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Thread: Meetme rooms?

  1. #1
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    Meetme rooms?

    When offering a vendor neutral colocation center, what is the point of having a dedicated meetme room? I understand if you running a carrier hotel, put if you providing multiple carriers in a colo IDC, is there any point to having an additional meetme room? Why would one not simply run interconnects to each carrier's cabinet on the floor?
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  2. #2
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    Quote Originally Posted by WebAfrica
    When offering a vendor neutral colocation center, what is the point of having a dedicated meetme room? I understand if you running a carrier hotel, put if you providing multiple carriers in a colo IDC, is there any point to having an additional meetme room? Why would one not simply run interconnects to each carrier's cabinet on the floor?

    Because "Meet me Room" sounds a heck of a lot better than "Carrier's Cabinet on the Floor".
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  3. #3
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    I'm not an expert, so I'm guessing here, but I would imagine it's for management purposes. Having a mesh of wiring between customers could be hard to keep track of in comparison to a central point. With a dedicated room, you can easily keep track of the incoming wiring to that room.

    In addition, you can multiplex connections over one line. Say someone offers a popular service that a lot of people in the datacenter want to connect to/peer with. That service provider only brings in one wire to the meet me room and everyone hooks up to that. If you have 10 people, it means a max of 10 lines, versus 100 (10 x 10) with a mesh.
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  4. #4
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    Quote Originally Posted by timdorr
    I'm not an expert, so I'm guessing here, but I would imagine it's for management purposes. Having a mesh of wiring between customers could be hard to keep track of in comparison to a central point. With a dedicated room, you can easily keep track of the incoming wiring to that room.

    In addition, you can multiplex connections over one line. Say someone offers a popular service that a lot of people in the datacenter want to connect to/peer with. That service provider only brings in one wire to the meet me room and everyone hooks up to that. If you have 10 people, it means a max of 10 lines, versus 100 (10 x 10) with a mesh.
    So what you saying its just for physical cable aggregation purposes? I notice a large number of colo facilities don't bother with them. Is it a justified expense though and a big enough selling point?
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  5. #5
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    Quote Originally Posted by WebAfrica
    So what you saying its just for physical cable aggregation purposes? I notice a large number of colo facilities don't bother with them. Is it a justified expense though and a big enough selling point?
    A meet-me-room can be small, or even be just a caged space, so the expense does not need to be large. For all the cable management benefits, it can pay off. Most of the money will be saved because of easier troubleshooting, since it is easier to find problems with a cross-connect when they are managed from a central location.
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  6. #6
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    What the OP is asking is.. what's the point of a "meet-me room" comprised of cabinets with power and equipment, etc., as opposed to a room full of cabinets which is appropriately referred to as simply "a room full of cabinets." IMHO, the only point of calling something a "meet-me room" is in the case of a dedicated room with no power and Layer 1 connectivity only, dedicated to the primary purpose of making crossconnects. A prime example would be the second floor MMR at 56 Marietta.

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  7. #7
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    The purpose of the meet me room is to simplify connections for both bandwidth providers and the facilities clients.

    On a single floor data center it's not really that big of deal but it does allow for at lease a centralized point for everyone to meet. Keeping everything more organized and easier to trace issues.

    On a multi floor building it's almost mandatory. The providers may be spread over multiple floors and the clients will be over multiple floors. Rather than have the providers run lines to possibly dozens of of clients over each floor they only have to run the one line or a single bundle to the meet me room.

    You wouldn't want individual providers consistently going in and running new lines all the time. This increases the risk of someone damaging the other lines. Typically in a quality facility the building will be responsible for running all the lines from the meet me room to each client. This provides a more consistent methodology of managing the cabling and reducing the risk of errors or problems.

    A "meetme Room" also implies that anyone that wants to provide services can pay to be at that facility as long as they pay their fees. While anything else could be thought of as a space the host has and it's only open to the providers it offers, not other providers.
    Last edited by mgphoto; 12-08-2006 at 10:17 AM.
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  8. #8
    The MMR is a term that has often been misused, distorted and otherwise mis-understood within the context of Carrier Hotels and Colocation Areas.

    Typically, a MMR is a place where connections are facilitated between tenants in different physical locations of a building or campus. If a tenant in Suite 1 needs to connect a Tenant in Suite 2 there are a few options:

    1) Run connections A-La Carte to from A to B which is costly, time consuming and inefficient.

    2) Pre-Terminate a bundle of connections from A to B which is better than option 1 but limits connectivity to a single tenant.

    3) Run a bundle of cable to a designated MMR area so that you can connect to to Suite B, C, D, E etc. This is clearly the most effective.

    On the other hand, some datacenters will choose to designate an area of a colo suite as the MMR when in reality they have a Distribution Frame. The Distro Frame is almost a microcosm of the MMR concept but basically, if implemented correctly, can reduce cross connect efforts to a simple jumper between patch panels or fiber cans.

    In my experience, I find tenants are much, much happier over the long run when they elect to run a bundle of cat5 and fiber to a distro frame. The NRCs are a little higher up front, but XC implementation is faster, cleaner and typically more reliable.

    In some cases, diverse routes are used to get to the distro frame to ensure that if one bundle gets crushed or severed, hot cuts to the new route can be done in seconds.

  9. #9
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    JamesonA just about hit the head on the nail. When doing the carrier neutral room most Tier1 providers actually request where your MMR is for their convenience and yours. It allows panels to be placed for your benefit and theirs. We have multiple connections going between providers in the Infomart where they have actually given us perks to piggy back on a pack of fiber already going to another carrier so they didn't have to do installs or deal with time constraints since we already had the connections.
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