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  1. #1

    Why is provisioning dedicated servers so hard?

    Whether you're a customer of a dedicated server provider, or you offer dedicated servers yourself (either as a reseller or directly), you've probably dealt with slow server setup times before. It can be painful. Why should it take several days to get a server up and running anyway? Shouldn't all of this be automated?

    We've been wrestling with provisioning processes for quite a long time. Getting the OS installed is just one part of the battle. You've got to make sure the order is not fraudulent or from a spammer, you've got to set aside hardware, ip space, etc, make sure the server is working, install the OS, configure the network / vlan / subnet for the server, make sure it all works, and most importantly, document everything so you don't get lost working on the server later. All while making sure you don't make any mistakes. We're not operating a nuclear power plant, but "oops I formatted the wrong server" may as well be a nuclear meltdown to an impacted client. There are a huge number of steps, many of them are both tedious and high skilled at the same time, and you simply cannot make any mistakes. Why?

    Every dedicated server host goes through this, but why is this not a solved problem? It seems like with shared hosting, you install Cpanel, set it up with WHMCS, maybe a couple plugins, and you're done. That's a solved problem. Not so with dedicated servers.

    Solutions like NOC-PS, Onapp, ISP Systems DCI Manager, Ubersmith, WHMCS, etc, all claim to solve part or all of the problem. None of them even come close. Even if you're willing to pay the money, OnApp's bare metal or smart server support will not configure any network devices or vlans for you. So I still need someone with "big red button" level access to our network in order to provision an order on a secure vlan. IP address management in most of the management software is a total joke. There seems to be a lot of options for PXE installs out there (NOC-PS etc), but even if it worked perfectly, that's just a tiny piece of the puzzle. Ubersmith and WHMCS do a good job on the billing end of things, but do extremely little for your provisioning automation. Adding insult to injury, a lot of this software that does a third of the job or less is extremely expensive and not under active development.

    I can only assume that the really huge providers have solved this with in house solutions, or else they just plug along with unreasonably labor intensive practices and pass the costs on to customers.

    What am I missing here? Is this problem fully solved somewhere and I'm not aware of it? Why is there no "cpanel for dedicated servers" on the market today? Dedicated servers have existed longer than shared hosting has, so time can't be the issue. Cloud software is pretty new and seems a lot farther along even.
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  2. #2
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    It feels good to setup a server for a client manually. It's like a type of craftsmanship to me. I wouldn't trust software if it did exist.
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  3. #3
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    I understand YOUR frustration. In my case, i'm always searching for instant dedi providers but, thats like a 5% of the whole industry? Is very hard. Sometimes I want a solution rush, not having to wait 2 days or a week for server setup is a life saver.

    Quote Originally Posted by funkywizard View Post
    Whether you're a customer of a dedicated server provider, or you offer dedicated servers yourself (either as a reseller or directly), you've probably dealt with slow server setup times before. It can be painful. Why should it take several days to get a server up and running anyway? Shouldn't all of this be automated?

    We've been wrestling with provisioning processes for quite a long time. Getting the OS installed is just one part of the battle. You've got to make sure the order is not fraudulent or from a spammer, you've got to set aside hardware, ip space, etc, make sure the server is working, install the OS, configure the network / vlan / subnet for the server, make sure it all works, and most importantly, document everything so you don't get lost working on the server later. All while making sure you don't make any mistakes. We're not operating a nuclear power plant, but "oops I formatted the wrong server" may as well be a nuclear meltdown to an impacted client. There are a huge number of steps, many of them are both tedious and high skilled at the same time, and you simply cannot make any mistakes. Why?

    Every dedicated server host goes through this, but why is this not a solved problem? It seems like with shared hosting, you install Cpanel, set it up with WHMCS, maybe a couple plugins, and you're done. That's a solved problem. Not so with dedicated servers.

    Solutions like NOC-PS, Onapp, ISP Systems DCI Manager, Ubersmith, WHMCS, etc, all claim to solve part or all of the problem. None of them even come close. Even if you're willing to pay the money, OnApp's bare metal or smart server support will not configure any network devices or vlans for you. So I still need someone with "big red button" level access to our network in order to provision an order on a secure vlan. IP address management in most of the management software is a total joke. There seems to be a lot of options for PXE installs out there (NOC-PS etc), but even if it worked perfectly, that's just a tiny piece of the puzzle. Ubersmith and WHMCS do a good job on the billing end of things, but do extremely little for your provisioning automation. Adding insult to injury, a lot of this software that does a third of the job or less is extremely expensive and not under active development.

