Datacenter and Colocation Discussions

The other day I had a customer call and complain about high ping latency between our router and his server. I asked, what are you pinging? The default gateway he replied. Well, there’s your problem. Ping one of our servers, and it will look fine. Customer did not understand, and simply wouldn’t accept my answer that seeing spikes in ping latency on the ethernet handoff between his server and my router is normal.

Unfortunately, many people use ping to diagnose problems, but they dont understand exactly how to interpret the results. First, not all latency is bad. Some devices are slow to respond because there is an issue causing problem. But sometimes, a device is slow to respond because it doesn’t feel like responding right away. Huh? Its called priority queuing. When you ping one server from another server, that ping is treated is high priority by receiving server. The recipient server responds as fast as it can, just as it would for any other request. But when you ping a router, the router can care less about that ping. Routers are designed to treat pings as the lowest priority request, it will get around to it after it finishes the other more important stuff its doing. Two routers right next to other might show 3ms latency, with intermitent spikes to 20ms – perfectly normal.

Interpreting ping data is a balance of latency and packet loss. The two routers might show latency, but upon closer inspection, there is ZERO packet loss, even after 10,000 pings. Though you could have two routers with stable low latency between them, but 3 or 4 percent packetloss. So you have to look at all aspects of the ping result set and the overall environment.

Once again, vendors are ramping up with new and advanced data center cooling technologies, in fact, I have received many calls just in the last 2 months. There is a common thread, they claim up to 80% reduction in energy costs. Wow, thats a big savings, is there a catch? Sort of… There are some technologies that can reduce electrical consumption, it’s not entirely a false statement, but there is a big catch – and its a not a “Green” technology by any means. I will explain.

Typical data center providers use Liebert cooling, basic DX (direct expansion). You have a floor unit that contains a compressor and evaporator coil, heat is rejected to an air cooled or glycol cooled condenser. These units use approximately 1.5KW per 1-ton of cooling. So a 40-ton data center installation, will have about 60KW of electrical usage just for the Liebert AC units. Can we get that down to say 10KW for 40-ton, YES. Here’s how….

Evaporative cooling has been around for years. In fact most large buildings use evaporative cooling instead of air-cooled dry coolers because an evaporative cooling tower takes up much less space. These cooling towers are fairly simple, big fans, lots of airflow, a really big heat-transfer coil (with glycol circulating) and a water source that sprays liquid onto the coil for it to evaporate off. Even in the summer, a 100-ton evaporative cooling tower can easily reduce circulating glycol temperatures from 100 degress F at inlet to 60 degrees F at the outlet.

The low-energy cooling technologies being advertised are basically a non-DX non-compressor solution. They tend to be rack based. So right next to the rack cabinet is a coil with glycol circulating from the evaporative cooling tower. The side cabinet sucks hot air from the rear of the cabinet, cools it across the coil, and supplies the cool air back to the front of cabinet. The coils is about 60 degrees or so, and with enough airflow, that will cool an average size rack. The heat rejected goes to the roof tower and is dissapated through evaporation.

So if this works, and uses less energy, why doesn’t everybody do it? Simple. One piece of information has been left out. Evaporative cooling towers use a HUGE amount of water to perform this kind of cooling. Instead of electricity and freon in a closed DX circuit, they use water and physics, but water is a resource and its not cheap. A 100-ton tower at max capacity (which is where it would be to get glycol outlet down to 60 degrees F) will use about 5,000 gallons of water a day. Not only is that a huge waste of water, but you are only shifting cost. Yes, your electric bill will be lower, but your water bill will be insane, somewhere around $2000/month.

Its common sense, if there were a better cooling solution, we’d have it. Data Center Providers are already using the most efficient system since cost is already a major concern. The fact is, cooling is already as efficient as it can be. These modified systems, may work for some people, for example, if you have a huge underground source of well water that is “unlimited” this may work for you. But most datacenters don’t have access to unlimited, free, clean, non-brackish water.

We all know what CFL bulbs are. But few people know about how LED lighting can bring additional power savings to a datacenter.

For starters, LED lighting is slightly more efficient then CFL bulbs. The hidden value is heat output reduction. LED lights have almost no heat output. In a 5000sqft facility using traditional T8 35W bulbs vs LED, this can add up to a difference of 2000 BTUs per hour.

The only limitation to LED is it is still cost prohibitive. For example, a T8 fluorescent bulb is about $6. An LED T8 bulb is about $90. If you run your lighting 50% of the time, then it will take about 2 years to recover the cost from gains in power saving.

