Bunker for the date: how I was allowed to walk on the data center RUVDS in the space plant
Someone likes to go to the cinema, someone likes to go to clubs, someone loves to go to museums - and I have long dreamed of going around the data centers, looking at everything with my own eyes, and talking with those who work there. But to organize all this seemed unreal. Fortunately, the certain recognition that poiskvps.ru has earned over the years, and which sometimes surprises me now - has simplified the most difficult thing: acquaintance. So over the past two months I have already visited two data centers. What interesting things I saw in St. Petersburg, I still plan to write later. And today I will tell you how I saw the Moscow-based data center company RUVDSin the city of Korolyov - their “small homeland”, where they started from the first server racks in the bomb shelter on the territory of the rocket plant. Yes, it not only sounds cool, but it also looks. Just look at these
door containments : At the end of 2015, the history of RUVDS began here. At first they just got a collocation to another company that rented racks in this DC. However, they did not linger there, soon moving to a separate room inside the air-raid shelter in order to build their data center behind its luxurious doors.
Nikita Tsaplin, managing partner RUVDS, explained that for the applicant to be the major player in the market was a strategic move:
- Its place to place, their capacities allow to organize everything under his control, not realizing at the mercy of contractors and get the FSB license and FSTEC about compliance with all information security requirements.
The main work was undertaken by the employees of the company MTW.RU, which is also a superior communications provider and data center operator. Since it was a question of a building built decades ago, I immediately decided not to wait for the prilization of specialized DCs with their ideally wound twisted ones.
It was really necessary to sew on a live thread: holes were punched in the walls to organize ventilation, they made a fire extinguishing system, put diesel generators and bespereboyniki - but we had to put up with the layout and height of the ceilings different from other data centers. But in early 2016, RUVDS had its own racks in its data center.
Nothing, testifying against such a choice, I, in fact, did not see. The result was just as boring as needed: “everything just stably works for clients”.
The maintenance of their DC RUVDS was given to MTW.RU for a row, so the employees of the hoster themselves often don’t have to go to their data center from the Pushkinskaya office. The staff of the company is about 30 people.
The first line of technical support was also outsourced to a third-party call center. Telephone support itself is rarely enough for hosting, but Tsaplin says that the possibility, in case of any problems, to talk with a living person, allows them to become more customer-oriented. In about half of the cases, this is enough. Only every second question needs to be transferred to the second line of technical support.
Another factor of economy: the hoster does not provide IPv6 addresses and in the near future there are no plans for this. Tsaplin also protects this solution:
- Tritely such addresses are not needed by anyone. For all the time, no one was even interested in this issue, and the cost of implementation is not zero, so it makes no sense to spend money on what is not needed.
Apparently, saving by delegating processes to outsourcing and reducing non-optimal staff costs, it turns out really well: the cheapest virtual server at RuVDS can be taken for 130₽ - the price is quite low and on the Search for UPU tariff falls on the first or second page.
The data center comes with 3 independent Internet connections of 10 Gbit / s each, which are fully enough for the needs of the RUVDS data center and their superior provider. True, once all three were killed by excavators from a construction site in the next building block. The Internet, of course, was quickly restored by welding optics. And soon they promise to finish the fourth, bringing the bandwidth up to 40 Gbit / s.
Power is also reserved: 2 independent substations and a diesel generator, which is checked once every 2-3 months with a complete imitation of the loss of electricity from the city, there were no failures, and there is nothing to complain about in the data center.
The fire extinguishing is done in the classic way: sensors, cylinders with freon and yellow pipes. Since the opening in 2016, they have not yet burned anything - and I hope it will be so.
The hoster rents IP addresses - so, according to them, it turns out to be much more profitable than buying their IP address blocks because of a less headache - they are cheaper and there are no problems with obtaining them, while the cost of buying addresses can be much more expensive , even when calculated for a long period. Plus, it’s very hard to buy the required number of IP addresses, in one hand most often they give no more than 1000 addresses at a time. Currently hoster only in Korolev uses about 15 thousand IP addresses.
Since 2016, RUVDS uses only Huawei servers.
These servers seemed to me interesting because in the event of a failure on the front panel, you can see the error code and quickly understand which element does not work.
All discs are signed, so in which case you can quickly find the right one.
The maximum such servers can accommodate either 8 2.5 "disks or 4 3.5" disks.
On the servers, the hoster uses Hyper-V virtualization, so the client can put both Linux and Windows and Windows on the virtual machine fully licensed, since the host’s license goes through the processors, so customers who want to buy a virtual server with a Windows license will it is very beneficial to contact this hosting provider: on any server, the license is already included in the price, while for other hosters the cost of such a license may exceed the cost of the virtual server itself and cost starting at 500 rubles per month.
Many clients, according to them, are brought to them by a blog on Habré (I remember it from the article about useful techniques for working in the Linux command line ).
There is, of course, an affiliate program in which PoiskVPS participates from the very beginning of adding this host to the catalog, and the partner reward increases every month.
In addition to the DC in Korolyov, RUVDS has an additional platform in Moscow in MMTS-9 , and since January 2017 in Switzerland, in the data center Deltalis, opened on the site of the former command center of the Swiss Air Force (NATO) deep under the Alps.
And in July of this year, about the same days when I was walking around their data center near Moscow, RUVDS servers had a registration address in the UK.
