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  1. #1

    Arrow Is colocation better? If yes, how do I choose the best infrastructure?

    Hello everyone. I have an upcoming company providing load balanced HA hosting services to a primary target market of medium-large enterprises and to a secondary market of individuals-small businesses.

    It is an OpenStack deployment providing a wide range of selections for clients. From clusters with any hardware of their choice, dedicated servers in the same way, VMs in an existing HA cluster or high performance shared hosting. A unique feature is the load balancing HA with a 100% uptime SLA while being extremely cost effective.

    With a startup budget of approximately $350,000, I have considered RackSpace and SoftLayer. But they seem to be an unnecessary investment. Startup with a colocation in a private suite with the same networking capabilities of RackSpace and SoftLayer is just as a great choice.

    As you might take into consideration, management of the servers is not a concern here.

    But I'm having a hard time choosing my hardware. If anyone has the experience, I'd love to get some advice for:
    Webservers
    Database servers
    Load Balancers
    Firewalls
    Switches
    SAS 15k drive brands

    Servers should be MADE for performance, looking forward to Quad Processor servers.

    Thanks for your advice.

  2. #2
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    If managing infrastructure isn't a problem, then collocation would be a cheaper solution in the long run!

    If you are planning for some mission critical cloud or HA cluster, I would recommend you to use some software that has some paid support incase your infrastructure goes down due to bug (VMware, Applogic, OnApp etc) you can get back your infrastructure back online quickly.

    Quad processors might be overkill for offering cloud/cluster. Most of the time saturation takes place in RAM and I/O. Dual Hexa core processors should be a right balance between performance and price.

    Just my 2 cents
    Last edited by nix101; 07-08-2012 at 12:58 PM.

  3. #3
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    Hi,

    For a turn key or validated deployment, check this: http://media.netapp.com/documents/ds-3105-flexpod.pdf

    VMware vSphere + Cisco UCS + Netapp Storage.

    Fully HA, everything virtualized, enterprise ready.
    Alan Woo, alan [@] ne.com.sg
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  4. #4
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    Quote Originally Posted by ServerTech2011 View Post
    But I'm having a hard time choosing my hardware. If anyone has the experience, I'd love to get some advice
    Deploying and running, as well as developing on Openstack is very human resource intensive, so i do assume you have experienced system administrators as well as a programming team and a project manager running your Openstack solution.
    A budget $350 000,- is not a lot since you need to deploy a test cluster, make sure to do the necessary (Automation, API and security) developments and once you are ready to setup a production environment, your team should know all the ins and outs of Openstack. This should include the knowledge on the best hardware platform to roll out for the production environment.

    Quote Originally Posted by alanwoo View Post
    For a turn key or validated deployment, check this: http://media.netapp.com/documents/ds-3105-flexpod.pdf
    VMware vSphere + Cisco UCS + Netapp Storage.
    That is a nice Virtualization V2.0 platform but not a true cloud platform. Did you even take a look at Openstack and tried to compare the solution above with what openstack offers?
    Last edited by swiftnoc; 07-08-2012 at 05:49 PM.
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  5. #5
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    Quote Originally Posted by swiftnoc View Post
    That is a nice Virtualization V2.0 platform but not a true cloud platform. Did you even take a look at Openstack and tried to compare the solution above with what openstack offers?
    Yes, openstack can do a lot more, I understand vmware solutions is just a subset of what openstack cover.

    vmware with vcloud director and vcloud api can achieve what he want to offer as well, a cost effective load balance HA hosting with 100% uptime and SLA.

    from business perspective, I will choose a turnkey/validated deloyment which inherent less risk, compare to openstack deployment which subject to more variables.

    And since he have a hardtime on choosing a combination of hardware, an validated deployment will remove a lot of integration and compatibility issue.
    Alan Woo, alan [@] ne.com.sg
    = NewMedia Express Pte Ltd (AS38001)
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  6. #6
    Quote Originally Posted by alanwoo View Post
    Yes, openstack can do a lot more, I understand vmware solutions is just a subset of what openstack cover.

    vmware with vcloud director and vcloud api can achieve what he want to offer as well, a cost effective load balance HA hosting with 100% uptime and SLA.

    from business perspective, I will choose a turnkey/validated deloyment which inherent less risk, compare to openstack deployment which subject to more variables.

    And since he have a hardtime on choosing a combination of hardware, an validated deployment will remove a lot of integration and compatibility issue.
    That's true. I'm really currently exploring possibilities. I personally don't feel that I'd be having too many problems with configuration or integration. OpenStack or VMware are basically my two top focuses.

