Re: Links between cabinets at commercial datacentre
On 17 Apr 2002, Paul Vixie wrote:
someone like exodus or qwest or at&t or uunet or abovenet would be very likely to prevent their customers from directly cross-connecting. mae-west (55 s market) won't allow it either. paix, equinix, switch and data, and other "neutral colos" won't allow it to occur without a fee but the fees are reasonable (unlike, say, the cross connect fees at mae-west.)
UUNet's never put up any roadblocks for me in crossconnecting between cabinets in their datacenters (2 cabinets belonging to different UUNet customers). They've done it quickly too -- here's the response from a UUNet engineer from the last time I asked:
If this is NOT an Out-of-Band cross connect (POTS, ISDN, whatever) contacting your sales person will not be necessary. Are you simply attempting to join cabinets [X] and [Y] via a Cat5 connection??? If this is the case let me know what ports in the patch panels you want the cross connect terminated to and I can send the request to have this done today.
Their quote for bringing in outside bandwidth (having a circuit punched down at the datacenter + crossconnected to a cabinet) was relatively little too -- something to the tune of $50/month iirc. At my request, they even allowed me to have a circuit run directly through their datacenter bypassing their equipment altogether. I flipped the bill for the UUNet-contracted outside vendor to do the cabling.
From what I've heard, Exodus is a bit more hell-bent on forcing customers to use Exodus (err cw) bandwidth, but even they obviously make exceptions for their larger customers (and perhaps those that threaten to walk?).
there's no answer to the question, as posed. "can you be more specific?"
I think the poster was inquiring as to common practice. ISPs will do whatever they can to make a buck. In some cases this could be forcing customers to use their own bandwidth by preventing crossconnecting within their datacenter. In other cases, it could be realizing that some customers require/value/will pay for such services. In cases where there is little or no competition, it certainly seems like the former would be more profitable (however disappointing). Regards, Adam
there's no answer to the question, as posed. "can you be more specific?"
I think the poster was inquiring as to common practice.
Yes, but there isn't going to be a common practice for "data centers" as a whole. There's going to be a common practice for telco/fiber hotels, and a common practice for hosting centers, and a common practice for exchange points, and a common practice for shell&core, and so on. Each kind of data center drives toward its own common practice, and asking about common practices for "data centers" is therefore a nonquestion.
Hi
Yes, but there isn't going to be a common practice for "data centers" as a whole. There's going to be a common practice for telco/fiber hotels, and a common practice for hosting centers, and a common practice for exchange points, and a common practice for shell&core, and so on. Each kind of data center drives toward its own common practice, and asking about common practices for "data centers" is therefore a nonquestion.
in this case, it's servers, and to be more specific, mainly webservers and some ASP type stuff. Not colo-routers/networks. --Rob
participants (3)
-
Adam Herscher -
fingers -
Paul Vixie