Comments on: Should You Build or Outsource Your Data Center?

By: Austin

Austin — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 07:07:33 +0000

We run 15 – 20 vms per server on open iscsi storage in a vertical configuration. This same stack is mirrored on another separate vertical. Both are fronted by LB. If one vertical is lost, the other is still running. We run full suite of monitoring on the underlying hardware vertical. This is for Mission Critical stuff. We’ve never gone down in this config. It also allows us to patch and do rolling deployments,

For non-mission critical, the VMs are backed up to disk nightly. Since we have aggregate bandwidth to all servers at 40 G over iscsi, restoring a lost server can be done by redirecting the ports to a new server or restoring the VMS to a new server. It takes from 10 minutes to an hour to do this.

By: KenDonoghue

KenDonoghue — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 17:57:04 +0000

How is fault tolerance available on commodity hardware? If you mean VMware FT, then you better be ready to do a lot of configuring that involves multiple servers. And even then, your applications will be able to use only one core in the server due to a lack of SMP support. Pity the poor person who has a dozen VMs running on an x86 server that fails. Downtime. Failover. Restarts. Maybe that’s high availability and good enough for some. It’s certainly not full function fault tolerance.

By: Austin

Austin — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 20:03:02 +0000

If done right, outsourced hosted operations should be 1/2 to 1/3 the cost of doing it in house. Not a lot of hosting providers do it right, though.

Most people do not look at the Net present value across five years of ALL the costs – CAPEX, OPEX, and SW/HW Support.

The best value for the money today is to put YOUR equipment in THEIR racks and leverage the hosted providers economies of scale on bandwidth. This seems to be the sweet spot especially if you go with open storage.

By: DLWarren

DLWarren — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 18:04:27 +0000

Hmmm,,, The article is written by a colo provider — of course that has NOTHING to do with it’s slanted view…. LOL

Then making an analogy of a corporate data center to a soft drink vending machines is beyond ludicrous.

And it’s funny how the following is somewhat buried inside the story.

” It won’t necessarily save you money compared to doing it yourself, but you should see a dramatic difference in operations for the same cost of doing it yourself.”