PgrMgr to start offering $150/month quarter rack Colo | Hacker News Reader

PgrMgr to start offering $150/month quarter rack Colo

prgmr.com

17 pointse1ven15 comments

At one point I debated fabricating my own and had some constructed by a metalfab, but, for splitting racks, if you're using a standard cabinet:

http://www.middleatlantic.com/rackac/security/security.htm

Several manufacturers sell half-cab cabinets where you have 2 individual locks. Of course, you might need to negotiate with he.net to get them to put that in prior to your start.

Raritan makes a power strip that is a little costly, but, allows you to control power by outlet, set triggers, see what the power use is by outlet, interfaces nicely with several stonith profiles. Individual web access by port (if I recall, we don't use that feature)

The highest density/power efficient box we've been using is a Supermicro 512-L, X7DVL-3, dual quadcore xeon, 24gb RAM. At load, .9 amps.

yup, if I wanted to spend more money, I could do /much/ better than the proposed setup. But, then I'd have to charge more, and the set of people willing to pay more does not overlap much with the set of people willing to do business with me.

I guess the title can't be fixed. I read it and thought "Cool a new company called peggermegger is offering colo for $150/mo", then I saw the actual link.

Sorry about that, I was incautious and didn't double-check.

In my (slight) defense, I've been up a very long time, but I messed that one up, and I apologize.

PeggerMegger sounds like a neat company name, though.

worst name ever, I am told. We should switch to serv-o-mat, says my friend with taste.

I should keep a closer eye on the twitter; I only noticed this got posted here today, and I bet by now everyone is gone. Very sad.

Too many flaws for this idea to take off. I've been in the colo business for years and can certainly tell this is going no where.

Here's the killer flaw in the idea:

"he.net support and remote hands(I need to check on the details here, but I /believe/ it's free and unlimited.)"

There's no free lunch folks.

Regards

Joe

eh, most data centers in the SF bay area these days really do give you "free" remote hands. You really can ask them to go jack with your stuff, and they really don't charge you.

One quickly learns, though, that you aren't going to get anyone of much skill at that price.

I got quoted 200$/mo with 7U and 2Amps (100Mb bandwidth) directly from HE.net which I found strange since the next power jump goes up to 600$/mo. This seems like a pretty good deal.

As far as I know, the current he.net prices are $400/month for a full rack with 15a power... and another $100/month for 100Mbps bandwidth.

If you can buy in those quantities, we resellers can't beat the price. But from what I've seen, resellers quite often can beat he.net's partial rack prices.

Two circuits per rack, with half of circuit per customer would be a lot better. The price would have to go up, but 3a in 10u isn't enough better than individual machine colo to be worth the price.

I have friends that are putting something similar together and might be very interested in this as a starting point.

I dono. I thought about that; 'round here, the cost per watt is about the same either way, and I thought It'd be nice to give people a little extra room, I mean, if it doesn't cost anything extra.

Excluding bandwidth, at he.net I get a full rack with 15a for $400/month. At SVTIX, I can get a full rack with 2x 20a circuits for around a grand a month. So, for the same margin I'd need to charge, what, $375 or so per 1/4 rack?

Considering that is within spitting distance of a full rack with more power at he.net where you won't have to share, I'd argue that the $150/month deal is probably going to appeal to more people than the $375 deal, even though the latter has a slightly better cost per watt, as the $400 full rack from he.net will have a better cost per watt.

(On the other hand, I've got a customer who had 1/2 rack and a full 20a at svtix vacating shortly, so if you do want some higher density power, lemme know and I'll see what I can do.)

I'm surprised there's a demand for this degree of power subdivision.

Other than regulatory issues[1], it wouldn't be terribly expensive or difficult to modify an existing low-end PDU with multiple small-amperage breakers. It may even be possible to get reasonably priced[2] self-resetting ones.

The main trick would be getting oddball values like 3.75A, though four 3A ones would allow the sub-tenants to run at full breakered capacity, while maintaining 80% overall.

Perhaps there's a hardware startup in this. How much would you pay for a power strip with individually breakered outlets?

[1] Could be as practical as Perfectly Spherical Cows, I realize.

[2] Under $20 even in small quantities

oh man, I spent a fair amount of time talking and researching this before hand... and yeah, it's probably possible, but you need a guy with significantly more knowledge and experience with power than I have to do it.

Oh, and, my understanding is that it probably wouldn't be as good as my hacked up perl script, either. Apparently, there is a lot of wiggle room in the power level at which breakers trip.

As for your "How much would you pay" question, probably not a lot. for the first cabinet I'm spending under $100 each for used metering PDUs (and giving every user their own.) After the first rack, I don't know what I'm going to do (that /is/ a reasonable used price, if you look around, but I would need to pay about twice that for a guaranteed supply)

HP c7000's are 10U - but they suck a hell of a lot of power. It would be great to pay just 150 per month to physically host 16 physical servers with (N) VMs running on it - but getting the power to it kills this deal.

EDIT: actually - you should be able to negotiate free hosting of an HP chassis assuming you get serious BW and power at full price.

not at he.net. you are limited to 1 15a 120v circut per rack there... and that's not going to be nearly enough to run your blade server.

(One sales guy said I could buy two racks, use one for storage, and put both circuits in one rack... but you'd need, what, six of those puppies, at least for the blade monster, if it can even run at all on 120v power. I bet that the he.net cooling systems would have a difficult time dealing with such a hot-spot.)

I'd recommend talking to SVTIX if you are looking for local high-power co-location, that or some place in Santa Clara.

I live in the low-end here; if you need a lot of power, you are probably better of going direct with someone who owns a data center, and/or shipping it to Texas.

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