New to colocation... what to look for?

[Conky]

I've been looking for used servers on eBay for a personal, non-commercial project though have some questions about choosing a colo provider...

• Is there a good tool or resource to calculate potential power usage? I am not for sure what the power usage for a server would be.
• Do datacenters let you store spare parts there? Do some sell them to you? I'd hate to have a failure and have to mail them something, because that could take days. Would be nice if I could ship an extra drive, stick of ram, fan, etc so in the event it was needed they could swap it out with one of those. If I wanted my server back, I'd want the extras back too.
• If I send a server to a DC tomorrow, and then in 6 months send in another one... these two servers could be on two opposite sides of the building. If I wanted to directly network these two servers, would I be responsible for providing the network cabling?

I'm just looking for a small server, nothing real beefy. Will be used for Proxmox and some random testing/learning. I doubt it will use a lot of power but I want to know how to calculate it's power usage. Since its for testing will probably use 1 drive, and keep a spare inside the machine incase the first one dies or something. Curious about the networking though, especially if I ever want to add another server later. Maybe it depends on the datacenter?

 

[matteob]

If you need only two server, i suggest you not going to used hardware. What happen in case of hw fault?

You should be cheaper going to dedicated server provider or join in a cloud enviroment. 

In my opinion, nowadays colocation is usefull only for non standard hardware or special requirements or big installation.

Just my opinion

 

[AshleyUK]

• Is there a good tool or resource to calculate potential power usage? I am not for sure what the power usage for a server would be.

Do you have the exact spec's of the servers in mind and we can help give you a rough idea.

• Do datacenters let you store spare parts there? Do some sell them to you? I'd hate to have a failure and have to mail them something, because that could take days. Would be nice if I could ship an extra drive, stick of ram, fan, etc so in the event it was needed they could swap it out with one of those. If I wanted my server back, I'd want the extras back too.

Most data centres will let you store spare's in a separate environment, however if your only racking a small amount of servers they may charge you a small storage fee.

• If I send a server to a DC tomorrow, and then in 6 months send in another one... these two servers could be on two opposite sides of the building. If I wanted to directly network these two servers, would I be responsible for providing the network cabling?

That would be down to the data centre and if they have fully racked the rack your first server is in, however most with a small amount of downtime would be able to de-rack your first server and move it alongside the new server. However again depending on the DC they may have a Virtual Private network setup across their entire DC which resolves the need for your servers to be "local" to each other.

 

[notFound]

I would have to agree with Matteo, used servers isn't a great idea because it'd probably be more prone to failure sooner. Now if you had a dedicated server which was rented most providers would take care of hardware replacements for you and in a good timeframe, with co-location that will be more difficult if it's only 1-2U's. 

It really depends how flexible your datacenter is, if you have a good relationship they'll probably allow you to store parts in one of their rooms or such. Personally even though my datacenter is fairly large and reputable I wouldn't store my parts in their rooms, with so many staff it's bound to be moved/misplaced so I tend to keep all my parts in a box at the bottom of one of the racks.

Again, this point would differ from DC to DC but generally in shared i.e. 1U, 2U etc. co-location contracts they tend to put that they will manage the cabling for networking. It wouldn't be hard to get your DC to put both your servers on the same VLAN if they have a reasonable setup, there are many ways they can do this.

All of it really depends on the datacenter and how flexible they are.

 

[VMBox]

I've been looking for used servers on eBay for a personal, non-commercial project though have some questions about choosing a colo provider...

• Is there a good tool or resource to calculate potential power usage? I am not for sure what the power usage for a server would be.
• Do datacenters let you store spare parts there? Do some sell them to you? I'd hate to have a failure and have to mail them something, because that could take days. Would be nice if I could ship an extra drive, stick of ram, fan, etc so in the event it was needed they could swap it out with one of those. If I wanted my server back, I'd want the extras back too.
• If I send a server to a DC tomorrow, and then in 6 months send in another one... these two servers could be on two opposite sides of the building. If I wanted to directly network these two servers, would I be responsible for providing the network cabling?

I'm just looking for a small server, nothing real beefy. Will be used for Proxmox and some random testing/learning. I doubt it will use a lot of power but I want to know how to calculate it's power usage. Since its for testing will probably use 1 drive, and keep a spare inside the machine incase the first one dies or something. Curious about the networking though, especially if I ever want to add another server later. Maybe it depends on the datacenter?

Personally, I'd say look into getting a rented box from someone...

Minimum you'll pay on per U on Less than 1/4 or even 1/2 Rack is around $50 per U with bandwidth/power/space.

You can pick up a dedicated server from Cloudshards for about that... Unless you're colo'ing like a Dual Hexa core with 8-12 drives and 32GB + RAM I'd say renting is much more beneficial to the end user, even some of the E3 configs you see as they only have 4 drives would be better rented than colo'd on a per U basis.

 

[drmike]

Every year I review the colo vs. rental game.

I still lean towards colo'ing gear.   Same old reasons, big disk (2TB drives), multiples of such, proper RAID controller, these days a few big SSDs (480GB?), as always large RAM (32GB or more).

Yeah, you can rent something reasonable.  Hard to find large RAM boxes at little money where you can spend for colo'ing 1-2U ---- $30-100/month.  Impossible to find a server I need at little money.

32GB of RAM + 2-4 2TB drives + 2 SSDs... plus a RAID controller... plus.... yeah that will cost quite a bit each month.

Folks need to remember, credit and financing still does exist.  Any provider selling dedicated boxes is leveraging such (usually).   Big exception are folks with the 5420's and 5520's which can be had for nearly nothing.   You to can finance a new server and have it be all new and such and pay a reasonable monthly hardware payment.

Me, I still buy well worn servers - at least from when released date until when I buy them.  Tons of off lease gear that never was used.  As far as something breaking, meh.   I've had my share of stuff go bad, much of it was under warranty and annoyed me (drives).   I've had fans go, that's something that should be scheduled maintenance on a server though and my own damn fault for not tracking that proactively.

Hardware tends not to fail like the server fairies want us to believe.   Things have become much more reliable and long lived.  Drives though, still the weak point.  Plan accordingly.

POWER USAGE:  This is a matter of really, with modern gear, 1A or 2A.  Most servers are there.  So question is what is base colo and what is +1A more costing?

PARTS STORAGE:  Good luck with that.   Small commits are in shared racks.   No space for your extras.  Places hate the inventory of such out of rack storing it.   Might be cheaper/more sane just to ship a second server.

TWO SERVERS and PROXIMITY / CROSS CONNECT -   that's something to be coordinated with your DC.  Ideally, they move your old gear to rack next to the new gear and can throw you a VLAN on the switch to communicate - ideally for free.

 

[SkylarM]

MOST used/refurb gear really isn't that bad. Have bought a bunch of servers, Dual L5520's, Dual L5639's, X5650's, X5660's, so forth with no issue. Only thing we've ever had fail on us was hard drives, and that's new hard drives purchased separately from a different vendor. I will agree though, if you're looking at something small like a Dual L5520, 32GB ram, 4 1tb drives, it'd likely end up cheaper and more practical to rent the hardware. If you're after more drives, larger sums of RAM, so forth then it would end up cheaper to buy hardware and colocate it (in the long run).

 

[Conky]

Thanks everyone. This would be more for learning than anything. I can have the server in my home and get it ready before I ship it and it won't be super powerful or anything that'd I would want to rent.