When will more servers be available (new ones, not bargain basement ones) and what do you expect the server specs to be?

After intense negotiations Robert and i have concluded a deal to allow him to utilise redundant space on my property for imperial 2. The very latest in Pine Sheds is at this very moment being constructed to house a state of the art data center. I picked up the extension reel and surge protector from argos this morning and will have the desk fan and 56k line installed tomorrow.

I would imagine the new servers will be available when the new dc is ready, specs, should be mid range p4s, from compaq. as for the dc, it takes time to secure a location and lay in the fibre. robert mentioned a link between dc2 and dc1 rather then seperate fibre being laid into dc2 this would allow for greater variation in fibre but also less redunancy. and youd need a serious link between the two. 6.2 gbps and rising. 3xOc48 or something right?

sorry i cant give a firm date, were all guessing, and i doubt an announcement will be made for a while yet, altho mid oct was pegged as a date for releasing info on the new product line from compaq.

what would be better is to have new fibers going to the dc2, and have a link between dc1 and dc2 where they can also share the two fibers coming in, so they would have 2 places for fiber to go

Definately. Yes, it'd be more expensive then just linking dc2 and dc1.. but if you have a single road out of dc2 (The fiber to dc1) and something goes wrong with that link.. you're going to have an entire dc full of upset customers.

dc2 definately would need some other route out to take in a failure.

i guess it all comes down to how you do it, there are pros and cos in each case. if dc1 has all the fiber routed into it, and dc2 is a spur with redundant connections to dc1 then both dc's will have a greater array of fiber to deal with dos attacks outages etc, but any probs in dc1 wipe out dc2 for definate. no more pliars being dropped then
personally if they could ensure the link is redundant and reliable i would probably rather see them have them linked, that way dc 1 could have say 12 gbps of fiber from diverse providers making it better able to withstand a dos then two dc's with 6 gbps.

As ity turns out, for now, there will be but one DC. We have negotiated an expansion of the current facility to add an additional 16,000 sqft and have the ability for an aditional 24k beyond that. This will allow a bigger staff in the current facility.

We are CONSIDERING, very seriously, offering extended "emergency support". It would be priced fairly high and would operate as a seperate department with a seperate staff but provide emergency support/immediate support for an additional fee. There are many details to work out and this post will likely come as a surprise to most RS employees.

The next generation server will make its debut later this month. It will not carry a $1 set up fee nor AND it is likely to be priced in the $109-$129 catagory. BUT, when you see the specs, you will see it is worth every penny. (OK OK it will be a P4 system but not like anything else we have ever offered before).

There will also be a new Celeron based offering at the $99 price point offered later this month. (But it will also carry a set up fee as well)

We are working on automating the provisioning of Urchin and will have details on how that will work. (There may be a small fee for us to install the software key if this had to be done manually) We must comply with their rules and are working to observe their rules while using our automation.

More later. Headsurfer has been very busy putting all of this tonether. Thanks to everyone for the continued business.

Robert

Any chance Of offering co-lo any time soon?

Thanks
jtr

Colo is a back-burner to having sufficient space for our own operations.

Robert

Sweet! Thanks for the update, HS

Too bad 1U chassis's aren't as cheap as those WBL ones that you see taking up row's and row's in the pictures... Could of fit a lot more in the same amount of space...

I never really understood why you can get a cheap mid tower case for like $40, but a 1U or 2U chassis runs over $200 when they are a lot less metal and not as flashy... sometimes not even including a power supply!

Because its not in the commercial industry... not nearly as much demand as mid-tower cases i'd imagine... Anything for commercial/industrial is usually 5-10x the price unfortunately...

I sell Rittal server enclosures/cabinets and they're not that much metal, but they are expensive.

i would imagine its economies of scale combined with the fact when your selling a b2b only product theres usually a massive premium. like when our old lab got a water heater to go above the sink to replace an old one. 1200 quid for a glorified kettle with thermostat. with fitting from kveaner on top. same thing from b and q is about 80 quid. why cos its being sold to a business. not always the case, but its an industrial grade component, and the price reflects the higher grade materials and the lower production runs.
and the fact that occasionally certain labs get told they can only buy from certain companies, said companies knowing this charge a damn fortune for a kettle. /rant

Very very great news!

