[olug] (Relatively) Nearby Colocation Centers

[Sean Kelly]

On Wed, Aug 15, 2007 at 11:22:50PM -0500, Dan Clough wrote:
> It seems that Jay at RTU is ending his colocation service at the end of 
> August, which leaves me with no affordable place to go in the Omaha 
> area, or for that matter, anywhere closer than a 4-hour drive.  I've got 
> a 2U Compaq DL380 (I'd put another one up if I could afford it) that 
> needs a new home, stable power and 1-2Mbps of bandwidth.  Can anyone 
> suggest a reliable colocation center?  I'm willing to go as far west as 
> Lincoln and as far east as Kansas City if that's what it takes.
> 
> I have a feeling that there are a few others who are in this situation, 
> so in the spirit of nerdy groupthink I'll post the quotes I've found so 
> far.

Where I work, we've begun to make heavy use of VMware ESX in order to
consolidate hundreds of Windows and Linux hosts onto four larger IBM x3850
servers. I'm estimating that we'll be able to fit somewhere around
100-150 VMs on these hosts under the right conditions. This allows us to
pool storage, CPU, memory, and networking resources and not have islands of
resources out there across a bunch of hosts.

Why am I bringing this up? There seems to be a lot of talk on this list
lately about people looking for colocation for fairly low end systems.
Maybe we should all consider looking at chipping in togehter on a colo'd
server or two running VMware Server (the free product), Xen, or something
similar?

I've actually considered doing this with a group of friends. Buying a colo
server and splitting it up among ten or fifteen of us. That would make the
prices tolerable, depending on where it was colocated. Another advantage of
virtualized solutions is that you don't need physical access to access the
console since the console is nothing but software. You just need somebody
to manage the underlying hypervisor.

-- 
Sean Kelly          | PGP KeyID: D2E5E296
smkelly at smkelly.org | http://www.smkelly.org