This time one would have expected something like the Bletchley Park mansion: Alan Turing hacked Enigma at the British Intelligence Station X Second World Secret Center which occupied it. But the ultra-modern London data center Equinix LD8, which is one of the main traffic exchange points in Europe, is also nothing - Turing would have approved.
View RUVDS ratescan be on their website or in a convenient form in my catalogs:
Search VPS and VPS.today
Nikita Tsaplin, managing partner RUVDS, explained that for the applicant to be the major player in the market was a strategic move:
- Its place to place, their capacities allow to organize everything under his control, not realizing at the mercy of contractors and get the FSB license and FSTEC about compliance with all information security requirements.
The main work was undertaken by the employees of the company MTW.RU, which is also a superior communications provider and data center operator. Since it was a question of a building built decades ago, I immediately decided not to wait for the prilization of specialized DCs with their ideally wound twisted ones.
The history of the Composite plant, in which the bomb shelter is located, which grew and became a data center, began with the Soviet rocket industry in 1947 with the creation of a materials science department for domestic rocket production in the central laboratory of plant No. 88. In 1975, the department "doros" to the Central Research Institute of Materials, renamed in 1986 in the NGO (today - JSC) "Composite". The skin from Korolev defended almost everything and the space stations from Salyut to the ISS, was on the Buran and Proton, Mir, Energiya-Buran, Vega, Phobos and ISS rockets.
It was really necessary to sew on a live thread: holes were punched in the walls to organize ventilation, they made a fire extinguishing system, put diesel generators and bespereboyniki - but we had to put up with the layout and height of the ceilings different from other data centers. But in early 2016, RUVDS had its own racks in its data center.
Nothing, testifying against such a choice, I, in fact, did not see. The result was just as boring as needed: “everything just stably works for clients”.
The maintenance of their DC RUVDS was given to MTW.RU for a row, so the employees of the hoster themselves often don’t have to go to their data center from the Pushkinskaya office. The staff of the company is about 30 people.
The first line of technical support was also outsourced to a third-party call center. Telephone support itself is rarely enough for hosting, but Tsaplin says that the possibility, in case of any problems, to talk with a living person, allows them to become more customer-oriented. In about half of the cases, this is enough. Only every second question needs to be transferred to the second line of technical support.
Another factor of economy: the hoster does not provide IPv6 addresses and in the near future there are no plans for this. Tsaplin also protects this solution:
- Tritely such addresses are not needed by anyone. For all the time, no one was even interested in this issue, and the cost of implementation is not zero, so it makes no sense to spend money on what is not needed.
Apparently, saving by delegating processes to outsourcing and reducing non-optimal staff costs, it turns out really well: the cheapest virtual server at RuVDS can be taken for 130₽ - the price is quite low and on the Search for UPU tariff falls on the first or second page.
The data center comes with 3 independent Internet connections of 10 Gbit / s each, which are fully enough for the needs of the RUVDS data center and their superior provider. True, once all three were killed by excavators from a construction site in the next building block. The Internet, of course, was quickly restored by welding optics. And soon they promise to finish the fourth, bringing the bandwidth up to 40 Gbit / s.
Power is also reserved: 2 independent substations and a diesel generator, which is checked once every 2-3 months with a complete imitation of the loss of electricity from the city, there were no failures, and there is nothing to complain about in the data center.
The fire extinguishing is done in the classic way: sensors, cylinders with freon and yellow pipes. Since the opening in 2016, they have not yet burned anything - and I hope it will be so.
The hoster rents IP addresses - so, according to them, it turns out to be much more profitable than buying their IP address blocks because of a less headache - they are cheaper and there are no problems with obtaining them, while the cost of buying addresses can be much more expensive , even when calculated for a long period. Plus, it’s very hard to buy the required number of IP addresses, in one hand most often they give no more than 1000 addresses at a time. Currently hoster only in Korolev uses about 15 thousand IP addresses.
Since 2016, RUVDS uses only Huawei servers.
These servers seemed to me interesting because in the event of a failure on the front panel, you can see the error code and quickly understand which element does not work.
All discs are signed, so in which case you can quickly find the right one.
The maximum such servers can accommodate either 8 2.5 "disks or 4 3.5" disks.
On the servers, the hoster uses Hyper-V virtualization, so the client can put both Linux and Windows and Windows on the virtual machine fully licensed, since the host’s license goes through the processors, so customers who want to buy a virtual server with a Windows license will it is very beneficial to contact this hosting provider: on any server, the license is already included in the price, while for other hosters the cost of such a license may exceed the cost of the virtual server itself and cost starting at 500 rubles per month.
Many clients, according to them, are brought to them by a blog on Habré (I remember it from the article about useful techniques for working in the Linux command line ).
There is, of course, an affiliate program in which PoiskVPS participates from the very beginning of adding this host to the catalog, and the partner reward increases every month.
Where I have not reached
In addition to the DC in Korolyov, RUVDS has an additional platform in Moscow in MMTS-9 , and since January 2017 in Switzerland, in the data center Deltalis, opened on the site of the former command center of the Swiss Air Force (NATO) deep under the Alps.
And in July of this year, about the same days when I was walking around their data center near Moscow, RUVDS servers had a registration address in the UK.
This time one would have expected something like the Bletchley Park mansion: Alan Turing hacked Enigma at the British Intelligence Station X Second World Secret Center which occupied it. But the ultra-modern London data center Equinix LD8, which is one of the main traffic exchange points in Europe, is also nothing - Turing would have approved.
View RUVDS ratescan be on their website or in a convenient form in my catalogs:
Search VPS and VPS.today