I love the P4 whitebox server I have now at RackShack (P4 1.7, 1 GB ram, 2 60 gb hard drives, intel motherboard) and I've been holding off on getting a second server until I can get one with equal specs. I think if RackShack offers some sweet servers like the special P4's you offered in the past, they will fly off the shelves. Then again, all your servers fly off the shelf and onto the racks

Anyway, thanks very much for the update, and very happy to hear that great things are in store as always.

Thank you for the update! Will you be going back to the old RS business model of low setup fees and monthly payments with lower-end (compared to your new next-gen servers) once the new datacenters are up? My P4 1.7GHz boxes are superb; the best values you have. I really hope you offer similar deals again and not just high-end servers.

if you read what robert posted youll see he mentioned new celerons in the low end price bracket announced slightly later then the p4 deals.

We're taking this week or 10 day slow down to reevaluate pricing on options as memory prices have fallen, implement Urchin asap, evaluate a premium support offering, and look at new products.

We have ordered 2 new drive duplicators that will speed the duplication process along from 2 hours for 8 drives, down to 3 minutes. This will free up a couple of positions to help in new areas.

We're also looking at ways to make reboots more efficient and also looking at ways to possible complete every rtestore request in a shorter time period .. possible as short as 30 minutes to one hour.

On reboots, we're working to look at ways to improve the process of notifying customers of the status by implementing barcodes on reboot requests that get printed and scanning them as they are assigned to techs. Then scanned again as the reboot is commenced.

Lots of ideas. We've been sooooo busy, some of these things have gotten puished to teh back burner. Now they are a top priority.

Robert

Celerons don't work well for my purposes.

Hi Robert,

This emergency support service - I am interested and hope ya could answer a few questions

Will this cover modifications to the box, say if I installed something and it went pare shaped would I get help by a tech to resolve the issue?

Will emergency support be a monthly fee or per incident? - I think a per incident fee might be a better idea!

~ Adam

Happy to hear this, I have been working for about a year with RackShack servers (now I own a duron, a XP, a Compaq and a P4) and I can say I am satisfied with the service you provide, expecially regarding the prices.

1) I think celerons aren't so bad, ok they are low end servers but in most cases are enough, the only thing I can blame is their 512MB ram limit, that's why I never purchased one of them despite their good hard-drives and preferred duron white boxes instead. If you are planning to offer another Celeron package please provide an hardware which can support at least 1GB, maybe offering less capable (and fast) hard drives, I think most people will appreciate it.

2) The transfers between servers inside your network shouldn't be metered, I think this would make easier the work for many of us who are running server clusters, very big websites with a dedicated mysql server or just who wants to offer a daily backup to their customers (adding a second hard drive is a solution not so effective). You can maybe add a setup-fee or whatever you think would be more appropriate to enable this feature.

Thank you

All sounds great!

P4 3.2Ghz with 1Gb ECC DDR RAM! and 4x 80Gb 7200RPM HDDs running on RAID 0,1 *drools*

one can dream

excellent news on the new options:)

mushrew, if the celerons dont suit your requirements, pay more money for a new p4?? rackshack are cheap enough, dont bleat because they cant give you a p4 for celeron money.

adam nice to see you about matey

ig you forgot cpanel

The Intel 815 chipset is the best for the Celerons and the limit on memory. The MBs that we are using use the 815 chipset and these MBs seem to be pretty good.

The P4s can get additional memory and max out at 1.5. We'll be look at this option as well.

Bandwidth- we track by the total port utilization so the scenario mentioned does not work for us. Also, we have only 1 nic in each machine so this is a limit as well.

Server monitoring-
our programmers are working on this system once again and believe we have it fixed. We'll be testing over the next few weeks to ensure it and then relaunch this service with some new notification options.