Ecologically speaking LED’s are also superior since they do not contain any Mercury. At Quonix, we are planning to convert to LED lighting systems within the next year for our datacenter.

A year in review…

Now that 2009 is nearing its end, its time to review where things are and where we are going.

We started the year with an expansion of fractional cabinet services by adding Quarter Cabinet (9U) Secure Colocation. The first quarter cabinet rack sold out in 30-days. Given the immediate interest, we will focus heavily on the quarter cabinet products, especially since VMware environments are getting smaller and smaller. We have full rack customers that can now migrate into a quarter rack running just a few servers.

VPS was also a new service addition for 2009. Our high-end guaranteed non-oversubscribed VPS platforms are doing very well, and they are a nice compliment to our existing web and email hosting segment.

We also saw increasing growth in out T1 and T3 DIA business. The biggest road block has been getting the word out to businesses in Philadelphia that Quonix Networks has the most competitively priced DIA circuits, not to mention the best IP network.

The icing on the cake for 2009 was finalizing plans on our new Harrisburg, PA datacenter. This facility is scheduled to open by the end of 1st quarter 2010. The Central PA location is ideal for Philadelphia based customers looking for a secondary DR location that is 100 miles away, but still convenient enough for daily commute.

2009 was a great year, but we expect 2010 to be even better. Some of our plans for 2010 include lit fiber optic services in Metro Philadelphia and Point-to-Point Metro Wifi.

Here is a short list of things to do and to look for when choosing your next colocation provider.

1. Make sure they alone own and operate the facility. No resellers.
2. Call them at 2:00am and see who answers the phone.
3. Make sure the facility is accessible 24×7.
4. Make sure they have at least two onsite Generators.
5. Make sure they have at least two UPS units.
6. Make sure they have been in business for at least 3 years.
7. Request a reference from a customer who has been with them for more then 3 years.
8. Ask to see copies of their preventative maintenance contracts on power and cooling systems.
9. Make sure they don’t impose excessively long contract terms.
10. Insist on an immediate tour.

So the above sounds obvious for the most part. #1 is the most important. Never, ever, take service from a reseller – especially for colocation. If you have a problem, a reseller can’t do anything about it. And white-label datacenter providers are growing in numbers. If you do a search for colocation providers, more then half are just resellers of someone elses space. If your sick, you go to a doctor – not someone pretending to be a doctor!

References are also extremely important, and overlooked these days. Its old fashioned business common-sense to get a reference when starting a new relationship. You demand references when hiring a painter, why not when selecting a colocation provider. And make sure its a reference for a customer that has been at the facility for some time. If a provider can’t get a reference that is 3 years old its means their a new business or have high turn-over – two things you want to avoid.

And lastly, audit their support. Its easy. Call them at 2:00am and pretend to have a problem with a server – even though you dont have a server there. See how they respond, if they even answer the phone at all.

When you are in the business of providing data center and telco services, you will undoubtedly encounter many clients who are leaving a provider that is providing less them stellar performance.

We here stories all the time of shady tactics that some companies employ in order to try and force a person to stay. The biggest tactic we see these days is contract auto-renewal with excessive requirements that make opting out of renewal confusing and complicated.

I personally went into business to service customers in a respectful fashion, not strong-arm them into contract renewals. I came across an interesting case the other days. Potential customer was at a data center that had a 12 hour outage; an outage caused by the provider failing to acquire more then one ISP feed even though they advertised redundant bandwidth. Customer knew their contract ended in November, so in early October they called to notify the provider of their intention to terminate at the end of the contract.

Well, there was a surprise waiting for them. The contract had an auto-renewal clause that stated if you dont terminate at least 90 days prior to contract end-date, then the contract auto-renews for another year. Now some people actually believe that anything written in a signed contract is enforceable, but this is not the case. Requirements for termination are unreasonable and in most states are invalid or a violation of the states business practices code.

Whenever you are trying to get out of a contract that has either auto-renewed prior to end-date, or service is so bad that it is impacting your business, the first thing you need to do is read your states business practices code. Most of the time, the aut0-renewal clause is in violation. Even if its not, most courts will rarely agree in the enforcement. The provider has to have a legitimate reason as to why the termination requirement is necessary. For example, is it reasonable that a datacenter provider needs 90 days to cancel your service. NO. It takes them 2 minutes to unplug a cable, and it takes you a few hours to move your equipment out. There is absolutely no reason why they need extended notice of your departure.

So all my future clients out there, dont be scared of auto-renewal entrapment.