[BBLISA] co-location

[Mark Allyn]

Folks:

Here is what I remember from my days at
Genuity/GTE/Whatever-the-name-is-now:

Web hosting was in scatteted data centers throughout the contry.
The New England location was at the Concord Ave (Fawcet Street) facility.

The other facilities that I can remember were in Cantully, VA; Palo
Alto, CA; Los Angeles, CA; Phoenix, AR; and some others that I can't
pull out of the fog in my brain right now.

All of these centers had a pretty nice common architecture. Each
had its own emergency power supplies. Each had it's own disaster
recovery facility. Each had it's own 'touch staff'.

System/Database admin was centralized in Cambridge and Palo Alto,
with Cambridge the Mother and Palo Alto the Daughtor. I worked
in the Mother facility in Cambridge (being the Mother as we had
the team leads; established policies; and performed the majority
of the software installs. The Daughtor facility in Palo Alto provided
'west coast' time coverage and absorbed the crews who had worked for
a company (I think, BARRNET) that we absorbed.

Things were pretty cool. Each machine had its console port attached
to terminal servers. There were remote control power switches. That
meant that I could sit in Cambridge (or at home) and flip the power
and watch the console of a machine in Phoenix.

As far as I can remember, the Fawcet data center was not considered
a 'temporary' facility. This, in fact, at least as of the time I
left, was kind of the 'Mother' of all of the data centers. I think
it was the largest of all of them. It was pretty well built and
had good backup power and security. It was well laid out; with
racks nicely labeled. It usualy took me only minutes to find
a machine. There was decent room in the front/rear of the racks
to do work.

I did enjoy working with the touch staff of that data center. They
seem to be conscious of the facility and it's ease of use by us
system admins.

I don't know what you all mean by CO-LO, but these machines were
fully administered by us. The customer did not have/nor did they
want the root or DBA passwords. There were a few exceptions, but
they may have had some sudo access (especialy for initial setup
of their machines) but they gave that up once their systems were
in full production. All system admin tickets were taken care of
by us. We would be the ones who got paged; not the customer, if
something happens in the middle of the nights. The machines
are owned by the facilty and rented to the customers. The customer
is presented with a fully loaded machine that is ready for their
data and cgi's.

I've been gone since 2000. I don't know what's happened since.

If all is the same as it was then; and if I had the bucks to host
my web site (www.clearplastic.com) at a full service facility,
I would consider this facility. Having been paged numerous times
for other customers; I would love to sleep, knowing that others
will be taking care of my web site.

Truly

Cleara
(Mark Allyn)