"John Stoffel" <[email protected]> writes: > Luke, > > One thing I've been wondering about here is physical access issues, > which you haven't really talked about. If you're going to let your > customers in a 4am to muck in their 1/4 of a rack, how are you going > to limit their access to the *other* 3/4 of the rack? What's to keep > that user from plugging into someone else's outlets?
I think just having seperate PDUs would be enough, especially if I have a shelf every 'border' - I've shared racks that way before when I was smaller an only needed 1/2 rack. SysAdmins are pretty good about "Don't touch other people's power" I think. If I'm wrong, of course, I'm sunk. But compitition in that building allows open access (though there is a process for bringing in new servers that he.net implements. I don't think it works that well 'cause they don't check power usage.) but I'd bet money that my customers can keep their hands off of another person's clearly marked PDU, especially when it's obvious that the access control people record who comes in when. > Do they even sell 1/4 rack doors with individual keys for a good > price? And don't you need those doors on the front and back as well? I should check... if it's cheap, might as well, right? > I'd almost say that you should cut costs by only allowing physical > access during *your* hours, with a bigger up-front fee for 24x7 > emergency access if something goes wrong. eh, even in that case I'm going to charge enough to price myself out of this market. the compitition all allows unsupervised access. > Basically, you're spending all this time worrying about the power and > what happens if someone goes over their limit, and taking out someone > else. Instead you should be working to make it as standard and cookie > cutter as possible so that you just populate a rack and then sell the > bits here and there. Yeah, standard is important. that's why a lower density 1/4 rack has me thinking more than a higher density rack, even at a slightly higher cost per watt. I won't have to balance high density with low density customers... just you stay between this shelf and this shelf. I will play with doing dedicated servers at some point; it's the natural complement to the vps hosting, and the opteron 41xx series looks like it'll let me deploy pretty cheap 4-6 core/ 16GiB ram boxes, which /might/ be closer to the price range I can sell into. still, I'm going to want $256/month for those, so buying will still likely be a better deal if you keep them very long, and you don't get ripped off too badly on 1u colo. (I've tried renting 8 core, 32GiB ram for $512 or so a month, and I've failed. it's above the cost threshold I'm able to sell into, and it's obvious to anyone pricing it out that you save money quickly by buying and co-locating.) But even 16GiB for $256, well, I don't have a lot of faith I'll sell many, even if that's within the price range my customers are willing to think about, well, my customers are the sort who are willing to do a bit of extra work to save some money. All my other plans are cheaper than co-locating some ancient hardware you have laying about... while this will be more expensive. -- Luke S. Crawford http://prgmr.com/xen/ - Hosting for the technically adept http://nostarch.com/xen.htm - We don't assume you are stupid. _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
