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Servers - To Colocate Or Not To Colocate?

Posted by Cliff on from the your-mileage-may-vary dept.

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!"

1 of 13 comments (clear)

  1. It's a question of reliability. by MemRaven · · Score: 4
    First, don't go with an outsourcing firm. They're lame, don't bother. You really want to own the boxen (or lease them) and arrange for your own network.

    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.