Hosted Solutions - Looking for some opinions

I manage a fairly small data center in the central US. We have roughly 30 servers including vmware, san storage, hp servers, cisco equipment, etc. The companies' owners are looking at future acquisitions as they are becoming more of an equity firm. We're aiming to host our data center in the cloud and moving from PPTP to an MPLS solution between sites. An environment that will be a lot more flexible with changes associated with an equity firm. Not to mention the disaster recovery.

With this, we are doing a complete cost comparison between hosting our own data center and the offers placed on the table. Only problem is this can take upwards of 2 to 3 months to finalize a single quote. To save some time, I'd like to hear from other companies that have done the same.

Note: We will only have to co/lo two servers (our servers sitting in their racks), the rest can be virtual.
Note 2: Do not need your annual rate as it obviously differs, however, if you have some input such as, "They were the cheapest of the lot", that'd be great.

A) What company do you use?

What is your opinion (general response time, professionalism, etc)?
C) Where are they located (don't have to be too specific, just a general region)?

Thanks in advance.

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shodown

kotan wrote: »

I manage a fairly small data center in the central US. We have roughly 30 servers including vmware, san storage, hp servers, cisco equipment, etc. The companies' owners are looking at future acquisitions as they are becoming more of an equity firm. We're aiming to host our data center in the cloud and moving from PPTP to an MPLS solution between sites. An environment that will be a lot more flexible with changes associated with an equity firm. Not to mention the disaster recovery.

With this, we are doing a complete cost comparison between hosting our own data center and the offers placed on the table. Only problem is this can take upwards of 2 to 3 months to finalize a single quote. To save some time, I'd like to hear from other companies that have done the same.

Note: We will only have to co/lo two servers (our servers sitting in their racks), the rest can be virtual.
Note 2: Do not need your annual rate as it obviously differs, however, if you have some input such as, "They were the cheapest of the lot", that'd be great.

A) What company do you use?
What is your opinion (general response time, professionalism, etc)?
C) Where are they located (don't have to be too specific, just a general region)?

Thanks in advance.

I recommend using someone else's data center and not building out your own. I have only seen 1 data center go bad in since 2008 and that was due to a huge HVAC failure. Building out your own with redundancy can be a pain in the rear.

To answer your specific questions

1. There are too many to mention. I have worked with AT&T, and Verizon in there co-lo's which were actually owned by other companies in the area, so your best bet is to see what they offer.

2. Depending on your SLA there is no responce time. If your stuff is not working you need to fix it. If its just a power issue or a plug in issue you can work with the data center on there. But there main job is just to provide connectivity and power, its your job to keep yourself working. They offer a range of services so its best to check

3. They are all over the US. Rates depend on the connectivity and how many options you want. Most Data Centers offer a MPLS service where you can buy circuits and IP's from them. Some even offer Hosted firewall and routing solutions.

To be honest you didn't give us enough info to go off. And if you are talking cloud it seems like you mean private cloud as you will still be using your own servers, and not using someone else's servers.

Iristheangel

I know I'm going to come across as extremely bias here, but I work at a provider. If you PM me your e-mail address, I can show one of the guys in charge this post and have them e-mail you pricing information, SLA times and references.

kotan

My apologies if I didn't provide enough information. What we're looking at today is moving our vmware environment into a private cloud. Essentially, we'll be paying the provider to rent their resources such as memory, CPU, and hard drive space.

They are responsible for their vmware environment and I'll be responsible for our infrastructure as a whole. I'm also responsible for all of the applications running on said servers. When I refer to their response time, I mean when I'm requesting more memory, needing a new VM spun up, requesting restores from backups, etc. Things I cannot control.

Does this clear things up?

Iristheangel, I will pm you.