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So you want to build your own data center

(blog.railway.com)
596 points dban | 3 comments | 17 Jan 25 20:41 UTC | HN request time: 1.882s | source
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jonatron ◴[17 Jan 25 22:24 UTC] No.42743915[source]▶
Why would you call colocation "building your own data center"? You could call it "colocation" or "renting space in a data center". What are you building? You're racking. Can you say what you mean?
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chatmasta ◴[18 Jan 25 00:29 UTC] No.42744684[source]▶
It seems a bit disingenuous but it’s common practice. Even the hyperscalers, who do have their own datacenters, include their colocation servers in the term “datacenter.” Good luck finding the actual, physical location of a server in GCP europe-west2-a (“London”). Maybe it’s in a real Google datacenter in London! Or it could be in an Equinix datacenter in Slough, one room away from AWS eu-west-1.

Cloudflare has also historically used “datacenter” to refer to their rack deployments.

All that said, for the purpose of the blog post, “building your own datacenter” is misleading.

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matt-p ◴[18 Jan 25 00:34 UTC] No.42744705[source]▶
The hyperscalers are absolutely not colo-ing their general purpose compute at Equinix! A cage for routers and direct connect, maybe some limited Edge CDN/compute at most.

Even where they do lease wholesale space, you'd be hard pushed to find examples of more than one in a single building. If you count them as Microsoft, Google, AWS then I'm not sure I can think of a single example off the top of my head. Only really possible if you start including players like IBM or Oracle in that list.

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1. fragmede ◴[18 Jan 25 01:41 UTC] No.42745016[source]▶
The best part about adamantly making such a claim is that anybody who knows better also knows better than to break NDA and pull a Warthunder to prove that the CSPs do use colo facilities, so you're not going to get anyone who knows better to disagree with you and say AWS S3 or GCP compute is colo-ed at a specific colo provider.
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2. matt-p ◴[18 Jan 25 02:16 UTC] No.42745213[source]▶
They consume wholesale space, but not retail Colo for general compute, that's all I'm saying.

Equinx is retail, with only a couple of exceptions, although I know they're trying to grow the wholesale side.

3. buildbot ◴[18 Jan 25 09:23 UTC] No.42747010[source]▶
Yup, I assume AWS, Azure and GCP would NDA this info.

That being said, this page amusingly mentions colocation in reference to media destruction: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/compliance/assurance/assur...