if you are using serious power and are willing to go super high density (e.g. you are willing to pay the premium for blades) BAIS in santa clara is not a bad deal; north of 10Kw usable for under two grand a month. Santa clara power prices are dramatically better than san jose power prices.
I'm trying to move my own stuff in the direction of santa clara.
Of course, at the low end? I mean, if you are the $200/month customer that is thinking about buying from me? that sort of thing probably makes less difference.
The funny thing about he.net is that if you work out the cost per watt, they are more expensive than most places after negotiation. (on the other hand, he.net gives you the price off the top; most other places go for 30-50% over what the real price is.)
Doing the quick math from what I remember HE's pricing to be, it is cheaper per watt... at my peak I had a full rack and 4.2Kw and only actually using half a rack. It just feels wrong to have to get 3 racks at HE and basically just be 4 servers per rack.
HE just seems at weird economies of scale. Pretty much no cooling, 70-80% of the warehouse empty, and $1/Mbit (they lower now?). If Fremont 2 gets more populated, will it inherit the same power issues? Part of me doesn't want to know.
I've heard good things about SVTIX though... haven't toured or had anything in there, but it seems to have a good rep.
you had 4.2kw in a rack at he.net? I didn't parse that. ah. You must have had 3 racks (or at least 3 15a circuits) as that'd be about that much power usable.
they'd only sell me 1 15a 120v circuit, which is 12a usable; 1.44Kw. Something like $500/month before bandwidth, $347 per Kw.
Compare that to $600/month for 20a 120v at svtix (I'm going to charge you $650, and throw in some bandwidth if you buy from me. If you go direct with the guy that runs the place, maybe you can do better, maybe not, but you'll definitely spend more time negotiating with him than with me.) that's 16a usable, 1.92Kw. $339 or so per Kw retail, including 10Mbps bandwidth.
(I'm not saying my prices are great; I think my prices are a reasonable no haggle deal. compare this to the quote from BAIS in santa clara for 11.5kw.. 6x20a 120v circuits in a single 47u rack... 96a usable, for two grand, that's $174 per Kw. Of course, at that point you are paying extra for higher density servers, though, and the up front price was rather higher.)
The power at Svtix has been solid for me, and the owner of the data center keeps it way colder than it needs to be. Which, I guess, is good marketing? but it costs money; 70-80F isn't going to kill a modern server.
I think that he.net fremont is a fine temperature; 80 degree temps aren't going to hurt your servers. (much above that and you worry) but the power at fremont 1, at least, has been horrible. I have two legacy racks there that I'm trying to get out of, and man, they've gone down three times in the last two years, which is horrible by the standards of such things. Once, the power surge when the power came back toasted one of my servers.
It was miserable. One of those "this is why you should get dedicated servers rather than co-locating your own stuff" experiences. I screwed up the configuration on my PDU, so my stuff didn't come online after the first outage; I was paged and had to leave a party. I fix it, and then the next day (early, if I remember correctly, or maybe it just seemed early) the power went out again, and this time it fried one of my servers, so I had to shuffle in, zombie-like, and swap it out with a spare.
I really like Layer42 in Santa Clara (and in Mountain View); I can probably get you a deal on power/bandwidth there (cofounder of my startup has a cage, etc.)
really? I actually have a customer that wants me to rent them some space and manage their stuff in mountain view, and I'm actively looking in Santa Clara for myself. (In both cases, we're talking small fry, under 10kw.)
I toured Layer42's Mountain View facility and it looked pretty good. Don't remember exactly what the power prices were, but it was comparable to Sacramento. I stuck with Sacramento since it was closer.
huh. I had a bunch of stuff in heraklesdata in sacramento. They quoted 150% of the 20a 120v circuit price for 30a 208v. I told the guy in the rack next to me (who ended up doing better than I did) and he wanted me to quit explaining power to the salesguys; this guy's theory is that one of the bizdev folks didn't know how to calculate power from amps and volts.
It's pretty funny; here in santa clara, people charge about twice (per amp) for 208v as 120v. thus, I end up just getting a whole bunch of 20a 120v circuits. It's silly, but eh, watts are what I actually want.
(208v is slightly more efficient; but an amp of 208v is, well, 208 watts, and two amps of 120v is 240 watts... 208v is not /that/ much more efficient.)
I'm trying to move my own stuff in the direction of santa clara.
Of course, at the low end? I mean, if you are the $200/month customer that is thinking about buying from me? that sort of thing probably makes less difference.
The funny thing about he.net is that if you work out the cost per watt, they are more expensive than most places after negotiation. (on the other hand, he.net gives you the price off the top; most other places go for 30-50% over what the real price is.)