Basically, that is the state of things. You're paying for power (which is also cooling) and bandwidth/connectivity. Globix is only letting us run one 30A 240V circuit per rack for "cooling reasons", however even with our 6850s we manage to populate a good portion of the rack. However, this means that for redundancy we cannot put anyone's partner in crime in the same cabinet. Though Globix is the typical cold-in-front, hot-in-back setup they still seem to be under-capacity when it comes to cooling... I think the end of the dot-com boom put a dent in their Liebert budget. It amazes me places like Hurricane can't get enough space when there are once-decent shops like Globix with so much unused space. Plan your power requirements carefully, and plan on the ability to upgrade in the future. With the current trend of high-capacity blades, it seems that it would not be impossible to find 20-25kw per cabinet not long from now. Power distribution (if done right) is easy, cooling that density is the fun part. What's your cooling plan? -Patrick ----- Original Message ----- From: "david raistrick" <drais@icantclick.org> To: "Joe Greco" <jgreco@ns.sol.net> Cc: nanog@nanog.org Sent: Saturday, March 22, 2008 9:26:37 PM (GMT-0800) America/Los_Angeles Subject: Re: rack power question On Sat, 22 Mar 2008, Joe Greco wrote:
Charging substantially less for rack space, even offset by higher costs for power, would encourage a lot of colo customers to "spread the load" around and not feel as obligated to maximize the use of space. That would in turn reduce the tendency for there to be excessive numbers of hot spots.
I wonder if we're to the point yet where we should just charge for power and give the space away "free".... When I'm shopping for colo that's pretty much the way I look at it. Power determines space. I need 80,000W of power at the breaker, so I need 800sqftx15$ in facility A, and 320sqft@40$ in facility B. I can fit my 8 racks into either the 320sqft or into the 800. If I'm doing the 800, I'll probably spend a bit more up front and use 12 or 14 racks, to keep my density down. A bit more cost up front, but in the grand scheme of things 4 or 6 extra racks ($6 to 10,000$) don't directly hurt to much. (80kW worth of power usually means you've got well north of $2M worth of hardware and software being stuffed into the space in my experience..but maybe that's because we're an Oracle shop. ;) Of course, I suppose for those customers still doing super-low-density boxes (webhosting with lots and lots of desktops), I suppose that model wouldn't work as well. ramble. .d --- david raistrick http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html drais@icantclick.org http://www.expita.com/nomime.html