  7. #7
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    I'd not suggest you to consider offering services with "with a 100% uptime SLA" despite that you might set up an infrastructure that allows you to deploy HA cluster. The theoretically possible uptime is not higher than 99.995% on an infrastructure level.
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  8. #8
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    Quote Originally Posted by swiftnoc View Post
    Deploying and running, as well as developing on Openstack is very human resource intensive, so i do assume you have experienced system administrators as well as a programming team and a project manager running your Openstack solution.
    Really what makes you say that I have a internal nova and swift cluster and while setup isn't automated it's really no big deal from a provisioning/maintainability POV
    Quote Originally Posted by swiftnoc View Post
    A budget $350 000,- is not a lot since you need to deploy a test cluster, make sure to do the necessary (Automation, API and security) developments and once you are ready to setup a production environment, your team should know all the ins and outs of Openstack. This should include the knowledge on the best hardware platform to roll out for the production environment.
    $350k is certianally reasonable your test custer onyl needs to be a proxy a switch, a hv and a handfull of nodes (~$5-10k) and if you know some basic principles of how openstack works and what your load may be it's easy to pick a suitable server base.

  9. #9
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    Quote Originally Posted by connected2 View Post
    Really what makes you say that I have a internal nova and swift cluster and while setup isn't automated it's really no big deal from a provisioning/maintainability POV
    The topic starter seems to wants to code additional functions in Openstack and likely wants to provide a control panel to clients as well. I got this feeling from reading the original port.
    Specific:

    Quote Originally Posted by ServerTech2011 View Post
    I have an upcoming company providing load balanced HA hosting services to a primary target market of medium-large enterprises and to a secondary market of individuals-small businesses.

    It is an OpenStack deployment providing a wide range of selections for clients. From clusters with any hardware of their choice, dedicated servers in the same way, VMs in an existing HA cluster or high performance shared hosting. A unique feature is the load balancing HA with a 100% uptime SLA while being extremely cost effective.
    It seems reasonable to assume, that programming resources are required.

    Quote Originally Posted by connected2 View Post
    $350k is certianally reasonable your test custer onyl needs to be a proxy a switch, a hv and a handfull of nodes (~$5-10k) and if you know some basic principles of how openstack works and what your load may be it's easy to pick a suitable server base.
    Sure, $350k is reasonable to provide for test cluster hardware, but $350k is a low budget if you need to hire system administrators, develop functionality in Openstack, develop a control panel and roll out a Openstack production environment on top of building a test cluster.
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  10. #10
    Quote Originally Posted by swiftnoc View Post
    Sure, $350k is reasonable to provide for test cluster hardware, but $350k is a low budget if you need to hire system administrators, develop functionality in Openstack, develop a control panel and roll out a Openstack production environment on top of building a test cluster.
    Refer to the Atomia Platform [http://www.Atomia.com/]. Exactly what I'm looking for, already integrated and designed to be used with OpenStack.

    What kind of a budget do you recommend from your perspective of an OpenStack system and why? We do have a flexible budget, and this shouldn't be a big problem.

  11. #11
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    Quote Originally Posted by HostColor View Post
    I'd not suggest you to consider offering services with "with a 100% uptime SLA" despite that you might set up an infrastructure that allows you to deploy HA cluster. The theoretically possible uptime is not higher than 99.995% on an infrastructure level.
    If you have 2 identical web server serving identical static content, theoretically this can achieve 100% uptime in typical scenario even one web server go down. Base on this concept, with certain redundancy build in, it is achievable to provide 100% uptime on infrastructure.

  12. #12
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    Quote Originally Posted by alanwoo View Post
    If you have 2 identical web server serving identical static content, theoretically this can achieve 100% uptime in typical scenario even one web server go down. Base on this concept, with certain redundancy build in, it is achievable to provide 100% uptime on infrastructure.
    If you really intend to deliver on this, you should plan to put them in separate data centers as well, as even good data centers go down...

  13. #13
    Quote Originally Posted by bigtimbers View Post
    If you really intend to deliver on this, you should plan to put them in separate data centers as well, as even good data centers go down...
    Separating the datacentres and running cron jobs across them is a hard job.
    Though in theory due the redundancy of the infrastructure and the availability of multi-homed bandwidth, 100% uptime is possible (in theory).

    As you said, power of the datacenter might affect the cluster. It is a tier IV datacenter with the least amount of downtime possible and the most failover options for power.

    Though if a few customers demand it, I can for them have servers placed in another datacenter undergoing global load balancing. This (if done) would always be on request and customers have to understand that syncing between the servers can be time and bandwidth consuming. And using bandwidth every 10 minutes for a cron job isn't really something a server owner wants.

  14. #14
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    Quote Originally Posted by ServerTech2011 View Post
    As you said, power of the datacenter might affect the cluster. It is a tier IV datacenter with the least amount of downtime possible and the most failover options for power.
    Sounds good in theory, in practice situations do occur that take both feeds in a rack down. Example:
    A faulty PSU trips break on PDU 1 and the resulting spike in power on PDU 2 trips the breaker of that PDU.
    Rack down.

    Quote Originally Posted by ServerTech2011 View Post
    Though if a few customers demand it, I can for them have servers placed in another datacenter undergoing global load balancing.
    Good idea, use an Anycast DNS service that provide realtime monitoring and you should be set.

    Quote Originally Posted by ServerTech2011 View Post
    This (if done) would always be on request and customers have to understand that syncing between the servers can be time and bandwidth consuming.
    This is a factor that will eat into the initial investment, building a fiber infrastructure (IRU, best relative return) or to rent waves between the datacenters - this should allow data replication between the physical locations at relatively small costs.
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