Dacentec New Price Schemes - Lowers Costs - Rent Only?!

[fileMEDIA]

How much longer will these dual L5520s make sense to colocate/offer? At their current market price, they cost more than a brand new E3 after 18 - 24 months. With E3 v1s starting to come to market, I don't really think it's a good investment.

Es long as they bring more profit than eats money for energy consumption it will be bought.

Currently you get on ebay DL380 G6 with 2x L5520 and some other stuff for around 300 to 400€. This is nothing for this compute power and features. Add a 10G NIC and 64 or 128GB RAM to this nodes and you will have nice VM nodes for the next 2 years.

 

[drmike]

How much longer will these dual L5520s make sense to colocate/offer? At their current market price, they cost more than a brand new E3 after 18 - 24 months. With E3 v1s starting to come to market, I don't really think it's a good investment.

From an operation like Dacentec, as long as the gear is cheap, abundant and in racks and people buy it, they will continue selling it.  Long term their offer price should only go down.  $50 RTO eventually at $35 RTO.

You can pick up 54xx/55xx units loaded in a rack these days for a song.  Populated with RAM, drives, everything.  Not even $200 a unit with big configs.

They'll be out here offered until something really more compelling comes in at same $50 price point in the Dacentec model.

Dacentec's model rocks.  Disruptive in ways.  The RTO niche part.

 

[Francisco]

Who else is doing budget RTO?

Is Dacentec the only ones?

Francisco

 

[qps]

There are a few issues with doing RTO on a massive scale.

1) Rent to own is probably considered a finance contract of sorts.  If you sell to an individual, this puts you under the regulations of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau and all of the red tape that comes with that.

2) After the hardware is paid off, some customers will want to have it shipped out.  This involves pulling out of the cabinet, packaging and shipping the servers.  Packaging isn't cheap, and creates a whole new liability and a lot of work.  What if a server gets damaged in shipping?  What if a server gets lost in shipping?

3) If the customer continues to co-lo the server and eventually stops paying, most states have laws about how long you have to hold the equipment after it is abandoned.  This will create a whole new additional process of holding servers and then figuring out how to dispose of them.

There's probably more than that.  It's a lot more hassle than it is worth from a provider standpoint.  The margins on this gear are so small anyway that if any of the problems I mention pop up, you probably burn through more than the profit for the whole time the customer had the server.

 

[dacentec]

RTO will still be available, no plans to stop offering magical deals. Now we have the best of both worlds. We will try to have parity between the new and old products in RTO mode.

We do a lot of things differently, and we build a lot of things to optimize what we do. One example out of many is our server racks, which were designed in-house and manufactured in Lenoir, NC. We are not just snapping together parts and playing with the numbers, we are redesigning the IAAS stack.

We continually work on improving, thanks for the patronage, criticism and competition.

 

[willie]

Hi Dacentec, is it possible to get the hard drives shipped out from these servers (RTO converted to owned colo), and how much does that cost?  What about putting new drives in?  Thanks.

 

[HalfEatenPie]

RTO will still be available, no plans to stop offering magical deals. Now we have the best of both worlds. We will try to have parity between the new and old products in RTO mode.

We do a lot of things differently, and we build a lot of things to optimize what we do. One example out of many is our server racks, which were designed in-house and manufactured in Lenoir, NC. We are not just snapping together parts and playing with the numbers, we are redesigning the IAAS stack.

We continually work on improving, thanks for the patronage, criticism and competition.

I absolutely love the servers and I actually have one of the E3s (I've already finished an RTO on a Dual L5420).  

I do have a question though, the noc-ps seems to be incredibly finicky and takes a long time to get a server's OS reinstalled.  And I mean more than 2/3 hours, I mean like 8 or more hours (i've once had the noc-ps running overnight and it still was in the process of "downloading" the image or something).  Is there any steps you guys could take to make this faster?  I don't use it often but every single time I do it doesn't work for me.  I've seen noc-ps work so much faster for a few other providers, so I think it's isolated to simply Dacentec itself, but again I'm not too sure.  This is actually mostly why I end up asking for the KVMoIP (or sometimes I'm just stupid and lock myself out from SSH... good thing these don't happen often... *cough cough*).

Anyways, thanks for the awesome service.  I don't like how the cost to add RTO is going to go up, as my main justification for going with Dacentec and your RTO was that "I'm going to be using this long-term anyways, might as well chip in the extra 5 dollars and go RTO", but everything else is perfectly fine!  

 

[drmike]

Who else is doing budget RTO?


Is Dacentec the only ones?


Francisco

At scale and with awareness and at low prices, I'd say so.

Other RTO stuff I see is one off folks moving idle misfit stock.  Or people taking their normal dedis and throwing a hefty per month surcharge on for the ownership part.

