March 23, 2017 at 13:49Features of choosing a data center for a cloud provider. Regional bias
In April 2017, the year will come when the mClouds.ru project is launched for commercial operation, the main purpose of which is to provide storage and computing resources for b2b clients. Over the past time, we have gained interesting experience, from the choice of technical solutions to the solution of facaps, which we want to share with you. The first story is about the torment of choosing a data center in the largest country in the world. Actually, the magnitude of the problem began.
The project was launched by the system integrator "Master", based in Tyumen, as we say - the best city in the world. The idea of launching mСlouds.ru was initially not to enter the open cloud hosting market, but to provide its b2b clients with computing resources for sandboxes and backup needs, such as report generation, remote repository for backups, external monitoring are not core databases. The solution also covers the needs of small companies in the SMB sector in the servers used for 1C: Enterprise. Considering that with the growth of the dollar exchange rate, buying our own servers, not to mention providing their UPSs, cooling and other infrastructure, began to take a lot of financial resources. Therefore, a decision was made within our company - to develop our own cloud direction,
We set a deadline for entering the productive environment on the first days of April and for three months we tested software and hardware capabilities based on the VMware vSphere platform. In addition, we managed to adapt many Enterprise solutions for the cloud infrastructure, and this is an interesting experience that we want to share.
Engraving at the entrance to the competence center - our personal Central Committee
Our project began to work in the Competence Center (hereinafter referred to as the Central Committee) based on our company, so there was no question about choosing a site. The cooling capacity and the UPS were enough to ensure the correct operation of the cooling and power subsystem. However, closer to the planned date of entry into the market, a problem emerged, where will the project have to live? Considering that we are not in Moscow or St. Petersburg, where there are no problems with it (after all, most of all commercial data centers in the country are concentrated there), then this is not a trivial matter for Tyumen.
So, in Tyumen there is anything but competent commercial data centers, and not everyone is familiar with a term like TIER 3 here, including the sites that we visited for acquaintance. There are corporate server rooms, several government data centers, telecom providers ’sites, but there are no commercial data centers as such, not to mention any certification. With Internet channels, too, not everything is successful, for example, connecting with a bandwidth of 1 Gbit / s is very expensive. If we say that the channel should have a growth prospect of up to 10 Gbit / s, then the eyes were completely rounded, it was read on the face or by phone that the guys first heard requests for such speeds in our region. So we started looking at data centers in the Russian Federation.
Australia is very close. Image: whatarethe7continents.com
Yekaterinburg - in this city there is a data center of telecom operators, for example Megafon and Rostelecom. But in the process of communication, we realized that the provision and level of service required for a cloud provider is not for them, since they themselves focus more on providing computing resources than on providing equipment placement services. As a result, we have not received an adequate price tag, we are continuing to study.
Data Center GAU "IT-PARK", Republic of Tatarstan
Kazan - everything is already better here, there is an IT park, Innopolis, it is clear that they understand, are interested in and love this area in IT. Professionally suited enough, but again, given our location - logistically, it is very inconvenient for us to get to Kazan. Therefore, SLA and communication channels were not considered as subtle moments, as an engineer.
The bottom line is Moscow and St. Petersburg. Photo: periskop.livejournal.com
We started a market review from St. Petersburg. The first data center (hereinafter referred to as DC), which turned out to be the data center SDN. A decent level of engineering systems with a fairly clear description, interesting neighbors, such as VKontakte, adequate price, level of communication and willingness to answer all our questions. Next, colocation services from Selectel, Fiord and other DCs were considered. We almost made the decision to host mClouds.ru in the St. Petersburg SDN. However, logistics again got on the scales, even though the SDN has a remote hands service, nevertheless, in the event of an emergency (and a regular one too), we would not be able to quickly land in St. Petersburg, given that we are physically located in Tyumen and, alas , to St. Petersburg, we have only one flight a day - and these are very high risks in terms of response time. However for those
The market for commercial data centers in Moscow, of course, is the largest. There is plenty to choose from. We divided the data centers into several categories:
Consider the first category. The main consumers of services are customers of integrators, and the main priority for them. In our opinion, the focus is clearly not on small projects. Examples - Data Center "Compressor" company CROC, Data Center "Trust-Info" from Ai-teco.
