RE: Broken Internet?

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From: Adam Rothschild [mailto:asr@latency.net]
Sent: Friday, March 16, 2001 11:23 AM

> > DSL has always been a cheap, semi-reliable solution for people
> > that didn't want to pay the money for a dedicated circuit.

This, I agree with.

> DSL behaves like a dedicated circuit

Dedicated in what sense? "Always up" nature? Aggregation hierarchy /
topology? Bandwidth, considering your provider might be _losing_
money with transit/ops/etc costs factored in, if you're using it al
full line rate 24x7?

Well, all of the above, except that there is no way to tell if your upstream
is losing money or not. Not if their market-communications folks know what
they're doing and they're privately-held.

> Additionally, you don't have to tune the link and it doesn't need to
> be hand-rebooted when the CSU/DSU drops (all the things they don't
> tell you about T1's).

What circuit-level fine tuning and rebooting do you speak of? Is the
telco running Microsoft DACS Server(TM) in the CO? :wink:

I'm speaking from having spent many nights and week-ends waiting for the
telco to bring the line back up, after my CSU lost power/went down/died/etc.
That's why we went with DSL (besides straight cost). Granted, after initial
build, this didn't happen. Mainly, because the CSU never went down again.

But yeah, putting all your eggs in one basket could make for a nice
single point of failure. Or calculated risk. Your call...

That's my point, small shops don't have much choice. Typical Inet start-ups
are cases where headcount is far less than server count. Granted, most of
the H/W is in a co-lo.

<sigh> You guys just don't want to allow a small business to run their own
data center, do you?
Can't y'all understand that there are serious business reasons for a company
to do so?

2

From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu]On Behalf Of
Roeland Meyer
Sent: March 16, 2001 2:44 PM
To: 'Adam Rothschild'
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
Subject: RE: Broken Internet?

> But yeah, putting all your eggs in one basket could make for a nice
> single point of failure. Or calculated risk. Your call...

That's my point, small shops don't have much choice. Typical Inet
start-ups
are cases where headcount is far less than server count. Granted, most of
the H/W is in a co-lo.

Why do you think small shops (eg: us, but we are smaller than the average
small shop) use colo?

It strikes me as a lot cheaper to pay $500-1000/megabit/month to Exodus,
AboveNet, Globix et al (my apologies to those from colo providers I didn't
name, I know there are hundreds out there) rather than find a suitable
facility, get a decent power setup, then you need to deal with ARIN, get
yourself some transit providers, etc. Oh, and then you need some operational
staff, too, to reboot your server if it dies, that type of thing. If all
you're planning on doing is connecting your own rack or two's worth of
servers, then you've just spent a lot more money building your own for
little benefit. There's the time factor, too... Most colo providers will
probably let you move in with all your hardware within a month, if not less.
How long does it take to build a real data center?

<sigh> You guys just don't want to allow a small business to run their own
data center, do you?
Can't y'all understand that there are serious business reasons
for a company
to do so?

All right, I'm curious here. What do you define as "data center"? If you
mean the facilities with redundant connectivity, diesel generators, enough
UPSes to power the biggest power hogging thing you can find for six hours,
etc, I'd like you to tell me how a small business can afford that.

If, like some people, you define "data center" as a small wiring closet
hooked up by one T1 (or, in your case, DSL, and you're not the first I've
encountered with a DSL-connected "data center") to some random provider,
then I don't think anyone has a problem with you running your own "data
center", although I think your semantics could be argued, and since this is
NANOG, will be argued for about 100 posts minimum.

Vivien