409600000 bytes (410 MB) copied, 41.3145 s, 9.9 MB/s
r@intel-e5-2699v3:/media# dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/toshiba480gb/testfile bs=4096 count=100000 oflag=dsync
409600000 bytes (410 MB) copied, 48.5509 s, 8.4 MB/s
 

T_Minus

Build. Break. Fix. Repeat
Feb 15, 2015
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2,043
113
Shadow - Great info to know, curious tos ee the differences now.