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Datacenters - Where the real stuff happens ...
Status: Just notes so far.
Pagecode: T->1 A->SAml H->trsa[t,a,si,di]d[t,a,si,di] C->SA[cccej]
Last changed: Monday 2010-03-01 [12:21 UTC]
Abstract:
Noise, heat and thus the need for an air-conditioned environment, structured under-floor cabling, redundancy power circuits, fire distinction through gas, equipment monitoring, physical access control, peering, hands and eyes support through 24/7 on-site personal, hundreds of gigabits bandwidth through many different carriers which run their own fibre backbones around the globe, multi-homing, carrier neutral hosting (not any datacenter provides for this), managed services, etc. Those terms are just a selection that goes with DCs (Data Centers). This page covers many different aspects with regards to datacenters from a customers perspective i.e. a company that does equipment housing and peering at large scale -- renting space for own equipment (racks, servers, SANs, etc.), installing own equipment in secured areas (private rooms, cages, etc.) and connect to several carrier backbones -- actually, things the random ISP (Internet Service Provider) does.
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Table of Contents
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The Players
To picture it, there are just a few players that makes the whole DC
(Data Center) shebang easy to understand
- Datacenter
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The datacenter itself provides space — whole 19" racks, cages and
private rooms. A datacenter usually does not sell space less than a
whole 19" rack. It also provides power and cooling. The building
containing the datacenter looks pretty much like a prison (barred
windows, every inch inside and outside is covered by CCTV, etc.). The
datacenter operator itself does not care about fibre backbones nor
about the provision for hardware e.g. random 1U server.
- Carrier
-
Carriers are those who own a fibre backbone. They do not care about
the air-conditioning in the datacenter or a particular 19" rack and
stuff like that. The only thing most carriers care about is extending
their global net of fibre cables and monitoring it. For the most part,
carriers are telcos e.g. the British Telecom is, amongst other things,
what is considered a carrier in datacenter terms.
- ISP (Internet Service Provider)
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Those are connected to n carriers (with
n > 0) which means even if one
carriers backbone fails (e.g. ship's anchor destroys a cable), the ISP
can still get I/O (Input/Output) from/to the Internet if he is
connected to x carriers (with x > 1). In datacenter terms, ISPs must
not necessarily be what most of us think — an ISP provides Internet
connection to end-users. An ISP can simply provide connectivity to
customers which house their equipment within the datacenter. However,
an ISP can do both — provide Internet to end-users and provide
connectivity for datacenter customers.
- Datacenter Customer
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This is what most of us are. A company can rent space from the
datacenter, put its own equipment on this space and buy connectivity
from an ISP. The space bought from the datacenter usually starts with
whole 19" racks, then cages and at the upper end we have private
rooms. In case one just needs one or two servers (say 5Us) colocated
in a datacenter, then he should rather ask an ISP for an all-in-one
package — space for 5Us plus connectivity. There is no need to become
a dedicated datacenter customer for as little as 5Us. As of now
(February 2008), the minimum costs for a 19" rack plus 10Mbit/sec
committed bandwidth (95% rule) come for around 2000 euros per month
(rack rented from the datacenter, 800x800x2000 mm with doors and
lock). The connectivity for this case is mostly single-homed i.e. the
datacenter customer is connected to an ISP which is then connected to
several carriers for redundancy reasons. However, a datacenter
customer may directly connect to one or more carriers and use dynamic
routing (BGP (Border Gateway Protocol)). However, that increases costs
and complexity dramatically and is mostly not recommended if the need
for bandwidth is less than 100Mbit/sec (again, 95% rule).
Hosting Location
In-House
Connectivity
Single Connection
Billing
IP Address Space
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