[AusNOG] Hurricane Electric Fremont DC

[Scott Howard]

I could sum it up best by saying "you get what you pay for..."

They have 2 datacenters in Fremont, FMT1 and FMT2.  The latter is the newer
one, and is most likely where you're referring to - and it's where I looked
after 2 racks of stuff for about 18 months at a previous job.

FMT2 is, on the whole, "good".  Definitely not great, but not bad either.

Historically the colo sections were in "suites", which were smaller room
with maybe 100 racks in them each.  Solid floor, and each row was oriented
the same way, so the input temperature of your systems depended partially on
how close you are to the nearest A/C vent above you, and how much heat was
being thrown out of the system in front of you.

Their newer area is apparently more open, but I haven't seen it since before
they put the racks in so I'm not sure of the exact layout.

The racks are cheaper models, but generally functional.  By default the
rails they have are round-holes, but can be adjusted front-to-back for
depth.  If you want square holed ones you can get them but they will charge
you for the rails ($200 for a set of 4 I think).

The power is... well..  the problem.  In 18 months we had 2 power outages.
The second whilst they were replacing a part that caused the first to fail -
but yet it was still done during business hours with no notice to
customers.  Even when it works you're limited to either 15A or 20A per rack
(12 or 16A by the time you apply the 80% rule), and even the 20A ones are
relatively hard to get.  If you want more, you buy a second rack.  If you
get a 20A rack, it'll come with a 15 amp power board.  If you want dual
power, find another datacenter.

(I've heard that it might be possible to get dual power in the new area of
FMT2, but I haven't heard any confirmation).

In general their remote hands staff seem good, although I didn't ever use
them for anything more than hitting the power switch on a box so it would
probably depend exactly on what you want to use them for. When things go
wrong (eg, the power outages above) you can expect to get continual busy
signals and/or no answer for long periods of time - they don't seem to have
worked out the benefit of a voicemail server that just says "yeah, it's
broken, we're working on it".


If you want palm-print security readers, 100% SLAs and good coffee machines,
go with Equinix (and expect to pay for it!)

If you want a full rack, 15+ amps of power, and 1Gbps of (good!) unlimited
bandwidth for around $1k, then HE is the place to go!

  Scott.




On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 5:54 AM, Greg M <gregm at servu.net.au> wrote:

> Hi Noggers,
>
>
>
> If anyone has any (on or off-list) feedback they wish to share about
> colocation at Hurricane Electric (specifically their Fremont datacentre) it
> would be appreciated. I know there are people on this list who use their
> facilities.
>
>
>
> We are about to take up a few racks of space at that datacentre, however
> since we are based in AU, all of our server and networking setup as well as
> remote hands is going to be managed entirely by he.net’s staff.
>
>
>
> Given it is an expensive trip from WA to California, we would like having
> to avoid $3k return flights every time something goes wrong, and have the
> confidence that their remote hands will be able to handle it for us! We will
> also be utilising their network, so if anyone has any feedback on that, it
> would be appreciated also!
>
>
>
> Thanks kindly in advance,
>
>
>
> Greg
>
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> AusNOG at lists.ausnog.net
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>
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