    I can only assume that the really huge providers have solved this with in house solutions, or else they just plug along with unreasonably labor intensive practices and pass the costs on to customers.

    What am I missing here? Is this problem fully solved somewhere and I'm not aware of it? Why is there no "cpanel for dedicated servers" on the market today? Dedicated servers have existed longer than shared hosting has, so time can't be the issue. Cloud software is pretty new and seems a lot farther along even.
    --

  4. #4
    Quote Originally Posted by xlightwaverx View Post
    It feels good to setup a server for a client manually. It's like a type of craftsmanship to me. I wouldn't trust software if it did exist.
    The OS installer does a LOT of things automatically, and maybe a couple o those things not exactly the way you'd like, but we use it anyway. Trust me when you're provisioning 50+ servers a month, all of them done exactly the same way, it doesn't feel like 'craftsmanship' anymore. Obviously you still want to get everything done correctly and just right, but why do it manually?
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  5. #5
    Quote Originally Posted by HRR1963 View Post
    I understand YOUR frustration. In my case, i'm always searching for instant dedi providers but, thats like a 5% of the whole industry? Is very hard. Sometimes I want a solution rush, not having to wait 2 days or a week for server setup is a life saver.
    Exactly! Unfortunately given the mixture of skills required to get a server up and running, several people may be involved in the setup, some of those people may be busy at some times, or some problem may start at one part of the process and so the next part cannot start until one person is available the next day. So it can easily stretch out to a couple of days even without any major problems.
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  6. #6
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    That's exactly what I have in mind for a long time now and although we put allot of effort in building our automation system to be perfect, we're still in need of 30% manual work to be done.

    Not only that, when you receive your batch of servers and want to rack the up, having them cabled, labeled, powered etc. will take a long time but that's not the end, the main issue is to have them added to your DHCP network, keep every part of your hardware up-to-date with latest firmware/BIOS update to assure security and performance stability and have them added to your automation system.

    I believe a real automation will be the one which picks up every server that is being added to the DHCP network and handles it from that point on.

    All we have to do is to add our main CIDRs to the panel, let it know which servers should get what block size and choose what mainboard is installed on the server so it can take care of updates etc.

    We're still trying to build such a panel since 2 years ago and haven't been able to accomplish the goal till this very moment.

    I have no issues paying $2K+ a month for such a panel but too bad it doesn't exist and I strongly believe that whoever get this job done first, will capture a whole lot of this market.

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  7. #7
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    What do you see as the steps to follow through on with a fully automated provisioning system? (including creating, tagging, untagging vlans; automatically choosing IPv4 and IPv6 address of a certain size from a certain pool; then automatically installing O/S over the still "private/internal" vlan, then configuring that O/S with the pre-selected IP's; then automatically switching the VLAN on the server's switch port back to the clients actual permanent VLAN).

    What if a providers network topology differs? How do you standardize across everyones different setups?
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  8. #8
    Quote Originally Posted by ItsChrisG View Post
    What if a providers network topology differs? How do you standardize across everyones different setups?
    That's exactly it, every provider's topology varies. With cPanel, they require a specific OS and a specific setup that they control.

    @OP - You will soon learn that once you get big enough, you will start turning into a software shop, and the costs it takes to develop the software will pay itself back within 1 - 2 years.
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  9. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by RSNET-John View Post
    That's exactly it, every provider's topology varies. With cPanel, they require a specific OS and a specific setup that they control.

    @OP - You will soon learn that once you get big enough, you will start turning into a software shop, and the costs it takes to develop the software will pay itself back within 1 - 2 years.
    I would agree that is the state of the industry today. It simply is not efficient for every provider to develop their own software. Eventually with that model, two things can happen. One is, someone comes out with a "cpanel for dedidcated servers" and much like cpanel requires centos etc, this hypothetical software may require a particular network topology and a limited number of network vendor options. The other option is, as the industry matures, only the largest 5 or 10 companies have the economies of scale to stay in business.
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  10. #10
    Quote Originally Posted by ItsChrisG View Post
    What do you see as the steps to follow through on with a fully automated provisioning system? (including creating, tagging, untagging vlans; automatically choosing IPv4 and IPv6 address of a certain size from a certain pool; then automatically installing O/S over the still "private/internal" vlan, then configuring that O/S with the pre-selected IP's; then automatically switching the VLAN on the server's switch port back to the clients actual permanent VLAN).

