[BBLISA] co-location

[Stephen Reppucci]

On Wed, 31 Mar 2004, Tabor J. Wells wrote:

> I disagree with the assessment on hosting.com's DC. There are far better
> DCs in Boston including InterNAP in Somerville, L3 in Cambridge, Switch &
> Data in Waltham and Cable and Wireless (now Savvis) in Waltham. All of these
> facilities are much better than the ALGX DC I toured a few weeks ago.

I agree with Tabor's assessment of hosting.com.

I was the person responsible for moving boston.com there, and lived to
rue the decision. The data center was OK, but their NOC people,
especially the first tier, were horrendous.

Example: We were in the cage adding a couple of servers one day, when a
NOC person in search of a clue wandered in, announcing that she had
received a phone call FROM A USER claiming that they couldn't access
boston.com from their home.  The clue-seeker told us she had come down
to "reboot the boston.com server". I shudder to think what switches she
might have tried to push had we not happened to have been there.

Another example: They had a log book in their lobby, accessible to
anyone who wanted to wander in, where you were supposed to sign in and
WRITE IN YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER.  I always put a fake number there,
but one day one of their Barney Fife clones was on the ball and checked
my name against the info I had to supply when we signed up and realized
I hadn't written my correct SS# in. He wouldn't let me in the facility,
and they couldn't understand why I would have an objection to having my
SS# exposed like this.

Shortly after we moved from BBN to Harvardnet, mainly to get away from
the shoddy procedures in place there, they had a mass hiring of ex
BBN'ers, so we ended up with exactly the same NOC people we were moving
away from. I also had the misfortune of getting assigned a "Customer
Care Rep" who (I later came to find out) was sleeping with some high
level VP there.  When I chewed her out about some of the crap service we
were experiencing, she had her consort phone my boss, and report me as
being "unreasonable". Didn't help that my boss was a duplicitous
marketing droid with no grasp of tech issues, and that Harvardnet was
running huge advertising campaigns with b.com at that time...

I don't believe boston.com has moved out of that facility though,
although I haven't spoken with people there in 6 months or so.
They also claim to be one of the only facilities in the area that is
supplied by two different power grids; I don't know if this claim is
accurate anymore.

The site in Billerica (was WorldCom when I viewed it, but is now C&W, I
think??) was by far the best location I've visited, but it was much more
expensive for what I needed.

You also might want to check out Navisite, up in Andover. I have two
small colo sites that I support there. The nuts and bolts of the service
are good, although their CS leaves a lot to be desired also (though they
have been shown signs of improvement recently.)

Good luck.
<Steve>

-- 
Steve Reppucci                                       sgr at logsoft.com |
Logical Choice Software                          http://logsoft.com/ |
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