Links between cabinets at commercial datacentre

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1

Folks,

  Wishing to set up an alternative peering point in our fair city, we
  have run into a problem with the data center administration.

  The data center prohibits direct cabling between clients cabinets,
  even if the clients agree.

  Our peering point is not in the data center, but is in the same
  building, and will necessitate data center clients separately running
  fibre to our room, and paying not only for installation but also
  monthly fees proportional to bandwidth carried.

  We are in South Africa, the monthly fees are related to wireline costs,
  even though the monopoly wireline provider, Telkom, is not involved.

  Without this rule, we would run one fibre between the datacenter and
  the peering point, and have peers in the datacenter hop on that fibre.

  While acknowledging that a data center may make any rules it likes, I
  am asking nanog how common this practice is.

  If people mail me offlist, I would be willing to summarise if there is
  enough interest.

Cheers, Andy!

2

  The data center prohibits direct cabling between clients cabinets,

    > even if the clients agree.

They require that all cables from customer racks go to a "meet-me room"
and crossconnect there? If so, are you also allowed into the meet-me
room?

Or are they simply not allowed to purchase "unlit" service at all? That
is, are tenants in the data center only allowed to purchase circuits from
the telco, as opposed to crossconnects?

    > While acknowledging that a data center may make any rules it likes, I
    > am asking nanog how common this practice is.

This is very uncommon. Rules like these do exist, but facilities with
such rules very rarely attract enough customers to be worthy of interest
to people building exchanges.

                                -Bill

3

Or are they simply not allowed to purchase "unlit" service at all? That
is, are tenants in the data center only allowed to purchase circuits from
the telco, as opposed to crossconnects?

This is not the Telco - this is a commercial, large, datacenter.

No connections between cabinets. Period.

    > While acknowledging that a data center may make any rules it likes, I
    > am asking nanog how common this practice is.

This is very uncommon. Rules like these do exist, but facilities with
such rules very rarely attract enough customers to be worthy of interest
to people building exchanges.

That is exactly why we are locating the exchange outside the datacenter.
However, we are still a prisoner of this rule, as peers must separately
'purchase' connectivity to us - basically a fee for connectivity.

South Africa has few large colo facilities. Because of the large expense
of cross-town connects, an artifact of Telkom as a monopoly provider, we
are obliged to locate in the same building as the datacenter.

To reiterate, Telkom is not a factor in costing the peering point
connectivity to the datacenter.

Cheers, Andy!

4

Are there any rules preventing radio transmission on ISM bands from the
cabinets ?
You could reach other cabinets from yours with wireless LAN...

Rubens Kuhl Jr.

5

Datacenter crossconnects over wireless lan? Now that's clever, but at the
same time not very scaleable, and it's also quite frightening.
Nothing like DoS and traffic sniffing from some troublemaker in the
parking lot...
-Paul

Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2002 11:12:48 -0300
From: Rubens Kuhl Jr. <rkuhljr@uol.com.br>
To: nanog@merit.edu
Subject: Re: Links between cabinets at commercial datacentre

Are there any rules preventing radio transmission on ISM bands from the
cabinets ?
You could reach other cabinets from yours with wireless LAN...

Rubens Kuhl Jr.

From: "Andy Rabagliati" <andyr@wizzy.com>
To: <nanog@merit.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, April 17, 2002 5:57 AM
Subject: Links between cabinets at commercial datacentre

> The data center prohibits direct cabling between clients cabinets,
> even if the clients agree.

Paul Timmins
paul@timmins.net

Home: 248-858-7526
Pager: 248-333-9113
"By definition, if you don't stand up for anything, you stand for
nothing."
     ---Paul Timmins

6

Spread-spectrum radio systems are not that easy to DoS, a good benefit from
the original military applications.
Trafic sniffing is something to worry with, but IPSEC is there to be used
when needed...

A 11Mbps (half-duplex) wireless LAN is capable of carrying multipoint
traffic interests of a dozen peers with up to T1 speeds traffic interest.
Those speeds were very common in south america when telecom state monopoly
was in place, so it may fit the original poster requirements.

Most wireless vendors have or will soon start shipping upgradable cards to
the 40-60 Mbps wireless standard, which may be more suitable for aggregating
long-haul connections.

Rubens Kuhl Jr.

7

"Rubens Kuhl Jr." wrote:

Spread-spectrum radio systems are not that easy to DoS, a good benefit from
the original military applications.

Actually, at close range it should be trivial to Dos an 802.11 system.
Just
throw up a strong enough carrier anywhere within the receivers passband
and it will have trouble hearing the desired traffic. Even a 2.4GHz
cordless
phone in the same room could cause problems.

KL

8

Or you could just microwave a bunch of burritos.

Joe

9

Just saw this release..

http://biz.yahoo.com/rb/020417/tech_cisco_technology_1.html

  Bri

10

  While acknowledging that a data center may make any rules it likes, I
  am asking nanog how common this practice is.

"data center" is too amorphous a term to be used here. private data centers
owned by banks or insurance companies aren't relevant at all. telco motels
aren't really data centers but the issue does come up there. someone like
exodus or qwest or at&t or uunet or abovenet would be very likely to prevent
their customers from directly cross-connecting. mae-west (55 s market) won't
allow it either. paix, equinix, switch and data, and other "neutral colos"
won't allow it to occur without a fee but the fees are reasonable (unlike,
say, the cross connect fees at mae-west.)

there's no answer to the question, as posed. "can you be more specific?"

11

To be specific, it is UUnet Cape Town.

The Internet Service Providers Association of South Africa have two
Peering points in South Africa - JINX (large, in Johannesburg) and CINX
(small, in Cape Town) which is hosted (for free) by said UUnet data center.

They (ISPA) set the rules, which are appended below, which we are
unhappy with. Since the Cape Town exchange is small, we figured that
there is an opportunity to start our own. The natural place to put it is
in the same building as the major local content providers, which, not
coincidentally, is where CINX is currently located, at said UUnet data
center. There are not that many good commercial hosting environments in
Cape Town, and UUNet have the biggest.

We do not compete with UUnet for transit. We certainly do not compete
with them as a hosting environment, though a couple of ISPs host some
servers at our location.

We merely wish to provide peering unencumbered with fees that we feel
prevent Cape Town from competing internationally in the ICT arena.

Large commercial concerns host in the USA, unless their target audience
is primarily South African, in which case they pay extra and host
locally. Costs-based connectivity (cheap peering) would reduce that
cost, and enable South Africa to keep its foreign currency for other
purposes.

So - that is the larger picture, but was not my question to NANOG.

We wish to be able to provide this peering, but we find that UUnets
cross-connect policy interferes with our aims - as it requires potential
peers in the data center to separately purchase connectivity to us (in
the same building) instead of hopping onto our link by cross-connecting
to another cabinet in the data center, which (of course) they waive
for connections to the CINX cabinet.

My question was if this was common practice.

Cheers, Andy!

12

... So - that is the larger picture, but was not my question to NANOG.

We wish to be able to provide this peering, but we find that UUnets
cross-connect policy interferes with our aims - as it requires potential
peers in the data center to separately purchase connectivity to us (in
the same building) instead of hopping onto our link by cross-connecting
to another cabinet in the data center, which (of course) they waive
for connections to the CINX cabinet.

My question was if this was common practice.

yes, it's common for a hosting facility (which uunet cape town is.)

it would not be common in a carrier/fiber hotel. if there is one of
those in town you'd be well served to talk to the landlord about
supporting a peering exchange there, since it will drive other sales,
and the openness of it will ultimately pull business away from the
necessarily-more-closed peering exchange over in the hosting center.