Recommendations for Hong Kong datacenter, and a sanity check for my geopolitical conclusions ?

Mailman List Mirror (Read Only)
1

I will be expanding a small network infrastructure service (read: DNS and mail ... a few 1u and 2u servers) to Hong Kong next year.

We don't have any particular customer base in Hong Kong - rather, we have customers all over southeast asia and would like to serve them better, as well as attract more SE Asia customers.

I chose Hong Kong for the following reasons:

- South Korea is alternately happy with / upset with Japan, and I don't want to deal with that

- Japan is is alternately happy with / upset with South Korea, and I don't want to deal with that

- Mainland China is out of the question, for obvious reasons

- The smaller (Thailand, Vietnamese, Phillipines, etc.) countries all have their own particular issues (recent coup in Thailand, etc.)

So the choice came down to Hong Kong or Singapore, and I chose Hong Kong because it seems easier to "just get things done" there. I realize that in the long term there is a greater risk of social paradigm shift in Hong Kong because of mainland China, but in the short run it seems that Hong Kong is more "functional" than Singapore.

Any comments on the above thought process ?

The obvious follow-up is, which datacenter ?

I need a full service center that will give me rackspace and let me just plug ethernet into their switch. I am not interested in brokering my own connectivity, nor am I interested in running my own routers. I want to pay one bill to one organization and get one cable. The end.

I think there are further considerations though ... I read details of one very modern, very sexy datacenter housed in a skyscraper, but my research showed me that this building has been built on land reclaimed from the sea, and there is reasonable concern that the sand underpinnings could liquify, to a degree, in a seismic event. I'd also like to be more than a few feet above sea level. Honestly, as sexy as it would be to be in a slick tower right on the bay in Central Hong Kong, I would much rather find some nondescript, one story building, miles from the coast and a few hundred feet above sea level.

What recommendations might someone have ?

Thank you very much for any comments or suggestions you may have.

2

Making every effort to not pimp my employer (pccw), I would say that
the Equinix in HK is good and they have a decent equinix direct
product (one bill to pay). If you're looking more for a "managed
colo", pccw owns powerbase which does that sort of thing. HKCOLO is
good but space is hard to come by.

3

The process is good, I did the same excepted I also potentially needed good Mainland China connectivity (what are the obvious reasons?), otherway I think would have take the Singapore option. Getting things done there is not a problem either.

I choose the Mega iAdvantage datacenters in HK.

Benjamin

George Sanders a �crit :

4

We recently moved out of Hutchinson (HGC), which was a pretty poor
experience overall. We moved to a fairly new NTT site, which is miles away
from anywhere (Tai Po). The experience there has been pretty much the exact
opposite. They tend to be quite anal about policy and procedure, which can
be a tad annoying, but overall I'll take that over the previously abysmal
experience :slight_smile:

5

George,

As a previous thread had stated I would opt for Singapore as well. 1) The country is more technology driven. They speak good english, and the country is beautiful too, without the uncertain future.

Jay Murphy
"We move the information that moves your world."
 Please consider the environment before printing e-mail

7

I'd say it depends, as always. Mostly of what your business is about. If you're a bank, you got to take many care about your datacenter(s) locations, but you'll have the money for it anyway. Same for health services and so on.

Here is a short story: when I had to choose for my first datacenter location, I checked if there was two distinct power lines, enough UPS capacity, no potential problem with water floods, etc.
Then I thought: who am I to care that much? If there is a terrorist attack in my DC and everything blows up, who will care? One big part of the local and international Internet will be down and injured, I'm not ashamed to say my business won't take that much damages after all. Still, if you're hosting critical data (and any business does), go for remote backups, even cheap ones. One dedicated server in another city / country with enough encryption (VPN / disk encryption) could do the trick.
Again, if the Mega iAdvantage building falls down to the sea, what will the whole island look like? Who's gonna care about the Internet at that time?

About mainland China, there are very nice datacenters in Beijing and Shanghai, even if in my opinion they're still lacking of sufficient services (even if Shanghai's are usually better). Then again it depends what's your business is about. If you're trying to reach Chinese people, you'll have to deal with mainland China administration guys anyway!

George Sanders a �crit :

8

Yes, thank you - that was the datacenter I had read about in my own research. What did you think of the height of that building and its location on reclaimed sea land ? It makes me nervous, but as I said in a different message in this thread, it looks like ALL of urban HK is reclaimed so ... who knows.

Well where does the HK govt put there servers? If they outsource them to a colo, then that might be an interesting place to start. Sinking into the sea seems a remote possibility. I don't know much about Hong Kong. I imagine others on the list might be able to speak to that better.

I was saying that I did not want the servers _inside of_ China, for obvious reasons. Although the actual geography of shenzhen makes it much more appealing, even though we want greater freedom RE: content/filtering/freedom of speech/etc. (if only for principles sake).

Something something govt event, something something shutting down/throttling all connectivity to get there message out.

The point is, that placing servers directly in China presents significant operational issues, that a business can understand (hey guess what we can't hit our VPN at random times completely outside our control). It has nothing to do with free speech, and everything to do with continuity of operations.

