Agreed. The interface is sometimes confusing, but the ability to pull in customer details and tie it to custom services shows off it's flexibility.
Internap's cloud platform, from the Voxel purchase, uses it for current and upcoming services.
And colo providers get driven down on cost as customers forget the previous catastrophic event. Every dollar spent enhancing a data center is passed along to the customer in some fashion. When your per-cab or per-foot pricing is higher than the competition--even if you can demonstrate more resiliency--it is a harder sell.
You can talk flood plains, gen sets, fuel locations and delivery schedules, CRAH and chiller redundancy, etc. As long as the SSAE16 or SOC 2 is current and there are no lingering memories of an "event" at the facility, it's going to come down to price. It's hard to help customers understand the basic capabilities of colo, let alone pricing differences. It mostly seems to come down to perception of the facility -- and price.
I would propose customers that have stringent RPO/RTO's investigate true geographic diversity. Not just for separation of footprints, but also to be disaster-diverse. Hurricane, tornado, power brown outs, earthquakes, etc.
They are downtown because all the fiber terminates there (111 8th, 60 Hudson, 75 Broad). They originate from the teletype days. Closest point to the main meeting places is a good place to build data centers. Hence Ashburn, London, Frankfurt, etc.
111 8th apparently has common fuel from the landlord (no individual tanks). This morning a valve failure starved out some gen sets.
It is still wild and wooly in downtown....
What's remarkable is the PUE factors Google, Facebook and Apple can get in their data centers. I stil think these are due to the homogenous nature of the equipment the place there, and the fact they don't have to worry about the multi-tenancy of commercial data centers. Middle of nowhere locations where things such as venting from the hot aisle are possible. In NYC, the 111 8th Avenue data centers are a good example of the constraints put on the various operators. Hopefully Google can help remediate that.
In regards to power and cooling, I still have a lot to learn about the tradeoffs in ease of use versus PUE. Good thread.
Approximately 100-200 BTC lost here due to wallet being lost. That was way back in the early days before the GPU computations started.
The regional stats aren't correct. In looking at the regional winner for Georgia, I see it's Verizon FiOS. That would be news to VzT (Verizon Telecom) since they have zero presence in Georgia (AT&T, formerly BellSouth territory). People in AL, TN, SC and NC would also agree. My guess is that the numbers for Tampa (LEC is VzT) destroyed the performance for the rest of the ISP's checked in the other states.
I would love to see a similar test performed, at a higher level of quality, for ISP providers in data centers.
FiOS (Verizon) or uVerse (AT&T) are wireline products. If you look at wireline growth in the 2-4% year over year versus wireless in 20%+ range, there isn't a big incentive for the telco's to invest in wireline upgrades. Look at FiOS - there are no new markets or expansions that Verizon wishes to do. Why? Because the capital invested in a wireline plant doesn't have nearly the same return on capital invested that upgrading a market to LTE does.
Granted wireless is saturated on the voice call component, but data is still a growing market. Ever wonder why the new share plans give you unlimited minutes and SMS? That's a gimmie compared to the hope you'll consume data (and pay for it).
The new cabal is the broadband providers such as Comcast/Charter/Cox looking to enhance and augment the Ethernet data markets while the telcos focus on wireless. Hence the recent purchase by Verizon for frequencies while promoting the cable consortium. I still think you'll see any carrier with wireless sell off their wireline business as focus on "mobility".
Most of the newer submarine cable systems have large amounts of participants in the consortium. It's not uncommon for Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, Global Crossing, Tata, BT, and others to be involved in these systems. My guess is that FB wants more control over the capacity of the system or to ensure capacity ends up where they need it, say China. Interesting landing points for China too.
This is strange though. You'd think FB would rather invest in the data centers near big pipes instead investing in transit itself. Maybe they just want to circuits installed in a more timely manner--I'm looking at you Big Red.
With your bare hands?!?
