My company has cabinets at datacenters around the US, but they are relatively stubby datacenters in terms of interconnectedness.
I have been thinking about what adding some backbone PoPs in more interconnected buildings would look like.
However space in these (one Wiltshire, 56 Marietta) tends to be at a steep premium.
Thus we would probably just want to rack a pair like 7280r3 or something and mostly just have fiber runs to our cheap stubby warehouse datacenter space.
Curious about strategy here - any continental mid-sized ISPs do similar with a small footprint in the main building but the majority of their footprint offsite?
Also, are there places to broker a fractional few Us of colo space in these buildings? I don’t need a full cab at thousands of dollars, that’s for sure. If you have 4U redundant power colocation at highly peered buildings (escort is ok) you can also hit me up commercially off list.
Thanks yall! Happy new year.
Alex
We have done this before and as a Engineer the answer is: it depends.
If you many many many racks at your "stubby datacenters" where you are getting good price for power, service, etc. then cost of dark fiber or wave service from an on-net carrier at your existing datacenter to a popular place like One Wilshire does make sense.
However if you have only a few racks, then the cost might not make sense as you have to factor in:
- dark fiber or wave service fee
- cross connect fees at your "stubby datacenter"
- cross connect fees at the premium datacenter (CoreSite, Digital Realty, Equinix, etc.)
- peering/transit/IX fee you ultimately want to connect to
- Any multiplexing equipment you need (CWDM, DWDM, etc.) if you want to split up/share the dark fiber connection
- any cabinet space you might need
Again, it all comes down to price.
For the Los Angeles area about 6 months ago we looked at roughly ~30 miles of dark fiber service by the airport over to downtown (CoreSite at One Wilshire). Crown Castle (Wilcon), Zayo and Cogent were on-net at both facilities.
Crown Castle and Zayo were the cheapest and offered dark fiber service for ~$1500/month. Cogent offered wave service for about double. Sadly, American Dark Fiber (local fiber company) was not on-net at our facility which would have been half the cost.
We then had to factor in a small POP at CoreSite to host the multiplexing equipment, etc.
Again, all comes down to price. Hope this helps
-Adam