The second category. Associations are beautiful, cool and ... expensive. We selected three companies from the initial selection: DataSpace, DataPro and Dataline. They looked, licked their lips and went on. It is necessary to come to the data center when the project has already grown, well, then, they have gone to grow.
The third category is the data center of telecom operators. Rather low flexibility due to constant and very long approvals, long answers from managers, lack of access to equipment at night and a price order comparable to certified DCs.
The fourth category. By the way, from this category we chose our future home for the project. We chose a data center, which is positioned as a network of club data centers. We liked the speed of the reaction, the willingness to show and tell everything, the connectedness with other sites, the willingness to receive our equipment from the transport company and mount it in the rack on our own, which meant significant savings for us on business trips of engineers. The data center infrastructure suited our requirements.
Looking ahead, I’ll say that we worked in the selected data center until the end of 2016. During the year, there was one simple summer at 2 hours 30 minutes due to a malfunction in the air conditioning system, and a malfunction of the data center network equipment, as a result we lost communication channels to the outside world for several hours. Unfortunately, the competencies of the data center employees were not enough to quickly eliminate the failure, and as we later learned, there was no backup equipment at the site. Draw conclusions and eliminate the possible repetition of such a situation in the future. All customers were forced to compensate for the monthly subscription fee, although formally they remained within the framework of the SLA. But the data center is still the basis, the foundation of equipment operability. This is written in the cons of this category of data centers.
We did not seriously consider the fifth category. Here are the own data centers of hosting providers, which are redone from any premises and are operated with some success. Investing in our own sites is worthy of respect, but we believe that buying a professional service and the service will be more functional and reliable. But the economy, of course, may suffer, which will affect the final cost of the service.
As a result, since the new year 2017, we have been working in the certified NORD4 data center under the TIER 3 program from Uptime Institute, a Dataline company. Very adequate service, high flexibility and, most importantly, high reliability. A detailed contract and a detailed SLA on performance and response. On Habré there were already reviews of this data center and a detailed description of the infrastructure.
This is how we briefly reviewed our experience in choosing a data center for the mClouds.ru cloud project. We hope it will be useful to those who choose the data center for their projects or services.
In the following articles, we will describe the technical features of the operation of our infrastructure directly and the solutions used.
The project was launched by the system integrator "Master", based in Tyumen, as we say - the best city in the world. The idea of launching mСlouds.ru was initially not to enter the open cloud hosting market, but to provide its b2b clients with computing resources for sandboxes and backup needs, such as report generation, remote repository for backups, external monitoring are not core databases. The solution also covers the needs of small companies in the SMB sector in the servers used for 1C: Enterprise. Considering that with the growth of the dollar exchange rate, buying our own servers, not to mention providing their UPSs, cooling and other infrastructure, began to take a lot of financial resources. Therefore, a decision was made within our company - to develop our own cloud direction,
We set a deadline for entering the productive environment on the first days of April and for three months we tested software and hardware capabilities based on the VMware vSphere platform. In addition, we managed to adapt many Enterprise solutions for the cloud infrastructure, and this is an interesting experience that we want to share.
Project site selection
Engraving at the entrance to the competence center - our personal Central Committee
Our project began to work in the Competence Center (hereinafter referred to as the Central Committee) based on our company, so there was no question about choosing a site. The cooling capacity and the UPS were enough to ensure the correct operation of the cooling and power subsystem. However, closer to the planned date of entry into the market, a problem emerged, where will the project have to live? Considering that we are not in Moscow or St. Petersburg, where there are no problems with it (after all, most of all commercial data centers in the country are concentrated there), then this is not a trivial matter for Tyumen.So, in Tyumen there is anything but competent commercial data centers, and not everyone is familiar with a term like TIER 3 here, including the sites that we visited for acquaintance. There are corporate server rooms, several government data centers, telecom providers ’sites, but there are no commercial data centers as such, not to mention any certification. With Internet channels, too, not everything is successful, for example, connecting with a bandwidth of 1 Gbit / s is very expensive. If we say that the channel should have a growth prospect of up to 10 Gbit / s, then the eyes were completely rounded, it was read on the face or by phone that the guys first heard requests for such speeds in our region. So we started looking at data centers in the Russian Federation.
What is near?
