Features of the choice of data center for the cloud provider. Regional bias
In April 2017, the year will be fulfilled, as the project mClouds.ru was launched, the main purpose of which is to provide storage and computing resources for b2b clients. Since then, we have obtained an interesting experience, from the choice of technical solutions to the solution of fakaps, which we want to share with you. The first story is about the agony of choosing a data center in the largest country in the world. Actually, the magnitude of the problem began.
The project was launched by the system integrator "Master", based in Tyumen, as we say - the best city in the world. The idea of launching mlouds.ru was not originally to enter the open cloud hosting market, but to provide its b2b-clients with computing resources for sandboxes and backup needs, such as report generation, remote repository for backup copies, external monitoring non core databases. The solution also covers the needs of small SMB sector companies in servers used for 1C: Enterprise. If we consider that with the growth of the dollar to buy their own servers, not to mention ensuring their UPS, cooling and other infrastructure, it took a lot of financial resources. Therefore, it was decided to develop our own cloud-based direction within our company, since the technical background of our engineers allows and allows it.
We set the date for entering the production environment on the first days of April and for three months we tested the software and hardware capabilities based on the VMware vSphere platform. In addition, we were able to adapt many Enterprise solutions to the cloud infrastructure, and this is an interesting experience that we want to share.
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Engraving at the entrance to the center of competence - our personal Central Committee
Our project began to work at the Competence Center (hereinafter referred to as the Central Committee) on the basis of our company, so there was no question of choosing a site. The power of cooling and UPS was enough to ensure the correct operation of the cooling and power subsystem. However, closer to the target date for entering the market, the problem was identified, where the project will have to live? Considering that we are not in Moscow or St. Petersburg, where there are no problems with this (after all, most of all commercial data centers in the country are concentrated there), this is not a trivial question for Tyumen.
So, in Tyumen there is anything, except competent commercial data centers, but not everyone is familiar with such a term as TIER 3, including those sites that we visited for familiarization. There are corporate server rooms, several state-owned data centers, platforms for telecom providers, but there are no commercial data centers as such, not to mention any certification of them. With the Internet channels, too, not all is well, for example, a connection with a bandwidth of 1 Gbit / s is very expensive. If we say that the channel should have a growth prospect of up to 10 Gbit / s, then the eyes were completely rounded off, on the face or by phone it was read that the guys heard requests for such speeds in our region for the first time. So we started to look at data centers in the Russian Federation.
Australia is very close. Image: whatarethe7continents.com
Ekaterinburg - in this city there is a data center of communication operators, for example Megafon and Rostelecom. But in the process of communication, we realized that the provision and level of service required for the cloud provider is not for them, as they themselves focus more on the provision of computing resources than on the provision of equipment placement services. As a result, we did not receive an adequate price tag, we continue to study.
Data Center GAU "IT-PARK", Republic of Tatarstan
Kazan - everything is better here, there is an IT park, Innopolis, it is clear that in IT they understand, are interested and love this area. They are quite professional, but again considering our location - logistically, we are very uncomfortable to get to Kazan. Therefore, the thin points, as an engineer, SLA and communication channels are not considered.
The bottom line is Moscow and St. Petersburg. Photo: periskop.livejournal.com
Began to review the market with St. Petersburg. The first data center (hereinafter referred to as DC), to which the SDN data center turned out to be. A decent level of engineering systems with a fairly clear description, interesting neighbors, such as VKontakte, adequate price, level of communication and readiness to answer all our questions. Further, the colocation services from Selectel, Fiord and other DCs were considered. We almost made a decision for ourselves to place mClouds.ru in the St. Petersburg SDN. However, logistics again got on the scales, even in SDN there is a service of remote hands, nevertheless, in the event of any abnormal situation (and a regular one too), we could not quickly landed in St. Petersburg, considering that we are physically located in Tyumen and, alas , to St. Petersburg there is only one flight per day to us, and these are very high risks in terms of the response time. However, for those who do not have difficulties with logistics before Peter, SDN is definitely one of the best among the options considered, as it seems to us.
The market for commercial data centers in Moscow is, of course, the largest. There is plenty to choose from. We have divided the data centers into several categories:
Consider the first category. The main consumers of services are customers of integrators, and they are also the main priority. In our opinion, the orientation is clearly not on small projects. Examples are the Compressor data center of the CROC company, Trust-Info data center from Ay-Teko.