    What if a providers network topology differs? How do you standardize across everyones different setups?
    Yes, those are a few steps in the larger process that need to be automated, and, if you want off the shelf software to do it for you, standardized.
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  11. #11
    Quote Originally Posted by funkywizard View Post
    The other option is, as the industry matures, only the largest 5 or 10 companies have the economies of scale to stay in business.
    This is already happening. Most smaller providers are resellers of larger providers. It's much easier to jump into the market and there is a lot less headache and investment.

    It's not just the software though, you will start seeing the smaller guys not able to obtain customers. WHT isn't producing nearly as much new business as it has in the past (at least for us), and customers tend to be less informed on the whole hosting market as it's slowly becoming more mainstream.

    I would personally say that our largest two investments in the last 12 months have been in software development and marketing. There doesn't seem to be a way around it, especially since 50%+ of specialty sites geared toward tech industries are overrun by the huge ultra budget providers.
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  12. #12
    Quote Originally Posted by RSNET-John View Post
    This is already happening. Most smaller providers are resellers of larger providers. It's much easier to jump into the market and there is a lot less headache and investment.

    It's not just the software though, you will start seeing the smaller guys not able to obtain customers. WHT isn't producing nearly as much new business as it has in the past (at least for us), and customers tend to be less informed on the whole hosting market as it's slowly becoming more mainstream.

    I would personally say that our largest two investments in the last 12 months have been in software development and marketing. There doesn't seem to be a way around it, especially since 50%+ of specialty sites geared toward tech industries are overrun by the huge ultra budget providers.
    In a commodity market it is bound to happen eventually. The question is how quickly, and how to stay ahead of the curve? If the right software was publicly available, it reduces the advantage the big guys have and buys extra time for the smaller sized competitors. If you as a smaller company have to make all of the same investments in time and money the big guys have to make, eventually the cumulative advantage for the bigger guys becomes something you can't keep up with because they can invest more than you in these fixed costs and spread them out across more customers.
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  13. #13
    Quote Originally Posted by funkywizard View Post
    In a commodity market it is bound to happen eventually. The question is how quickly, and how to stay ahead of the curve? If the right software was publicly available, it reduces the advantage the big guys have and buys extra time for the smaller sized competitors. If you as a smaller company have to make all of the same investments in time and money the big guys have to make, eventually the cumulative advantage for the bigger guys becomes something you can't keep up with because they can invest more than you in these fixed costs and spread them out across more customers.
    I'm not saying that we're able to speed ahead of the big guys. We're playing catch up and personally believe that we're on the tail end of providers that will survive in the dedicated industry.

    We have on many occasions, thought about commercializing our in-house software, but it doesn't make sense. The target market would be providers with budgets too small to justify the kind of support needed for the product.

    We're going to be programming a completely new platform in 2015 (not for dedicated, but will assist in --hopefully-- killing the dedicated market, especially the low end) to launch a few different products and will most likely release an affordable commercialized version for providers.
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  14. #14
    Quote Originally Posted by RSNET-John View Post
    I'm not saying that we're able to speed ahead of the big guys. We're playing catch up and personally believe that we're on the tail end of providers that will survive in the dedicated industry.

    We have on many occasions, thought about commercializing our in-house software, but it doesn't make sense. The target market would be providers with budgets too small to justify the kind of support needed for the product.

    We're going to be programming a completely new platform in 2015 (not for dedicated, but will assist in --hopefully-- killing the dedicated market, especially the low end) to launch a few different products and will most likely release an affordable commercialized version for providers.
    I think you'll be surprised at the lack of automation at some larger companies. I know of a UK host with two datacenters that doesn't even automate provisioning. My understanding is onapp smart server / bare metal support exists because a very large host needed that automation and was willing to pay a lot for it (even as an incomplete solution). So from hosts like myself, the budget is not there, but you may be surprised that hosts your size or larger may also have nothing in place for automation today and would potentially pay enough to justify the support.
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  15. #15
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    Since we don't have a dedicated development staff, we've been forced to piece together various solutions to automate as much as we can. Unfortunately there comes a point in time that further automation starts to become cost prohibitive for a shop of our size, so we just try to be as efficient as possible with the tools commercially available.

    It's a difficult problem to solve, for certain. Even then, in many cases you have customer who want to customize some aspect of their service - more RAM, bigger disks, etc - which pretty much guarantees some kind of human involvement in the provisioning process.