China is.... difficult. I was tangentially related to a China deployment project for a massive e-commerce company. My manager was discussing the project, and I told him I wanted nothing to do with it.

Every time my team mate turned around there was another discussion with legal going on. Not to mention EVERYTHING was 100% outsourced.

It was pure unbridled hell for everyone involved with the project.

9

Yes, thank you - that was the datacenter I had read about in my own research. What did you think of the height of that building and its location on reclaimed sea land ? It makes me nervous, but as I said in a different message in this thread, it looks like ALL of urban HK is reclaimed so ... who knows.

Well where does the HK govt put there servers? If they outsource them to a colo, then that might be an interesting place to start. Sinking into the sea seems a remote possibility.

Hong Kong is considered to be in a low seismic risk area and is not near a plate boundary. I don't think that there has ever been a major Earthquake recorded there. Past performance of course is no guarantee of future results.

See, e.g.,

http://www.cedd.gov.hk/eng/publications/information_notes/doc/in_2007_05e.pdf

Regards
Marshall

10

When comparing, I would think you need to compare HKIX vs SOX and see which IX gives you better overall peering and connectivity for that area.

-Hank

I will be expanding a small network infrastructure service (read: DNS and mail ... a few 1u and 2u servers) to Hong Kong next year.

We don't have any particular customer base in Hong Kong - rather, we have customers all over southeast asia and would like to serve them better, as well as attract more SE Asia customers.

I chose Hong Kong for the following reasons:

- South Korea is alternately happy with / upset with Japan, and I don't want to deal with that

- Japan is is alternately happy with / upset with South Korea, and I don't want to deal with that

- Mainland China is out of the question, for obvious reasons

- The smaller (Thailand, Vietnamese, Phillipines, etc.) countries all have their own particular issues (recent coup in Thailand, etc.)

So the choice came down to Hong Kong or Singapore, and I chose Hong Kong because it seems easier to "just get things done" there. I realize that in the long term there is a greater risk of social paradigm shift in Hong Kong because of mainland China, but in the short run it seems that Hong Kong is more "functional" than Singapore.

Any comments on the above thought process ?

The obvious follow-up is, which datacenter ?

I need a full service center that will give me rackspace and let me just plug ethernet into their switch. I am not interested in brokering my own connectivity, nor am I interested in running my own routers. I want to pay one bill to one organization and get one cable. The end.

I think there are further considerations though ... I read details of one very modern, very sexy datacenter housed in a skyscraper, but my research showed me that this building has been built on land reclaimed from the sea, and there is reasonable concern that the sand underpinnings could liquify, to a degree, in a seismic event. I'd also like to be more than a few feet above sea level. Honestly, as sexy as it would be to be in a slick tower right on the bay in Central Hong Kong, I would much rather find some nondescript, one story building, miles from the coast and a few hundred feet above sea level.

What recommendations might someone have ?

Thank you very much for any comments or suggestions you may have.

11

My take on this would be that DNS especially, and the volume of mail that can be handled via a few 1 and 2u servers, are pretty easy to duplicate. As such, I suspect you're overthinking some of the risk management pieces. In any of the places you mentioned, you're more likely to have random accidental power or network connectivity outages than to be dislodged by a tsunami, hurricane, or military coup. No matter where you go, if you design your service such that it can fail over to your network sites elsewhere in the world, you should be fine.

I ran a 30-location DNS network that included servers in some fairly unstable places for about four years. Power outages in one location or another happened a couple times a week sometimes. The ones we worried about were the ones where the equipment didn't successfully reboot itself afterward. Hardware failures happened periodically -- again often enough that I don't have a clear count. We had one location that we lost connectivity to due to a coup for maybe a week, once.

The real questions to be asking are where you'll get the best network connectivity and support. For network connectivity, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo will all be decent choices. Tokyo can be difficult if you don't have a Japanese speaker on staff. Hong Kong and Singapore are both full of people who speak good English. Last time I looked at it, transit connectivity was cheaper in Hong Kong. Peering was easier in Hong Kong as well, since everybody was on the HKIX rather than being split between two exchanges (SOX and Equinix) as they were in Singapore. But it's been a few years since I've dealt with stuff in either place, so the situation may have changed.

As for facilities, my usual shopping technique is to figure out who I want to connect to, figure out where they are, and then figure out which building has the best combination of price and remote hands support. If there are any discernable differences in the level of back-up power they provide, you may want to take that into consideration too. And then remember, your equipment will be far away. Things will happen to it that you don't expect. Some of those will be hard to fix from a distance. Make sure you're able to fail over to equipment in other places if you need to, because if you do this enough, you will lose a site somewhere eventually.

-Steve

12

Equinix and Mega-iAdvantage are both good choices. Equinix is just standing up their peering exchange in HK, so this is something they have over Mega-I, and both can offer connectivity to HKIX.

Outside of the locations above, our HK presence is also a floor in a PCCW facility, which has been good so far. I'm also not a sales person, but we could offer the capability you are looking for, though we aren't colo if you ever needed physical access to your equipment.