There is plenty of cheap and powerful gear for a song out there.  No reason why savvy DC operators aren't snapping up racks worth and doing the RTO model ala Dacentec pricing.  Someone else sorely needs to come with competing products to market.  Why?  Because we all need multiple geographic locations, diverse networks, etc.

 

[Francisco]

Power.

A lot of that older gear eats power, especially the 54xx stuff.

Francisco

 

[Steven F]

Power.


A lot of that older gear eats power, especially the 54xx stuff.


Francisco

 

[HalfEatenPie]

Power.


A lot of that older gear eats power, especially the 54xx stuff.


Francisco

Huh. Any additional content to this? 

 

[Francisco]

Huh. Any additional content to this?

Fully buffered DDR2 chunks 0.1<>0.2A per stick, CPU's are 60W<>80W/ea. It all adds up very quickly.

Francisco

 

[HalfEatenPie]

Fully buffered DDR2 chunks 0.1<>0.2A per stick, CPU's are 60W<>80W/ea. It all adds up very quickly.


Francisco

Oh I meant to @Steven F who just seemed to quote you and not write anything.

But yeah, Dual L5420s are pretty power intensive for what they bring (now-a-days anyways)

 

[drmike]

Oh I meant to @Steven F who just seemed to quote you and not write anything.

But yeah, Dual L5420s are pretty power intensive for what they bring (now-a-days anyways)

Power matters only a bit.  Big picture 5420's are going to eat what?  < 2A most of the time.  Guess I need to find my meter and go test one over the weekend  Been meaning to set up a test environment anyways.

2A = 240 watts.

240 x 720 hours = 173 KwH

173 x 5 cents = $8.65 /mo

$103.80 per year

$103.80 is real cash, but at what cost to acquire new machines?

E3 @ $650 w/ 16GB RAM and no drives   vs. $200 5420 w/16GB RAM and no drives  (both used/refurb)

$450 spread there.   That's 4 1/2 years roughly of power money difference.

Power savings on a server matters when you renting colo space and have that nasty per rack cap cramming you.  To a DC, power matters but to lesser small sort of way.   They care about megwatts consumed overall......

That's what is slick about the Dacentec model.  Take off lease gear no enterprise or reseller style company wants = cheap per unit.  Place that out there in the expensive dedicated rental server market then put a cherry on top for the RTO.  Presto whole big audience of folks that no one was addressing.

I've recommended multiple people to Dacentec for the RTOs.  Startups, entrepreneurs, a tech everywhere sort of person. To all the price is right and ownership gives some perception of additional control.  Unsure if Dacentec  supports shipping them drives (they should).

Who else is going to bring me a RTO offer ?

 

[willie]

Where do you get that 5 cent power?  Around here, 1 watt of power is $1 a year, approx, if you can get it from the power company.  In a data center if you're renting space, it's generally a lot more.

 

[AutoSnipe]

All i can say, is it's about time, as not everyone goes to their full term and comes out with a Server. 

This is obviously an option they should have had long ago, and a welcome change. 

But i still love their RTO Options

 

[qps]

@drmike, you can't just look at raw power cost.  There are a lot of other costs involved (power infrastructure, cooling cost, cooling infrastructure, possibly water costs, water infrastructure, maintenance, etc).

Additionally, most data centers aren't setup for more than 5 or 6 kW per cabinet.  If you are in a data center where power density is limited, some of the older servers can force you to put fewer servers per cabinet, which can be problematic if real estate costs are a factor (in markets such as NYC metro).  

 

[KuJoe]

I love my RTO server. I've had it for over 12 months but not changing pricing because I like having the free hardware replacement.

 

[drmike]

@drmike, you can't just look at raw power cost.  There are a lot of other costs involved (power infrastructure, cooling cost, cooling infrastructure, possibly water costs, water infrastructure, maintenance, etc).

Additionally, most data centers aren't setup for more than 5 or 6 kW per cabinet.  If you are in a data center where power density is limited, some of the older servers can force you to put fewer servers per cabinet, which can be problematic if real estate costs are a factor (in markets such as NYC metro).  

I agree... Always use about 2-3x factor on power for the other related overhead and cooling.

Lenoir though, there is no real estate mass inflation and power has to be low there.

It's good to look at lesser tier markets like Lenoir from cost side.  Only downside as customer tends to be backhauling to those other "real" city POPs and the added latency.

 

[rds100]

I agree... Always use about 2-3x factor on power for the other related overhead and cooling.

Lenoir though, there is no real estate mass inflation and power has to be low there.

It's good to look at lesser tier markets like Lenoir from cost side.  Only downside as customer tends to be backhauling to those other "real" city POPs and the added latency.

Well, 2x-3x is a little extreme. Most datacenters would aim for 1.5x or less. 3x would be extremely inefficient.