    One of the most time and labor consuming aspects for us is fraud verification and order confirmation. The tools out there for that largely suck in my experience - there's no substitute for a human eye when it comes to catching a "fishy" order.
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  16. #16
    its actually a pretty simple answer

    physical servers are difficult - you either go mass market and complete automation - which equals less (ie zero) customization options.. or you go with custom builds and a more manual process - which is less automated and usually not as cost effective.

    you can play in both spaces - but, you have to understand the respective markets.

    as for the tools - you can accomplish most of it with something like onapp (or various other solutions now available), but, there will always be some ingrown tools involved as well

    we really like the custom built approach for now, as its a differentiator in the marketplace. want 2 raid arrays, want brand new and custom built/burned in hardware - not a problem - it will take a bit longer, but, you will get exactly what you need and you will not need to settle on a pre-fab, prebuilt spec
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  17. #17
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    Cloud is here to solved the dedicated server automation problem, login to Aws spin up any instance in any country and the server is ready to go. After finish using the instance, just destroy it. Simple and clean.

    Understand cloud do not solve all the problem as some customer still want dedicated servers.

    As other mentioned, each provider have difference network topology, the provisioning software will need to customized to fit into your environment.

    If we breakdown the steps to provision a dedicated servers, each steps is actually pretty simple and it doesnt cost a lot money to custom built a provisioning script to meet your requirement.
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  18. #18
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    There are certainly benefits to both approaches, but I have trouble understanding while it would take days to provision a server. I would have to guess that any company that can't provision a server within 24 hours is overworked/understaffed.

    We have developed in-house automation for a lot of these processes, but we do like our servers to go through an OS installation (as compared to imaging) as it serves as a good test of the hardware. Copying an image and booting the OS can work on a server with bad RAM or even a bad HDD sometimes; but installing an OS and uncompressing hundreds of RPMs/CAB files is a little harder. We prefer that method.

    Still shouldn't take days though.
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  19. #19
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    Quote Originally Posted by funkywizard View Post
    Whether you're a customer of a dedicated server provider, or you offer dedicated servers yourself (either as a reseller or directly), you've probably dealt with slow server setup times before. It can be painful. Why should it take several days to get a server up and running anyway? Shouldn't all of this be automated?
    It can take several days because some of us build our servers to order. Even if we stock parts, between testing of components, build time, what order in line you might be in front of other orders can all factor into the time it takes to get your server up and running.

    Personally, I get rather suspicious of folks who are in an awful hurry to get a server up and running. More often than not it meant they were up to no good.


    We've been wrestling with provisioning processes for quite a long time. Getting the OS installed is just one part of the battle. You've got to make sure the order is not fraudulent or from a spammer, you've got to set aside hardware, ip space, etc, make sure the server is working, install the OS, configure the network / vlan / subnet for the server, make sure it all works, and most importantly, document everything so you don't get lost working on the server later. All while making sure you don't make any mistakes. We're not operating a nuclear power plant, but "oops I formatted the wrong server" may as well be a nuclear meltdown to an impacted client. There are a huge number of steps, many of them are both tedious and high skilled at the same time, and you simply cannot make any mistakes. Why?
    Well, you've touched on another aspect in the orders/provisioning process. The due diligence that goes along with fraud checking an order. This is not something that can be entirely automated either. Takes a rather experienced staff with some good deductive reasoning skills to spot the bad apples before getting too deep into the process.


    Every dedicated server host goes through this, but why is this not a solved problem? It seems like with shared hosting, you install Cpanel, set it up with WHMCS, maybe a couple plugins, and you're done. That's a solved problem. Not so with dedicated servers.
    Because again, not all dedicated servers are "brick and mortar". It's not a simple process when there are ever changing resources in terms of parts, specs, advancements, etc.. It's near impossible to stock hundreds if not thousands of servers that could become obsolete overnight just waiting to be provisioned.

    And, since you mentioned fraud? Think about it.. Its much easier to nuke a cPanel website than it is to kill a server that you invested all that time and effort into provisioning. If you automate the process completely you have the potential of burning through much more cash in terms of energy and bandwidth before you find out you're never getting paid because the automated dedicated server customer was fraudulent.

