Suggestions for colocation needed

Tue May 24 09:13:41 PDT 2005

>> I would avoid 200paul. Their security is a joke. You get an HID 
>> badge, and that's it, you have full access to the
>> entire building. 
>
>
> You have access to some of the floors, not all and only the common 
> areas.  You do not have "full access to the entire building".

Perhaps now this has been fixed, but when my customer hosted there, my 
badge gave me access to everything.

>> They don't have a 247 noc,
>
>
> They claim to have a 24x7 NOC.  I have only seen it during the day as 
> that is when I was there.
>
If they do have a noc, this is a new development. When I had regular 
access to the building, I had a customer there as of 18 months ago,
and the only person on site at night was  the one security guard.

>> just one security guy.  
>
>
> They have 24x7 security and typically during the day there are two on 
> staff.

If they have two, this is also a new development. In a year, I never saw 
more than one
at any given time.

>> The grounds are also unsecured because they
>> share a parking lot with a newspaper delivery depot.
>
>
> After hours you have to use your badge to open the gate.  The grounds 
> are monitored with cameras.  I have even seen the guards check on the 
> lot as they like to ticket if you are parked in the no-parking areas.

Between 3 and 7am, the gate is wide open because of all the delivery 
trucks going in and out.  I've also seen the gate fail on half a dozen 
instances, due to the high winds that
go through that strange hilly alleyway. I had my car vandalized once 
there. I'm not sure if you've noticed, but 200 Paul is in the ghetto.

>> They're UPS based.. I can say that in the past 10 years, all but one 
>> of the 35 datacenter outages I've gone through
>> have been because of faulty batteries causing cascading failures.
>
>
> I have seen more problems with APC UPSes in the bottom of racks.  They 
> are designed to barely work when needed.

I prefer to have my servers at a datacenter, like 365, that generates 
their own, clean power, rather than rely on pg&e and poorly
maintained ups's. You do remember that 3-hour outage they had 2 years 
ago when their ups infrastructure fell over itself
in a cascading failure?

>> Go and tour their facilities.. You'll have this nagging feeling going 
>> through your head as you walk around. That
>> feeling is "Amateur", it describes their operations. They're also a 
>> spam friendly hosting provider.  Cogent is still
>> their most popular bw provider, followed by wiltel. One of their 
>> salespeople told me point blank that most of their
>> business came from porn and spam.
>
>
> Do you have a clue that DRT/200P/eXchange is only one of many colo 
> providers there?  There is XO, UnitedLayer and others in this 
> building?  They all have their own infrastructure?  Also there are 40 
> IP providers at this location?  DRT/200P/eXchange is a *real estate* 
> company where their main biz it to provide a building.  And they do a 
> pretty good job at that.  I would be happy to give you a tour of the 
> facilities some time.  You can determine if it is a A or C facility 
> yourself.
>
> Tim

40 IP providers?

You mean 6 on-site bandwidth providers, and 34 low-end aggregators.. 
Though I always thought their wall of providers on the third floor was 
cute, It was interesting to
count the # of them who were out of business (I remember 2), and then to 
count the # who didn't have a router in the datacenter, but instead 
would arrange for some kind
of local-loop. I expect to be able to ask for, and receive, an ethernet 
or fibre drop to my cage at a datacenter with no more than about a 
week's provisioning time at
a carrier-neutral datacenter, since I'd typically expect for carriers to 
keep access points onsite.

Again, a customer of mine hosted there for about a year. The staff was 
pleasant, but overworked. They did
not have well established processes. It was hard enough to get a line 
strung, or add somebody to their access list. They are really a 
no-frills rack/power/ac provider, and I think
are a good for hosting a non-critical service. Not even the salespeople 
there would try to sell me on that place being a world class datacenter.

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