Pitfalls of choosing a data center

    This morning, I once again ran through the websites of companies offering server hosting services in data centers, what I wrote there caught me so much that I decided to ask the public for opinion.

    As everyone knows, in Russia there is no sufficiently authoritative organization that would deal with certification of data centers. A variety of data centers with reliability parameters differing significantly at the market offer their services on the market. Any barn is a Tier 3 data center. As before, all the cellars were called “B + offices”, and the slums of the Moscow Ring Road were called “Class A offices”.

    Yes, we have a classification of data centers by size, but I believe that the quality of the services provided and the area of ​​the data center are very distant concepts.
    With the same success, you can remove the hangar or factory, make cosmetics inside, put a couple of household clothes, paint the walls with whitewash and place the racks there. Cool get a data center, right ?! And by this principle, most data centers have been made.

    A normal data center is one that is purposefully built, and not shoved into some old workshop in a rotting factory or warehouse ... sores of the old building cannot be fixed with any cosmetic repairs, and it’s generally unrealistic to relocate nearby communications.

    Rates for accommodation.
    Now on the market there are such offers: 50 000 rub. per month for cabinet rental, load 5-10 kW. And after all, they go to them and put the server, without even thinking that this is cheaper than the cost. Despite the fact that data centers are not built at all by altruists, but by very cruel capitalists. For a 10 kW rack, only for the payment of electricity (kW * hours) it takes 37500 p. per month (and this is at the current price, but it rises 1-2 times a year). Data centers should be powered by the first category, everyone knows the tariffs.

    Initial investment per rack, according to the most conservative estimates, is about 30 thousand American Tugriks to recapture them in 2-3 years and earn. Despite the fact that I did not take into account the costs of the Internet, the salaries of engineers, taxes and other monthly expenses, which are also very large.
    For a fifty dollars a month, you can stay in a rented office room, partially converted into a server room or, even more beautifully, in a small toilet with a beautiful cabinet and a fire extinguisher. Moreover, such data centers, as a rule, do not pay for electricity ... agree on personal remuneration with individual managers of the lessor. What happens when a landlord's manager changes? That's right, customers of such a data center consider their risks. So it turns out, or save 10-20 thousand per month at a stand, but periodically lose on business downtime, or initially plan to use real data centers. But why then use unreliable data centers? It’s better to just rent an office room and put your own pair of racks in there, both cheaper and more reliable.
    By the way, everyone is talking about X kW per rack / server, and who thinks?
    There are at least four typical divorces: calculation by the sum of the power ratings of the power supplies; by rated power of one of the blocks; according to the nameplate capacity of the server; by theoretical maximum peak power. And there is only one honest way: measuring consumption in established mode.

    An interesting case was recently, a client approached us with a request for 35 kW of power for a cabinet - a client used to pay for this power in another data center. We, realizing that it is impossible to remove such an amount of heat in an ordinary cabinet, began to study the situation. It turned out that the client’s typical rack is full: two IBM blade baskets (each with 4 power supplies of 2.9 kW each) 16 blades with 2 SAS disks per blade, plus several single-server servers, plus a 16-disk disk shelf (two blocks each 1.5 kW). After an honest measurement, it turned out that the entire rack consumes 5-6 kW in total (under load). After understanding how he was bred before, the client moved completely to us.

    Traffic
    What Russian does not like a freebie ?! Guided by this, on sites near the traffic in 98.8% of cases anonym is written at speeds from 100 Mbps to gigabits for free. Wow, that’s great, and on the right are cute stars. And if you click on them, it turns out that the traffic is not completely anlim, but with ratios and restrictions. But how beautifully veiled! What happens to a resource whose traffic exceeds some kind of secret norm? That's right, or it’s clamped by speed, or they offer to pay extra ... well, for the sake of prevention, every 4-5th client gets periodically a “surcharge”, because traffic did not fit into the ratio. And if you think about it, data centers rent channels and pay for each megabit. It's like a home network buys one 100 Mbps channel and sells to 2-3 thousand users at 10 Mbps anlim ... they even introduced an interesting term: “overbooking”.

    Another interesting point: there are data centers that provide the best connectivity (open peer-to-peer policy, participate in all exchangers, rent a large number of channels with international and snickering operators), and there are those who agree with one operator and pour all traffic ... it doesn’t matter what speed it is, most importantly, through one operator (it’s easier for him to sell the service, and the channel gives the data center cheaper).

    And the behavior of the data center in emergency situations is very important .
    Anyone who finds themselves in a blackhole under a DDoS attack of 10-100 Mbps will understand what I mean. Almost all cheap data centers kill such a resource, but from those. support comes: "wait for the attack to end, turn it on." It's a shame, and there is no one to complain.
    Fortunately, not everything is so terrible! And yes, naturally there are normal data centers. There are only 5 of them in Moscow, do not be mistaken.
    How to choose? Yes, it’s very simple - to see, to see the insides. Read, compare, listen and be sure to watch live, but rather bring a server and "test" the service.

    We made a virtual tour of our own data center, so that everyone could climb, see and practically feel how everything works. The link can be found on the company's blog and website.
    This is not so much PR, we just want everyone to know that free cheese is only in a mousetrap and that the criteria for comparison are not only “1U tariff per month”. Yes, everyone has their “+” and “-”, and we are not an exception, but we need to compare not only tariffs, but also risks and hidden fees.

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