    Solutions like NOC-PS, Onapp, ISP Systems DCI Manager, Ubersmith, WHMCS, etc, all claim to solve part or all of the problem. None of them even come close. Even if you're willing to pay the money, OnApp's bare metal or smart server support will not configure any network devices or vlans for you. So I still need someone with "big red button" level access to our network in order to provision an order on a secure vlan. IP address management in most of the management software is a total joke. There seems to be a lot of options for PXE installs out there (NOC-PS etc), but even if it worked perfectly, that's just a tiny piece of the puzzle. Ubersmith and WHMCS do a good job on the billing end of things, but do extremely little for your provisioning automation. Adding insult to injury, a lot of this software that does a third of the job or less is extremely expensive and not under active development.
    Unless you are so busy with orders and thousands of dedicated server sign ups a day, I can hardly see the need for complete automation. Its not like the automation is going to save you money or time unless again, you have that much volume and a lack of available manpower. The margins on dedicated are much larger than those few buck a month hosting accounts. The reason hosting is automated is because none of us can afford to waste the time setting up an account manually for a few bucks a month.



    I can only assume that the really huge providers have solved this with in house solutions, or else they just plug along with unreasonably labor intensive practices and pass the costs on to customers.
    What is so labor intensive? Case, MG, drive, ram, test, install OS.. Its not rocket science. Even in larger volumes it actually becomes a bit more efficient given you can create a kind of assembly line build environment. I don't know what is so labor intensive about building a server.

    This is assuming someone is building theirs to order. The larger outfits typically buy/lease pre-built servers and then just auto install the OS and or re-install and go... I don't know what else you could really automate here. There's just not that much to re-using a server, which is what happens at the larger farms. Server's wiped, and OS is reloaded.. Its never moved, unplugged or powered down. Just re-provsioned.


    What am I missing here? Is this problem fully solved somewhere and I'm not aware of it? Why is there no "cpanel for dedicated servers" on the market today? Dedicated servers have existed longer than shared hosting has, so time can't be the issue. Cloud software is pretty new and seems a lot farther along even.

    What I think you might be missing is that this is likely not really a problem.

    Hell, I would love to have a problem where I needed to fully automate everything to the point of George Jetson.
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  20. #20
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    Quote Originally Posted by alanwoo View Post
    Cloud is here to solved the dedicated server automation problem, login to Aws spin up any instance in any country and the server is ready to go. After finish using the instance, just destroy it. Simple and clean.
    The bare metal where the cloud resides still has to be setup. IPMI, NIC MAC mapping, BIOS settings to boot over the network, drivers, and installing the hypervisor still needs to be done.

  21. #21
    Isn't this why the market is moving towards "private ssd clouds" where users can adjust what resources they require and providers can automate this process. Say good by to setting up servers for clients, instead just keep adding more standardized nodes and sans to your cloud.
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  22. #22
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    Quote Originally Posted by SolaDrive - John View Post
    Isn't this why the market is moving towards "private ssd clouds" where users can adjust what resources they require and providers can automate this process. Say good by to setting up servers for clients, instead just keep adding more standardized nodes and sans to your cloud.
    So it would appear.
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  23. #23
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    Quote Originally Posted by SolaDrive - John View Post
    Isn't this why the market is moving towards "private ssd clouds" where users can adjust what resources they require and providers can automate this process. Say good by to setting up servers for clients, instead just keep adding more standardized nodes and sans to your cloud.
    How do you guarantee I/O performance?
    Other than SolidFire (which is $200K+ per SAN), how are you going to provide them with consistent, guaranteed, and predictable I/O on a shared storage platform?

    and how do you do it at the prices people are trying to pay now a days? (the answer is you dont for this question, the low end market will be stuck with dedicated servers ("baremetal"))
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  24. #24
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    You should give a try to online.net ... That's the most amazing provision I've ever come across.

    They are just amazing, and not just the servers... everything... from IPs, to SAN disks to ddos protection.

    Purely spectacular.

  25. #25
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    4,615
    In-house solutions tailored for a particular network environment is the only sure-shot solution, IMO. In 2008 there was pretty much NOTHING available 'over the counter' so to speak so we rolled our own after being inspired by softlayer's automation setup back in the day. Although we still manually approve orders, manually pre-configure subnets/VE/VLANs into a pool making sure there's always spares available, since 2009 the rest of the process is automated (assign hardware and vlan to customer, select OS and partition layout and click 'go')... as long as we've got the hardware on-deck and spare VLAN's ready to go, the rest of the process is completely automated. I can't imagine not having some form of auto-deployment for bare-metal these days. Probably saved us 1000's of man-hours and goof-ups over the years.
    Fast Serv Networks, LLC | AS29889 | DDOS Protected | Managed Cloud, Streaming, Dedicated Servers, Colo by-the-U
    Since 2003 - Ashburn VA + San Diego CA Datacenters

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