How Do I Find the Best Local Colo for Me?
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Title pretty much sums it up. I was recently reading some threads here about colos and the pricing seems to make sense for some of my workloads. How do I find the best local colo for me?
Just in case it matters... Southwest Ventura County, CA is where I am located.
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As I am not an Engineer might be a dumb question but here goes: What are you looking to put in a Colo?
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@Minion-Queen Thanks for asking... Mostly for a DR type scenario. Replication of VM backups and maybe some small databases.
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for DR local ones aren't your best bet. Geographically separated is better for DR. We have a handful throughout the country and a couple in different countries.
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@Jason That is a good point. I do use Amazon S3 and Glacier and am looking into Veeam Cloudconnect.
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Are you looking for a hot site or cold site?
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@anonymous Warm(?) I would kill two birds and have an ADDC there, as well as some minor things, depending on latency and also replicate backups from VMs, both ways.
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Why look local? There are reasons for doing this but often people jump to local without really thinking through the business reasoning.
We've colo'd for a long time and only ever used semi-local. We use Toronto and are based in NY. We get better speeds, prices and services in Toronto than we can get in most, if not all of, NY. It's worth not just not being local but being in another country, the difference is so big! And we even have to pay customs to have servers there too!!
LA might easily have good offerings for you, but I would evaluate carefully if "local" adds value, loses value (like for DR) or is irrelevant. Typically it is irrelevant and should just be ignored as a factor. If you are doing things that involve you physically going to the colo facility, you aren't doing it right
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Yeah as Scott and Jason have said, a local colo is generally bad practice.
Look to store the DR in a separate state or country, (or both) so if something goes belly up in one location, you have the other as a backup.
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I'm in the same area as @wrx7m
2 questions:
- What if you want the local co-lo as a "hot" site
- For those that have co-lo in other geographical area's, do you own the gear or lease from the colo provider
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@scottalanmiller said:
Why look local? There are reasons for doing this but often people jump to local without really thinking through the business reasoning.
We've colo'd for a long time and only ever used semi-local. We use Toronto and are based in NY. We get better speeds, prices and services in Toronto than we can get in most, if not all of, NY. It's worth not just not being local but being in another country, the difference is so big! And we even have to pay customs to have servers there too!!
LA might easily have good offerings for you, but I would evaluate carefully if "local" adds value, loses value (like for DR) or is irrelevant. Typically it is irrelevant and should just be ignored as a factor. If you are doing things that involve you physically going to the colo facility, you aren't doing it right
To be clear, Toronto is only 2.5 hours away, so yeah it's in another country, etc., but it's not that far away in reality.
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@art_of_shred said:
To be clear, Toronto is only 2.5 hours away, so yeah it's in another country, etc., but it's not that far away in reality.
Until you get to customs..... HAHA
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@art_of_shred said:
To be clear, Toronto is only 2.5 hours away, so yeah it's in another country, etc., but it's not that far away in reality.
For us on the West coast, Toronto is in another galaxy..
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@FATeknollogee said:
@art_of_shred said:
To be clear, Toronto is only 2.5 hours away, so yeah it's in another country, etc., but it's not that far away in reality.
For us on the West coast, Toronto is in another galaxy..
The point wasn't for you to use Toronto, but to consider other options.
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@Dashrender said:
The point wasn't for you to use Toronto, but to consider other options.
I realize that, hence my use of the "smiley"
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@FATeknollogee said:
I'm in the same area as @wrx7m
2 questions:
- What if you want the local co-lo as a "hot" site
- For those that have co-lo in other geographical area's, do you own the gear or lease from the colo provider
Check out Colocation America, I've not used them but they have a lot of offerings.
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If they have a datacenter in the location you choose, QTS has been amazing for us. Highly recommended, top quality company, great facilities and service.
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@FATeknollogee said:
- For those that have co-lo in other geographical area's, do you own the gear or lease from the colo provider
We own everything. I think the Palo Alto's might have been a Lease to own program though (through palo alto, not the Colo).
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@FATeknollogee said:
I'm in the same area as @wrx7m
2 questions:
- What if you want the local co-lo as a "hot" site
- For those that have co-lo in other geographical area's, do you own the gear or lease from the colo provider
- In the case of NTG, we own our own gear and just rent space at the DC. Very rarely do you have a case when you actually need to put hands on the physical equipment.
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@art_of_shred said:
@FATeknollogee said:
I'm in the same area as @wrx7m
2 questions:
- What if you want the local co-lo as a "hot" site
- For those that have co-lo in other geographical area's, do you own the gear or lease from the colo provider
- In the case of NTG, we own our own gear and just rent space at the DC. Very rarely do you have a case when you actually need to put hands on the physical equipment.
We have out of band management plus dial modems on routers (protected) to console in if needed.
