I have routers in both 60 Hudson St & 1 Summer St and I’m looking for some low cost bandwidth options for out of band management. Currently I have Opengear boxes at each site with cell modems but they don’t work too well. I either need to replace them with new cell based devices or find a wireless/ethernet bandwidth option. I only need a couple serial ports and ethernet for when everything breaks.
I’m in DR space @ 60 Hudson and the Markeley MMR @ 1 Summer
I’m surprised OOB bandwidth isn’t a feature for colocation providers.
Before getting rid of the cellular based OOB, look into some more detail about exactly what LTE modems are in those. I’ve seen some remarkable results from equipment using the 600/700 bands (tmobile, verizon) for getting signal into deeply buried concrete structures. There’s a lot of different types and capabilities of cellular data modems on the market.
What SIM provider and modem are you using in those Opengears?
It’s been over a year but walked around 60 Hudson with LTE . I would exhaust the modem , provider , antenna placement options
We use Raritan console devices in NJR2 and I couldn’t be happier. They allow you to have to connections. We have a VPN device that is connected to our wan switches and then we have Verizon LTE as a backup. When we first went with T-Mobile we had problems with the connectivity (see https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2019-January/098723.html). We then moved over to Verizon where the signal was strong but we had issues with the MTU issues (see https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2019-June/101576.html). I ended up adding a rule to the raritan to lower the PDU and that allowed connectivity via the cellular network. I used the cellular modem that raritan recommended although I probably could have gone with something cheaper like the MikroTik LtAP.
Ha! “Surprised”? Well, offering OOB for a reasonable price could be a differentiator for the savvy colo providers, but bean counters say: “Huh? If customer X wants OOB, they can pay ~$300/mo for a cross-connect”. ~$300/mo might seem an exaggeration, but not for some of us. Even ~$150/mo is ridiculous.
If 4G-ish mobile service won’t work, expect to pay. ;-(
In --dayJob we were a customer of 1 Summer. OOB was provided by Markley in the form of a couple of L3 circuits on SMF with some static IPs. I don’t recall the exact commercial relationship as I wasn’t in the company at the time it was negotiated but it was effectively supplied free of charge with the rack space. Cross-connects at 1 Summer are so damn expensive it’s impractical to take a feed from anybody else. That said, if you’re in the MMR then you probably have a lot more flexibility.
In other DCs we tended to either sub-lease rack space from a colo provider, as they could provide a feed from their adjacent network racks for very little cost, or we found a friendly network in the same suite to either take a cheap feed from or swap bandwidth with.
LTE reception in the majority of DCs is awful so I was never willing to trust it to work when needed.
I believe we were recently quoted a price of like $900/month (between cross-connect and monthly charge) for 10Mb OpenGear OOB access in a large Canadian Data Center. We passed. While I don’t disagree, you have to pay for these services. The cost far exceeds the value for what is provided in many cases.
For what it’s worth, I really like Markley. Everybody that works there is fantastically helpful and they don’t cut corners on their infrastructure. Only gripe is X-Connect pricing
I believe we were recently quoted a price of like $900/month (between cross-connect and monthly charge) for 10Mb OpenGear OOB access in a large Canadian Data Center. We passed. While I don’t disagree, you have to pay for these services. The cost far exceeds the value for what is provided in many cases.
I have often been pleasantly surprised by how often I can open a laptop in a colo, see a list of SSIDs, figure out from the name who runs it, and ask nicely if I can please attach an AP(/station) and OOB widget to their network. I’ve basically always got the response of “Sure, as long as you are only using it for OOB and don’t try route traffic over it, no worries…”. Often the reply also includes a “… and, could we do the same? You stand up an AP and we’ll tunnel OOB through it”.
Yes, many colo’s frown upon/“ban” Wifi, but what they don’t notice doesn’t hurt them… The Internet used to be built on people helping each other out - let’s see if we can recreate that…
Wow, this is an impressive offering. I wish more providers would do this.
+manylots. It’s always surprising to me how often companies (in all industries) can be broken up into those that understand the value of goodwill and those that instead nickel-and-dime.
My local Potbelly (sandwich ship) every now and then will just say “No charge, this one’s on us”. This only happens around once every 30-40 times I go in, but they loyalty that it has created means that I go there way more often than I otherwise would. It also means that in the few times that something goes wrong/I have a bad experience, I don’t really care.
The additional profit that they’ve made from having me as a loyal customer more than covers the cost of 1 free sammich every N.
In many ways Markley seems similar - they feel like they understand that some things (like OOB) are annoying to deal with, and that the loyalty / goodwill provided by being “nice” more than repays the cost of the service.
W
As the person who created that product for Markley, I can tell you that is precisely what we were thinking.
It cost us nearly nothing, made customers stickier, generated good will, and created a chance to talk to them about cloud offerings or similar. The only “catch” is you need a fiber xconn. The thinking was it was barely more than a copper xconn for POTS yet you get gigabit instead of dialup, or you would have used fiber to another ISP anyway.
Every serious colo has enough bandwidth that 2 Mbps won’t be noticed, competent network engineers (one hopes), and free switch ports (or can get them cheap). Why don’t they do this? Perhaps someone in finance feels it can be “monetized”. I feel the monetization lowers adoption and kills the other benefits Warren mentions above - which are worth a hell of a lot more than the paltry sum they would get from billing a few customers.
I'm in both locations as well. We have a 10MB static IP connection for them and I think it's like $50/mo. Depends on how "out of band" you want it to be.
I also think Markley @ 1 summer offers something similar.
I would advise against this, OPEX nightmare. Who will NOC call when it is down? What will they say to the other end to identify the circuit? When will it get fixed? If not, how to escalate?
Free OOB is too expensive for me.