MRTG Port/server-
Up to now this has been a manual process so we had to physically reinspect each month each IP/port that we billed bandwidth on. Our programmers are finishing a new system that will poll a port using SMTP to identify the IP assigned and check the IP/port assignment automatically each day. Even if a server was moved on the switch but the IP remained the same, the MRTG would automatically follow. Other changes are in the works as well.

LOts of new and improved things coming.

Oh... *faints*

Wow, great job Headsurfer, it looks like there may be some exciting things finally coming to RS since the new gige links

Excellent news Headsurfer

Good to ear !

I wouldn't agree with this suggestion at all - hard drives are one of the most critical aspects of a good server, and at the same time the difference between a bad IDE hard drive and a fast reliable one is only a few bucks. Definitely not the place to skimp on a server.

I'm not good at visualizing by sqft, could somone say how many servers will go into this new addition? that would put it more into the way i can understand it good

bout 5000 servers.
imperial was is 30k ft, and maxed at just over 10k servers. so roughly 5-6k servers.
umm what exactly is this extension? i was under the impression you rented the building, do you only rent one floor or something? and youve increased this to renting another floor? or something similar. who else is in the facility? you can guess the general line of questioning

sounds like they are doing an addon like physically building onto it or am i wrong?

thats what i thought, but hell even with serious money theres only so many corners you can cut, it takes time to errect a building like that and kit it out, you need designs, planning permission, prepare the site, build it, kit out the inside to dc standards, this is not a few months work. the buildings would have to be there already.

I know HDD are critical, expecially as regards the reliability, I didn't mean, of course, to use cheap hard drives, but I think a server with a regular 40GB HDD and 1GB of RAM would outperform a server with a 60GB 7200 RPM HDD and 512MB for many applications.

AFAIK if you have a small or medium sized website but with lots of hits (and concurrent httpd processes) you could get better results with this configuration, expecially if you aren't serving streaming content or similar. My duron with 1GB of ram used to outperform my Compaq P4 with only 512MB of ram under these circumstances.

Yes, if it was possible I would choose both , but if it's not I'd rather get 512MB of additional RAM instead of 1800 additional RPM/sec, this is of course just my opinion

HeadSurfer,
Whats the chances of you guys offering other OS's also when you start offering these new boxes ??

I would love to see you guys offering a debian system, (I cant find any other hosting company offering a debian box).

also any chance you could provide us with a little more info on these new P4 systems you will be offering ??

will they have a reasonably cheap setup fee or will it be a few hundred box.

I LOVE the service you guys provide, you are doing very well.

ALSO on another front, if you guys had a seperate data centre (like in another state / country) I would want to get a box there also. Is this on the cards down the track somewhere ?

thanks

The difference in price between a 5400 and a 7200 rpm hard drive is likely 10-20 dollars, and I'd rather pay that as a one time setup fee than have the slower hardware still paying $100/month. I think both should be possible, but of course that's my opinion (my first server as I said is one of the P4 special whitebox servers with two 60 GB 7200 rpm hard drives and 1 GB of RAM. At the time I had to decide whether to go with no setup or pay the setup to get this very nice server. I am so glad that I paid the setup and got a server that I really love having.)

Wow, I remember the awesome p4 boxes with 600GB of bandwidth (if I'm not mistaken), unfortunately I wasn't fast enough to get one of those

I hope there will be some offers like this in future, I'd rather pay a higher setup fee instead of a monthly quota too, I think this generally depends on how often you replace old hardware with new one. However if you get a very good hardware you won't even consider to replace it.

Right... They are actually renting space inside a preexisting building. Obviously though, they didn't rent the entire thing when they started the Imperial project. It's pretty standard actually for the hosting company (at least for smaller ones, and yes, RS is "smaller") to not own their own building.

This is definately great news though and I can't wait to see what servers Robert and the team bring out.

is there any ETA on when extensions to the current DC will be completed, and when these killer boxes are released?

In another thread, Robert mentioned something like the end of this week or the beginning of next. They will start with Urchin as the top priority, and then the new boxes and automation of other services.

ta