Australia is very close. Image: whatarethe7continents.com
Yekaterinburg - in this city there is a data center of telecom operators, for example Megafon and Rostelecom. But in the process of communication, we realized that the provision and level of service required for a cloud provider is not for them, since they themselves focus more on providing computing resources than on providing equipment placement services. As a result, we have not received an adequate price tag, we are continuing to study.
Data Center GAU "IT-PARK", Republic of Tatarstan
Kazan - everything is already better here, there is an IT park, Innopolis, it is clear that they understand, are interested in and love this area in IT. Professionally suited enough, but again, given our location - logistically, it is very inconvenient for us to get to Kazan. Therefore, SLA and communication channels were not considered as subtle moments, as an engineer.
The bottom line is Moscow and St. Petersburg. Photo: periskop.livejournal.com
We started a market review from St. Petersburg. The first data center (hereinafter referred to as DC), which turned out to be the data center SDN. A decent level of engineering systems with a fairly clear description, interesting neighbors, such as VKontakte, adequate price, level of communication and willingness to answer all our questions. Next, colocation services from Selectel, Fiord and other DCs were considered. We almost made the decision to host mClouds.ru in the St. Petersburg SDN. However, logistics again got on the scales, even though the SDN has a remote hands service, nevertheless, in the event of an emergency (and a regular one too), we would not be able to quickly land in St. Petersburg, given that we are physically located in Tyumen and, alas , to St. Petersburg, we have only one flight a day - and these are very high risks in terms of response time. However for those
The market for commercial data centers in Moscow, of course, is the largest. There is plenty to choose from. We divided the data centers into several categories:
- Data Center of large integrators
- Uptime Institute certified data centers
- Data center telecom operators
- Small and independent commercial data centers claiming compliance with Tier 3
- sites of various hosters, from independent to dedicated zones in large commercial data centers
Consider the first category. The main consumers of services are customers of integrators, and the main priority for them. In our opinion, the focus is clearly not on small projects. Examples - Data Center "Compressor" company CROC, Data Center "Trust-Info" from Ai-teco.
The second category. Associations are beautiful, cool and ... expensive. We selected three companies from the initial selection: DataSpace, DataPro and Dataline. They looked, licked their lips and went on. It is necessary to come to the data center when the project has already grown, well, then, they have gone to grow.
The third category is the data center of telecom operators. Rather low flexibility due to constant and very long approvals, long answers from managers, lack of access to equipment at night and a price order comparable to certified DCs.
The fourth category. By the way, from this category we chose our future home for the project. We chose a data center, which is positioned as a network of club data centers. We liked the speed of the reaction, the willingness to show and tell everything, the connectedness with other sites, the willingness to receive our equipment from the transport company and mount it in the rack on our own, which meant significant savings for us on business trips of engineers. The data center infrastructure suited our requirements.
Looking ahead, I’ll say that we worked in the selected data center until the end of 2016. During the year, there was one simple summer at 2 hours 30 minutes due to a malfunction in the air conditioning system, and a malfunction of the data center network equipment, as a result we lost communication channels to the outside world for several hours. Unfortunately, the competencies of the data center employees were not enough to quickly eliminate the failure, and as we later learned, there was no backup equipment at the site. Draw conclusions and eliminate the possible repetition of such a situation in the future. All customers were forced to compensate for the monthly subscription fee, although formally they remained within the framework of the SLA. But the data center is still the basis, the foundation of equipment operability. This is written in the cons of this category of data centers.
We did not seriously consider the fifth category. Here are the own data centers of hosting providers, which are redone from any premises and are operated with some success. Investing in our own sites is worthy of respect, but we believe that buying a professional service and the service will be more functional and reliable. But the economy, of course, may suffer, which will affect the final cost of the service.
As a result, since the new year 2017, we have been working in the certified NORD4 data center under the TIER 3 program from Uptime Institute, a Dataline company. Very adequate service, high flexibility and, most importantly, high reliability. A detailed contract and a detailed SLA on performance and response. On Habré there were already reviews of this data center and a detailed description of the infrastructure.
This is how we briefly reviewed our experience in choosing a data center for the mClouds.ru cloud project. We hope it will be useful to those who choose the data center for their projects or services.
In the following articles, we will describe the technical features of the operation of our infrastructure directly and the solutions used.