You need to know very little of this actually.

EDIT: I will expand on this a bit.

First, the real question you need to know, is, who owns the building your servers will be in? Lots of people claiming to have datacenters are actually renting from someone else, or even sub-leasing from somewhere else, putting you 2 places away from the owner. As much as possible, get into a situation where your monthly payments go directly to the true datacenter owner.

Second, what about the network? Rather than engage in a lot of hand-waving, just find out who they are directly connected to.

Third, do they have both UPS and diesel genset backup for your power? If you are able to physically visit the place, have them show you the physical stuff.

Ignore the "Tier" datacenter and "SAS70" crap, Tier X != reliability and SAS70 is a load of BS (CPAs trying to soak up some consulting dollars - yes, an SAS70 report can only be prepared by a CPA firm...)

SAS70 -- that depends who you sell to I guess. Every major client we have that will put a bit of data on our servers asks about things like SAS70, physical security, environmental factors like power backup, disaster protection etc. etc. Mind you, I can't say for sure they'd not do business with us if we didn't have good answers, but SAS70 is something a big company cares about.

I disagree on the SAS70.

Sure, it's an audit compliance document that does nothing of itself to ensure compliance. But: somebody asked and looked at this stuff, and there's absolutely no reason you can't do as much (or little) inspection as you want. Having been on a few DC audits myself, it's an educational process. And still ... onsite redundant generators, fuel, fuel provider contracts, backup batteries, etc., still mean little if there's a fault somewhere in the system (the past few major outages I've experience directly or have read about all included all of the above, but something somewhere failed to cut in or out appropriately).

Nobody's got anything on the Krell though.

Fair enough, but why can only CPAs perform such audits? It is spending $20K-$40K per audit for essentially nothing of importance. This cost gets passed on to customers.

I don't know that it's CPAs specifically. But it is essentially an audit/control document.

Auditors are trained in, like, you know, auditing.

Which is rather more than just beancounting, preconceptions notwithstanding.

http://sas70.com/sas70_faqs.html ; Question #2 - who can perform/sign off on audits? Only CPAs.

Thanks.

And again: what the audit entails is interviews, requesting and reviewing records, and the like. This doesn't guarantee that a SAS70 site is doing what it says it's doing. But if there are gross inconsistencies in the statements and documents, they should stand out.

From there, use the SAS70 report as a basis for your own questions. There are some very good summaries of things to as at sites such as ServerFault, WebHostingTalk, O'Reilly, and elsewhere.

If the SAS70 report says that all access is controlled, but you find you're able to casually stroll through the main door ... something's not adding up. Dig deeper.

A perfect example of the time-wasting that he says you should avoid.

Maybe for 1 or 2 servers in a quarter rack; but all of these questions and concerns are very salient if you are filling full rack(s) or cages and plan to get your own ASN and such (as any serious internet company should, since otherwise you are not PART OF THE INTERNET). Not getting the answers to these questions is the difference between quite a lot of pain, heartache, and money spent or having everything run (relatively) smoothly.

I have to agree his list is a little unfortunate. It contains all the basic questions that you should ask (responsibilities/transits/power density etc.), but then also rather specialized things (PDUs, RFOs) that are a little over the top when you're going to rent half a rack without significant growth perspective.

That said, the colo should indeed answer all these questions. It's just that most small shops will not be able to make sense of the answers...

If you're a small shop looking to dip a toe into colo then a good summary question to ask is "Who else do you host?". If they have a few big-names to share then they'll probably be good enough for you, too.

Ideally ask for permission to ring up one or two of their reference customers and then actually do that. Colos don't like that very much - but if they outright refuse then you'll know to better look at another one.

Ideally, most of this would be on a provider's website. Unfortunately, the NAPs of the world rely on multi-level sales staffing that present what they think is important(or differentiates them). The smaller colos who envision themselves the equivalent of the NAPs refrain from sharing much info as well and then the consumer ends up in a dim corner of "kinda/sorta generally acceptable commodity(service and quality) level colocation." It is then your burden to translate that to a customer why their LOLcats website is loading slowly for Uncle Bob. SLAs are hard and most providers treat them like a joke. If you're a startup and want to pass the buck, then just go with AWS. There is a solution for everyone.

Yeah, I find this incredibly irritating. Just getting the real price can take months of back and forth. On the low end, the cost of just the negotiation can dominate everything else.

Indeed and yet for someone who has been doing it for years, all of this can be identified in a matter of minutes. In the same vein, most programmers today don't need to know Assembly. It just depends on what you're trying to accomplish.

A little time wasting upfront can save you massive heartbreak down the road. When I started our company we went with a very small startup datacenter for our colo. Imagine my surprise when the colo's HVAC failed and they subsequently went out of business. Having those servers driven halfway across the country while all of our sites were completely down was an absolutely horrible, stressful experience.

These are all great questions - but unless I was going to be entering a MRC (Monthly Recurring Costs) of something north of $50K, I expect most data centers would tell me to piss off. :-) Getting even 90% of that information out of your average data center even with a $50K monthly commit, would be problematic. Most data centers start hand waving when you ask them details about their internal procedures.

But - yes, once you pick up a cabinet, particularly if you are doing any kind of BGP multihoming, pretty much all of those questions need answers (possible exception being their internal procedures - at a certain point you just have to trust them to do their job. )

Very interesting questions. :) If I was a colo provider and I saw these questions, I would run for the hills unless you were ready to lay down some serious dough. ASN numbers and high density for micro vms? I think the guy just wants to host a little website ...

No, it's fine information, if a bit much. But these questions, for the most part, shouldn't matter until you are big enough for these to be important questions but not for you (presumably a founder).

>What's your ASN number(s)? Carrier neutral facility? How many connectivity providers are present in the data center? Does data center run BGP over these providers? IP Transit providers - Bandwidth Pricing? Overage pricing? Straight $mbps/month? Who manages your network? Ip allotment? Assignment procedure? High density for micro vms(Heroku style)? 200 VMs per host meaning 200IPs per vm. Swip/rwhois updates on assignments? Cross-connects? Cross connect pricing? Charges? Local loop(last mile connectivity) charges? BGP support? Is our traffic on a private/separate v-lan from your other customers?

If you are spending more than, say, two grand a month on co-lo, you probably want different providers for your rack and your bandwidth. Aside from the ease of moving providers to keep costs down, usually the 'house bandwidth' is often 10x market rate. I just got a quote the other day (I only need a little bandwidth, 100Mbps at this new place) and they wanted like $10/Mbps for single homed cogent. $0.50-$1.00/meg is market for single homed Cogent.)

Most of those are reasonable questions, though most salespeople won't know how to answer them. (and many of them, like 'local loop' charges will only make sense to telco guys. In data centers, we call them 'cross connect fees' and they are still important, but much less of a big deal than local loop charges when you are getting a telco line from someone off site)

Note, all of those questions should be asked of the bandwidth provider, not the rack provider. except the cross connect fee - this is what the datacenter/rack provider charges for a connection between you and a transit provider in the building. Sometimes it's one time, but it's usually monthly, and scales directly with how nice the data centre thinks it is. It's $50 one time for copper at he.net, but can be like $300/month+ at a coresite location for fiber.

Note, every bandwidth provider in the building is going to have different answers to all those questions, and even within one provider, the answers will be different based on what class of customer you are or how much you can pay.