Suggestions for colocation needed

Mon May 23 18:00:35 PDT 2005

I can't consider JMA more useful than a couple of guys with a garage and 
some extra power. The last 7 years in the
bay area have seen some excellent datacenters built, and with so much 
extra capacity, some incredible pricing.

3 years ago JMA decided to rewire their downstairs datacenter, ethernet 
and some power, without telling their
customers (they forgot we were there), taking us all down. No apologies, 
no forewarnings, no reasons afterwards.
We only found out what caused it, because we happened to be up at that 
time and able to investigate ourselves.

To this day, I could walk into that building, wave at the security guy, 
and have full access to all of the cabinets
downstairs. I doubt upstairs is any more secure. Their concept of a NOC 
is some guy that lives on the other side
of the city, who takes an hour to get there.

And the "upstairs" DC , coloserve/servepath, whatever they're calling 
themselves today, again, a budget mom&pop shop
at best. I toured their old datacenter in the sega building, brought a 
thermometer, it was 90 degrees, no AC, wires hanging
all over the place, the salesman could not understand why I was laughing 
hysterically. I'm not sure either, maybe I was just
trying to breath.

JMA was built as a carrier exchange, not a hosting company. Hosting for 
them was an afterthought when they realized they
couldn't fill all of that space by having telcos & isps connect to each 
other.

And 365 != abovenet. Abovenet is almost dead at this point, 365 is it's 
own corporation. It's a carrier-neutral colo facility, and
the only carrier-neutral, first-class datacenter in san francisco. The 
only other options are the mom&pops (6th & mission,
650 townsend, jma), and level3. I fully agree that above.net's politics 
were not such that you could conduct business with them,
even if their network was great.

> Ummm... I've been in a lot of data centers in my 26 year career. Some 
> are bad, some are worse. Maybe you look for an ISP... I dunno. I don't.
>
> I look for good power (did 20 hours in a data center a few years back 
> due to their idiot power contractor pulling the plug to change a 
> breaker) and good air conditioning. I don't care if they have a NOC or 
> not. because they ain't gonna touch my gear anyway.
>
> I refuse to deal with "politicians" like abovenet. I buy my bandwidth 
> separately from my real estate. I like it like that.
>
> I run 3 racks in JMA. Been in there for a couple of years now.
>
>
>
>
>
> Michael T. Halligan wrote:
>
>> JMA wired is a joke. They're nice guys, but come on. Have you been in 
>> their datacenter? I ran the infrastructure
>> for a small company that had about 1 racks worth of gear for 2 years 
>> in there. One night, at about 2am, I was
>> out drinking with the customer's CTO, and we get a call that 
>> everything was down. We made our way over to
>> JMA to find out that they had ripped out all of the wiring in the 
>> datacenter, without telling customers, and everything..
>> I mean EVERYTHING was down for 6 hours.
>>
>> If you want a REAL colocation provider, go to the opposite side of 
>> that block, and look at 365 Main.
>>
>> 365 is a great datacenter. Above.net's flagship $130M datacenter, 
>> that the building owner bought for a song ($2M) in
>> the bankruptcy sale. I run about 8 racks worth of gear for various 
>> customers (including my own consulting company)
>> there, and it's the only place besides equinix in the bay area that 
>> deserves my business.
>>
>> Call them up, and ask for Kevin Shanahan (tell him I sent you!)
>>
>> Their facilities are awesome, plus they have about 20 bandwidth 
>> providers in there now.
>>
>> The only problems I've had with 365 was that they had a power 
>> failure, due to a faulty relay shutoff valve in the
>> cooling system. I've never had an ISP be as professional as they 
>> were. Within 10 minutes of the outage they had
>> called us, told us what the situation was. By the time we got down 
>> there they were letting people into the building,
>> and helped us do a controlled power-up. The shutoff valve has since 
>> been taken out of their infrastructure.
>>
>> Since the dot-com bust there have been a lot of half-assed mom&pop 
>> colo providers jumping up, sniping on the
>> dirt-cheap facilities, but you get what you pay for.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Bruce Ferrell wrote:
>>
>>> You might want to talk to JMA wired in San Francisco. Their building 
>>> hosts ColoServ. There are a number of bandwidth providers in the 
>>> building.
>>>
>>> I'm just a satisfied customer.
>>>
>>> Ulf Zimmermann wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hello everyone.
>>>>
>>>> My company needs to expand their colocation and I am looking for
>>>> suggestions where to check. Our requirements are something like
>>>> this:
>>>>
>>>> 20'x14' cage to be able to put up to 6 HP 10000 cabinets 47U high.
>>>> Initial we would put 4 in but want space to be able to add 2 more.
>>>> For each cabinet we would need 2 circuits 40A or 50A at 208V hard
>>>> wired.
>>>> Carrier neutral would be nice but doesn't necessary have to be.
>>>> It needs to be a presentable colocation as our customer include
>>>> companies like Ford and Chase and they sometimes come by to look
>>>> at things.
>>>>
>>>> Our company itself sits in Menlo Park so something close would be
>>>> good, but we are pretty much open elsewhere in the area (our current
>>>> colocation is in Fremont).
>>>>
>>>> We also have a 10Mbit/sec Ethernet link to our Phoenix failover site,
>>>> so experiences with colos who have providers in house to provide
>>>> simular links would be good also.
>>>>
>>>> Looking forward for any hints :-)
>>>>
>>
>>

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