The second category. Associations are beautiful, cool and ... expensive. From the initial selection, we identified three companies: DataSpace, DataPro, and Dataline. We looked, licked our lips and went on. It is necessary to come to these DCs when the project has already grown, so what, we’ve left to grow.
The third category is the data center of telecom operators. Sufficiently low flexibility due to constant and very long approvals, long responses of managers, lack of access to equipment at night and price arrangements comparable to certified DCs.
Fourth category. By the way, from this category we have chosen our future home for the project. We chose a data center that is positioned as a network of club data centers. We liked the speed of reaction, the willingness to show and tell everything, connectivity with other sites, the willingness to receive our equipment from the transport company and mount it in the rack on our own, which for us meant significant savings on engineers' business trips. The infrastructure of the data center suited our requirements.
Looking ahead to say that we worked in the selected data center until the end of 2016. During the year there was one simple summer for 2 hours and 30 minutes due to a malfunction in the air conditioning system, and a failure in the network equipment of the data center, as a result we lost communication channels to the outside world for several hours. Unfortunately, the competence of data center employees was not enough to quickly eliminate the failure, and as we later learned, there was no backup equipment at the site. Concluded and eliminated the possible repetition of this situation in the future. All customers were forced to compensate for the monthly subscription fee, although formally they remained within the framework of the SLA. But the data center is still the foundation, the foundation of the equipment operability. This is written in the cons of this category of data centers.
We did not seriously consider the fifth category. Here own data centers hosting providers that are converted from any premises and with one or another success operated. Investing in our own sites is worthy of respect, but we believe that buying a professional service and service will be more functional and reliable. But the economy, of course, may suffer, which will affect the final cost of the service.
As a result, we have been working since 2017 in the certified NORD4 data center under the TIER 3 program from the Uptime Institute, the company Dataline. Very adequate service, high flexibility and, most importantly, high reliability. Detailed contract and detailed SLA on health and response. Habré already had reviews of this data center and a detailed description of the infrastructure.
That's how we briefly reviewed our experience of choosing a data center for the cloud project mClouds.ru. We hope it will be useful to those who choose the data center for their projects or services.
In the following articles we will describe the technical features of the functioning of our infrastructure directly and the solutions applied.
The project was launched by the system integrator "Master", based in Tyumen, as we say - the best city in the world. The idea of launching mlouds.ru was not originally to enter the open cloud hosting market, but to provide its b2b-clients with computing resources for sandboxes and backup needs, such as report generation, remote repository for backup copies, external monitoring non core databases. The solution also covers the needs of small SMB sector companies in servers used for 1C: Enterprise. If we consider that with the growth of the dollar to buy their own servers, not to mention ensuring their UPS, cooling and other infrastructure, it took a lot of financial resources. Therefore, it was decided to develop our own cloud-based direction within our company, since the technical background of our engineers allows and allows it.
We set the date for entering the production environment on the first days of April and for three months we tested the software and hardware capabilities based on the VMware vSphere platform. In addition, we were able to adapt many Enterprise solutions to the cloud infrastructure, and this is an interesting experience that we want to share.
')
Project site selection
Engraving at the entrance to the center of competence - our personal Central Committee
Our project began to work at the Competence Center (hereinafter referred to as the Central Committee) on the basis of our company, so there was no question of choosing a site. The power of cooling and UPS was enough to ensure the correct operation of the cooling and power subsystem. However, closer to the target date for entering the market, the problem was identified, where the project will have to live? Considering that we are not in Moscow or St. Petersburg, where there are no problems with this (after all, most of all commercial data centers in the country are concentrated there), this is not a trivial question for Tyumen.So, in Tyumen there is anything, except competent commercial data centers, but not everyone is familiar with such a term as TIER 3, including those sites that we visited for familiarization. There are corporate server rooms, several state-owned data centers, platforms for telecom providers, but there are no commercial data centers as such, not to mention any certification of them. With the Internet channels, too, not all is well, for example, a connection with a bandwidth of 1 Gbit / s is very expensive. If we say that the channel should have a growth prospect of up to 10 Gbit / s, then the eyes were completely rounded off, on the face or by phone it was read that the guys heard requests for such speeds in our region for the first time. So we started to look at data centers in the Russian Federation.
What is near?
