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Seeking Reviews of Colocation Facilities? 23

Posted by Cliff from the finding-a-good-home-for-your-big-iron dept.
h_box asks: "My small company is looking for a colocation facility to host a few Apache servers and Oracle database boxes. Is there a definitive review site on the net for this type of facility? Really what would be helpful would be a review site that comprehensively reviewed candidates physical facilities, their quality of support, their network architecture, and maybe even tracked network downtime. For those of us in Southern California, it would be additionally helpful to make sure the site will stay functional throughout rolling blackouts. Don't forget financial status! We want the servers nearby, for convenience, although we are well aware that there are excellent and cheap colo facilities in the midwest."
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Seeking Reviews of Colocation Facilities? More

Seeking Reviews of Colocation Facilities?

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  • this? (Score:2, Informative)

    by VA Software ( 533136 )
    http://www.colosource.com/colo2002.asp
  • ... What do YOU mean?

    To me, COLO means rack space and bandwidth; nothing more.

    Do you want cabinets? HW support? OS support? A small bit of hands-on? Professional services?

    RackSpace
    Digital Island (C&W)
    Qwest
    AT&T
    or your local ISP
  • We have a data center in a tornado-proof building in western Missouri, one of the most siesmically stable areas of the country. We have generators with over a month's worth of fuel, and more redundancies built into things than I could care to list.

    We mostly deal with companies in the financial services industry, so protecting the data is part of our bread and butter. We co-locate systems for most of our clients.

    If you want more info on us, our services, our data center, etc. please reply off-list.

    - Freed
  • At my old gig (went kaboom in the .com bust) we dealt with many of these companies:

    Exodus - The McDonalds of colo's cheap everywhere but HORRIBLE service and not so good connectivity. The facilities themselves (I've been in their San Jose and Los Angeles ones) rock, but we eventually dropped them for lack of support.

    Internap - They ROCK! Never been in a facility, but others I worked with liked them, they're connectivity is top-notch. They're expensive, and worth it if you need good connectivity to most of the net.

    Verio - Seemed ok, not stellar, not bad.

    I don't remember much about the others.
    • ---snip
      Internap - They ROCK! Never been in a facility, but others I worked with liked them, they're connectivity is top-notch. They're expensive, and worth it if you need good connectivity to most of the net.
      ---snip

      probably have not seen the inside of one of their facilities, because they arn't in the colo business? :)
      • probably have not seen the inside of one of their facilities, because they arn't in the colo business? :)

        What businees are they in? Our company (this was in 2000), placed servers in a rack that was owned/leased by Internap. We were provided power, space, and conectivity for a monthly fee. What business is that?

    • a company i used to work for went initially with verio because it was closer to the office and cheaper (they are mainly in colo for reliability of connection, rather than bandwidth, and verio was one of teh only major companies that offered bandwidth packages in the neighborhood of what they used), but verio had some wierd network issues, like problems with getting to services on specific ports on specific ips, but not to that port on other ips we had from them.

      it got to be such a pain in the ass, that they moved to exodus, but it was at around that time i stopped working for them. I think exodus ended up with more reliable networking.
    • I have never used Verio for co-location, but in general I've found (experienced by several of my clients who used them, as well) that their customer service blows chunks.

      Exodus I never had any qualms about. Their connectivity seemed fine. I never signed up for any of their fancy services; to me, colocation is some bandwidth and some rackspace, and the rest is up to me. As far as support for issues with either of those two things, they had a well-defined ticket and escalation protocol, and the few times I had to use it, they took care of everything in short order. This was in their Seattle (Tukwila) facility. I suppose it depends on what you're looking for--rackspace and a pipe, or full service.
  • http://www.colocations.org/

    Brought to you by the same great folks at shellreview. More geared twards the shell provider, but it will give you alot of good leads then you can do your own research into the individual companies.

  • How to review a colo site. (Score:5, Informative)

    by billn ( 5184 ) on Tuesday November 20, 2001 @09:05PM (#2593674) Homepage Journal
    There's a handful of important things to consider when assessing a colocation facility. Major questions to ask the sales droids:

    Connectivity.
    How many providers bring connectivity into the facility?
    - Companies like Exodus have no small amount of their own backbone, but other companies, like Equinix, bring in large pipes from multiple providers, making it much akin to having colo right on a peering point. Having direct access to multiple providers gives you room to negotiate for the levels of service you need, and can provide.
    How is connectivity delivered?
    - Basically, how many fiber entrances into the facility? Will a single fiber cut or repeater failure blind you to the rest of the network?
    Can you get out-of-band circuits or facilities?
    - Out-of-band could mean a T1 into the back end of your colo cage, or something as simple as a dial-in to a console server.
    How does the company handle peering, routing, and traffic engineering?
    - How is their reputation, in a nutshell? Check around, see what other networking companies think of them. Now more than ever, intelligent routing companies are getting into the mix and really leveraging multiple peer environments (Equinix is one colo space that is doing this).

    Two: Power and Environment
    What kind of backup power is available?
    - It's common to have a online UPS through which all power flows. In the event of a brownout or power failure, your hardware should never know. On the outside of that UPS should be two power feeds: City power, and generator backup.
    How often is preventative maintenance performed on backup equipment?
    - Sounds extreme, but it's important. Companies like GlobalCenter performed weekly/biweekly tests of all generator facilities.
    In the event of an extended outage, what is the colo company's fuel situation for diesel backups?
    - Don't laugh. Some generators can power facilities for a couple hours or more. For a widespread failure (Like the PG&E debacle in the Bay area a few years back), is there a process in place to make sure a fuel truck will arrive on time?
    Average maintained temperature within the facility?
    - Some devices just don't like room temperatures. If you're running big servers, ask your engineers what your environment requirements are. The differences across platforms are significant.

