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Servers - To Colocate Or Not To Colocate?
BilldaCat writes: "I would like to know which is the better choice for a start-up: colocating, outsourcing or bringing the servers in house. Office space is not an issue, as it is already paid for. Money is not so much of an issue, but if it's possible to save $ without losing reliability/service, that would be what we want to do. Flexibility and growth is key. We expect a fairly quick ramp-up period in a couple months. Personally, my bias is to bring the stuff in house, as reliability is very important to me, and I feel with some of the larger companies we may not be treated as well as I would like, since we plan on starting with only a handful of servers. If anyone has any experience in these situations, I would really appreciate some feedback!"
It really depends on your requirements. How much downtime can you stand? How much traffic are you going to get and how fast will it grow? Is it cost effective for you to deal with the infrastructure issues yourself or should you let the coloc people worry about it?
Bandwidth, power and cooling are going to be your main issues. Let's talk bandwidth first. How fast is your traffic going to grow? Major colocs like Exodus have plenty of spare bandwidth on hand to sell you. Telcos can take weeks to run a new line. If you do it yourself you have to really keep on top of your line utilization or you can find yourself way behind the curve and it's a bitch to try and catch back up.
As far a cooling goes, you're probably going to be fine unless you have to add a ton of servers. But this is one thing that's bitten me in the past. We outgrew our cooling capacity in just a few months and we paid the price for months until we got another unit installed.
And let's not forget the power issue. How much downtime can you afford? A good coloc is going to have a generator as well as a good UPS system. Can you stand your site being down 4 hours because of a blackout?
The other benefits of a good coloc is their experience and full time staffing. I've very rarely seen the good ones have anything but minor network outages (backhoes not withstanding. :) Their NOCs often catch problems long before you hear anything from your users.
The major downside to a coloc is the expense. The good ones cost a ton of money. The only way to cut down the expense is to make sure you go rackmount and use the minium Us you need to do the job. They'll also hit you up for bandwidth costs, but that's gonna directly relate to your traffic so it's less of an issue.
So it all pretty much boils down to balancing downtime and headaches vs. costs. And that's math only you can do.
Particularly when you're dealing with an Akamai situation, you need to be physically distributed, and that's what they're getting by being all over the place.
Unless you are running a large number of servers and using a consistantly high amount of bandwidth, it is much cheaper to colocate.
When you buy bandwidth at a colocation facility, you are buying a 100mbps ethernet port (cheap), plus a share of an OC3 (or an OC12 or whatever).
When you buy bandwidth to your offices, you are buying a T1/fractional T3/T3/whatever. Economies of scale come in here: at least from AT&T, an OC12 connection is 4 times cheaper than a T1 on a per-gigabyte basis.
Unless you are going to be using a huge amount of bandwidth, it is going to be cheaper to share a fat pipe with other people than to buy a narrow pipe for your self.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
So with that in mind, the real issue is one of reliability. Consider the following factors:
- Cooling. Yes, it's been said, but it's very important. I'm at a software company, and even if we were to have the ability to control our cooling needs (and we don't at the moment, which is a major limiting factor), you'd be amazed at the kind of heat you'll put out. I've seen rooms where the cooling failed, and it's not pretty. Colo facilities have cooling situations that would make you drool, and they're redundant.
- Redundant Links. For the price of one link, at a competant colo facility, you get several links to several backbones. One goes down, you're fine. Two go down, you're still fine. Even if you get dual T-1s or dual T-3s on your own, unless you actually lay your own fiber, you're probably dealing with your local RBOC owning the cable itself. So there's still a central point of failure. If the problem is with Sprint and you have an MCI link, you're fine. But if the problem is with SBC/PacBell, you lose regardles of how redundant the links you have to your office are. People often forget this.
- Security. Ever had a janitor accidentally pull out a cable of any kind? I have. That won't happen at a colo facility.
- Someone's there 24-7. At the colo we're using, let's say we get a page at 3:30am which says that our firewall has died. I can actually call the colo staff, and have one of them walk to our rack, pull ether from one box and into another, and go back to sleep. This is actually a big advantage.
- Power redundancy. This is another big issue. Let's say you have a power outage in your office. Fine, your servers are on a UPS. Is your phone company's routers? Who knows. Let's say the outage lasts a while. Then everyone loses. Unless you spend a fortune figuring out everything in your setup which is power dependant (don't forget the A/C! If you have a power outage and your A/C goes, you might start burning CPUs in a matter of an hour or so), and making it redundant, what about one block away where your phone company is?
In short, the real issue with a colo is truly reliability. You could spend all your time and money setting up a comparable situation to a colo facility in your own office, but why bother? It'll just cost you more, and those are sunk costs which your CFO won't be happy about.