Australia is very close. Image: whatarethe7continents.com
Ekaterinburg - in this city there is a data center of communication operators, for example Megafon and Rostelecom. But in the process of communication, we realized that the provision and level of service required for the cloud provider is not for them, as they themselves focus more on the provision of computing resources than on the provision of equipment placement services. As a result, we did not receive an adequate price tag, we continue to study.
Data Center GAU "IT-PARK", Republic of Tatarstan
Kazan - everything is better here, there is an IT park, Innopolis, it is clear that in IT they understand, are interested and love this area. They are quite professional, but again considering our location - logistically, we are very uncomfortable to get to Kazan. Therefore, the thin points, as an engineer, SLA and communication channels are not considered.
The bottom line is Moscow and St. Petersburg. Photo: periskop.livejournal.com
Began to review the market with St. Petersburg. The first data center (hereinafter referred to as DC), to which the SDN data center turned out to be. A decent level of engineering systems with a fairly clear description, interesting neighbors, such as VKontakte, adequate price, level of communication and readiness to answer all our questions. Further, the colocation services from Selectel, Fiord and other DCs were considered. We almost made a decision for ourselves to place mClouds.ru in the St. Petersburg SDN. However, logistics again got on the scales, even in SDN there is a service of remote hands, nevertheless, in the event of any abnormal situation (and a regular one too), we could not quickly landed in St. Petersburg, considering that we are physically located in Tyumen and, alas , to St. Petersburg there is only one flight per day to us, and these are very high risks in terms of the response time. However, for those who do not have difficulties with logistics before Peter, SDN is definitely one of the best among the options considered, as it seems to us.
The market for commercial data centers in Moscow is, of course, the largest. There is plenty to choose from. We have divided the data centers into several categories:
- Data Center for major integrators
- Uptime Institute Certified Commercial Data Centers
- DPC telecom operators
- small and independent commercial data centers claiming compliance with Tier 3 level
- sites of various hosters, from independent to the selected areas in large commercial data centers
Consider the first category. The main consumers of services are customers of integrators, and they are also the main priority. In our opinion, the orientation is clearly not on small projects. Examples are the Compressor data center of the CROC company, Trust-Info data center from Ay-Teko.
The second category. Associations are beautiful, cool and ... expensive. From the initial selection, we identified three companies: DataSpace, DataPro, and Dataline. We looked, licked our lips and went on. It is necessary to come to these DCs when the project has already grown, so what, we’ve left to grow.
The third category is the data center of telecom operators. Sufficiently low flexibility due to constant and very long approvals, long responses of managers, lack of access to equipment at night and price arrangements comparable to certified DCs.
Fourth category. By the way, from this category we have chosen our future home for the project. We chose a data center that is positioned as a network of club data centers. We liked the speed of reaction, the willingness to show and tell everything, connectivity with other sites, the willingness to receive our equipment from the transport company and mount it in the rack on our own, which for us meant significant savings on engineers' business trips. The infrastructure of the data center suited our requirements.
Looking ahead to say that we worked in the selected data center until the end of 2016. During the year there was one simple summer for 2 hours and 30 minutes due to a malfunction in the air conditioning system, and a failure in the network equipment of the data center, as a result we lost communication channels to the outside world for several hours. Unfortunately, the competence of data center employees was not enough to quickly eliminate the failure, and as we later learned, there was no backup equipment at the site. Concluded and eliminated the possible repetition of this situation in the future. All customers were forced to compensate for the monthly subscription fee, although formally they remained within the framework of the SLA. But the data center is still the foundation, the foundation of the equipment operability. This is written in the cons of this category of data centers.
We did not seriously consider the fifth category. Here own data centers hosting providers that are converted from any premises and with one or another success operated. Investing in our own sites is worthy of respect, but we believe that buying a professional service and service will be more functional and reliable. But the economy, of course, may suffer, which will affect the final cost of the service.
As a result, we have been working since 2017 in the certified NORD4 data center under the TIER 3 program from the Uptime Institute, the company Dataline. Very adequate service, high flexibility and, most importantly, high reliability. Detailed contract and detailed SLA on health and response. Habré already had reviews of this data center and a detailed description of the infrastructure.
That's how we briefly reviewed our experience of choosing a data center for the cloud project mClouds.ru. We hope it will be useful to those who choose the data center for their projects or services.
In the following articles we will describe the technical features of the functioning of our infrastructure directly and the solutions applied.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/324680/
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