Clook moving datacenters

[brian]

Clook have announced that they're moving all their servers from TelecityRedbus Sovereign House to a new facility at Greenwich View Place.

Some interesting reasons for moving - I'd heard about Redbus being expensive, but didn't realise how bad the costing situation was getting:

Why move?
1. TelecityRedbus merger
With the merge of Telecity and Redbus this has brought massive price increases (approx 400%) along with a reduction in service. Since the merge, the number of on site engineers has been scaled down which has led to increased waits in the event that remote hands are required. With Telecity continuing to expand with their purchase of Globix, another round of price increases and staff reductions are expected. In addition, TelecityRedbus are unwilling to commit to contract terms longer than a few months which is not ideal for long term business planning.
2. Expansion space
The existing Redbus sites are pretty much at full capacity and additional space is at a minimum. Furthermore, any space that is available is priced extremely high since the merger which makes it impossible for us to continue to grow without passing on price increases to our own clients. Up to now we have soaked up the increase in our costs but with this set to continue we're unable to continue soaking up the increases without taking action. In order to continue growing we need to be able to secure additional space without 6 or 12 month waiting lists or by having to spread our equipment between different buildings.
3. Power policies
Since the TelecityRedbus merger they have introduced new policies with regard to the amount of power that can be configured for each rack which has resulted in us not being able to get anywhere near to the ideal capacity of a colocation rack before the power usage limit is reached. The latest limit per rack at TelecityRedbus is 8 amps which is enough to power approx 10 servers (this is in a full rack capacble of physically housing 40 1U machines). At the new facility all racks will have 16 amp as standard with further upgrade options which will allow us to continue getting the most from our colocation rackspace.

To summarise, if we were to continue at Redbus we would be paying 3-4 times more per colo rack, with 3 times less servers able to go in the rack, with decreasing amount of remote hands coverage. In addition, with the low contract times, prices could increase and policies change for the worse (as we have seen several times within the last year) at any point.

As I'm a Clook customer there's certainly some degree of trepidation about this - but I guess I'm simply going to have to have faith that all goes reasonably well.

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[monaghan]

Docklands is getting quite full now, so prices are going up and up and big customers seem to be the only ones who can expand easily.

The budget end is being slowly squeezed out.