Ross West <we...@linepoint.com> writes: > Having been involved with this kind of thing in the past, so let me > make some commentary. As was pointed out - most of your answers are > actually determined by the business, and shouldn't be done via a > technical solution. > > > 1. It's got to be cheap. > > It's not that cheap up front. A customer will do stuff at 3am, and then > screw it up needing physical access "right away" because they punched > in the wrong IP address into their firewall and it don't have a OOB > connection, or you can't hook up a simple crash cart (KVM on a cart) > to it. So you (or your employee) is running around then, or you'll > need to invest in higher-end/remote management gear. Oh, and they'll > agree to any cost at that moment (3hr minimum @ $150/hr?) but refuse > to pay since it only took 10min to fix, or simply can't afford it.
Yeah, this is the current situation, only I have good serial out of band access setup for everyone. I've stopped accepting co-lo customers for this very reason. With this new setup, I'd like to give them access to the rack... he.net will manage access for me, so they can go down and screw with it without waking me up. My problem is that I need to make sure they won't overdraw the circut while they are screwing around, and take down other customers. (there is a certain level of risk inherent to just sharing a rack... but I think the biggest risk is of overdrawing the shared circut.) > > 2. it's got to be low-calorie on my part. > > Then do pre-pay rather than post-pay. Ie: People pay you $100 and put > that into their "account", then you debit that "account" with ongoing > costs as they happen. When the balance is $0, turn it off > automatically. No money, no service. Also gets around the issue of > people paying 1/2 their bill - remember you're aiming for the cheapest > customers possible. Yeah. I need to get a good shutoff policy for co-lo customers. > Be sure to check on the govt rules for holding money in an account on > someone's behalf - it might be different than holding a generic > deposit for billed services. this is something I'd not thought of, thanks. I guess maybe I could structure it as a setup fee with a 'last month free' deal? or something. I guess I'd have to talk to someone about that. > > 3. there has to be good isolation. > > This is standard business stuff - I'm assuming that you already do a > VPS service from your website, so how do you handle a 75mbps burst to > a virtual server on a 100mb cable that has normally ~50mbps usage? > Employ the same attitude. The difference is twofold. First: I can get bandwidth on plans where I have a 100Mbps commit on a 1000Mbps connection. I can overrun my commit with no more consiquence than paying more money. second: if the pipe is overran momentairly, the consiquence is that some packets are dropped. If the power is overran momentairly, all servers on the circut fail. This isn't the 'cloud' - people expect their co-located servers to stay up. > > 3.5 (electrical Qs) > > You will not get a NEMA5-15 Receptacle (the standard one) 7.5a fuse > for a few reasons: > > - Probably somewhere breaks the electrical code > > - Your non-standard 7.5a breaker will cost 5x the 15a breaker (if you > can even find it) those two are very good points. And as another poster said, the breaker won't really do what I want without giving myself some headroom, anyhow. > - You're not going to be around when the circuit pops and needs to be > _manually_ reset. Remotely resettable ones cost stupid amounts of > money. Like i said, this part, at least, isn't a problem. if you blow your circut, well, that sounds like you have a problem until you can get it reset. > So my advice is suck up the upfront cost and install a remotely > manageable PDU (eg: www.servertech.com), and bill the customer based > on actual usage (watts!). I have several by that brand, in fact. pretty nice stuff. > Running 230v/400v/600v is great, but people assume 120v and bring gear > for that (eg: wall warts for a 5 port dlink switch). Servers aren't as > much of a problem. Yeah. 208v would actually be fine, if I could find it cheap. but the opportunity I see now is a reasonable (not awesome but reasonable) cost per watt at he.net, which gets me lots of rackspace (which is nice to have, even though it's not really essential) and he.net has pretty smooth remote hands and access control policies, if I can set it up such that people can be trusted to deal withstuff. > People have _no_ idea how much power their gear uses. I've had people > come with 15 disk san arrays assuming it's the same as their 1U server > at 150w. I've also had the inverse too (told modem draws 1 amp @ > 230v). Yup. I most often get people who think that the big cost is the rackspace.. I mean, that's the most visible, but it probably has the least to do with my costs. Sometimes I wonder how much of that is actually negotiation... "Well, can I put this massive dual xeon from 2003 in your $50/month 1u special? it's only 1u." I've got a friend who conned some local ISP into hosting his 10 CPU sun enterprise for $65/month. _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list Tech@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