    Security:
    What's the reputation of the site security team?
    - Big dirty question. I've done a lot of work in a lot of facilities, and it will shock and astound you how far you can go with a little knowledge and a forked tongue. Companies won't be quick to fess up to famous failures, but people who work there might. Make the sales droid bring an engineer, and shush the droid when you ask this question.
    Access limitations?
    - When can you get in? Who can you get in? Who controls site access? What happens when your liaison departs the company (yours or theirs)? What happens when someone tries to get in without proper credentials?
    - True story. I didn't have access to a facility, and had to have my boss call in to approve it. Approval was done over the phone. Anyone else see where the grease can go here?
    How is equipment access and movement controlled?
    - Signed in and out with notation of serial numbers OR MAC ADDRESSES, hopefully. Who did it, when they did it, where it came from or where they put it. Log of event emailed to liaison at the time, would be nice, but probably too much to ask for. Cook your SLA well.

    Support:
    Can you get remote hands in the facility?
    - It happens. You reboot a machine, it doesn't come back up. You're in Turkey, the box is in LA. Can you get a console to it to identify the error in the short term? These are often rolled in to sales agreements or SLAs.
    How long does it take to get support?
    - Do you call a call center or a tech center? How long does it take for them to find your information? How much longer to get someone on the problem? Time means money. Your money.
    How does their escalation process work?
    - Escalation is a big magic word. I've personally been involved in shaking a union president out of bed to get more techs on a sonet ring turn up, after we ran out of escalation levels with the telco. Know what happens when things are broken and people aren't getting things done. Mention rebates to the sales droid and watch them squirm.
    Do they do their own post mortem work?
    - It's the day after a night full of fast hacks and dirty reassembly in the wake of a power failure or peering outage, or anything else that's clearly the provider's fault. Who calls first thing the next morning, you or them?

    I'm not going to get into things like uptime gaurantees and network security, because those are joint responsibility areas. If you're relying on the provider to account for all your uptime, you're already missing the point of it. Hope this helps. If you're doing something big and scary and have other questions, I may consult. Email me.

  • This is a question about providers in Southern California, right? I just finished a pretty thorough search for Colocation providers in the Los Angeles area, maybe my research will be of some benefit to you.

    First, if you're in the area of LA proper, your choices are pretty limited. Qwest, Sprint, and plenty of others have data centers in and around Irvine and Burbank, but both are just far enough away to be inconvenient if you do business in downtown LA, Santa Monica, or Beverly Hills.

    Pretty much everybody knows about Exodus in El Segundo. The facility is supposed to be terrific, but we couldn't get the deal done because of our clients' concerns about their financial stability. Also, we heard rumors that this facility might be one of the first to go if they end up scaling things back.

    There's a company called IX2 (www.ix2.com) that offers pure colocation downtown, but they provide only the physical space, you contract separately with the carrier. One of my very large corporate clients has put their entire data center down there, and is really happy with it, but they're not a colocation provider in the traditional sense.

    Another unusual option is Los Nettos, which is a consortium of companies (Centergate, CalTech, JPL, TRW, USC, ISI) that operates a big network in the LA area and connects with MAE-LA etc. They provide colocation in two data centers. It sounds like the facility and connectivity is very good, but I'm not sure about support. Their pricing was comparable with the other folks, but they just didn't feel commercial enough for me.

    At least one regional ISP called Interworld (www.interworld.net) offers managed colocation and other services through those facilities. They're small, but very very smart, and I highly recommend doing business with Interworld in general.

    Verio has a very small but nice colo facility in downtown Los Angeles. We ended up doing the deal with them because the price was just too good to turn down. Their connectivity is good, and I've been happy with the service overall. We've had no unscheduled downtime in about three months of operation, according to mrtg.

    The only gotcha is that they facility is remotely monitored and there's no on-site 'remote hands' or any other kind of support, other than through contracted third parties. But they do provide a web interface to the power distribution, so you can power cycle stuff remotely. We got a single rack @ the 1MB/sec rate in a locked cage, with extra space behind and on the sides, for the same price that Exodus quoted for an open rack.

    The issue of rolling blackouts is a red herring. Any serious operation will offer both battery backup and generator backup well in excess of what's necessary to insulate you from brief outages.

    Yours,
    mjr
    • from experience with the verio location in downtown (its in one of those huge buildings, 707 wilshire), next time you're in the colo, while doing a reboot (or whatever convient time), check and see if your key opens anybody elses rack. The building security was pretty good about checking to make sure you didn't bring any computers out of the facility without a note (they even tried to stop me taking out the 386 laptop i brought in a few hours prior), but i don't know how difficult it would be to get a note. We didn't lose any hardware though, and they said they'd change the keys, but i didn't get to follow up.
  • Not sure if they've got any colo's in your area or not but I've been in their Missouri location and it is state of the art incredible.

    Not to mention that their technical support is second to none.

    I used them for a while when we were getting a T1 installed.

    www.savvis.net
  • check out nyi.net

    See if it suits your needs.

    Decent prices, services, and facilities.

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