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