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OurHistory / ProspectiveHostsQuoteRequest

1. Letter to prospective service providers

This page contains the newest version of the letter that we will send to prospective hosting providers, as well as older versions and discusion about the letter we will send. Read the section marked Newest version to see the text that we are (almost) ready to send to potential colo providers, pending approval from the broader member base of Hcoop, Inc., or sections below that if you are curious.

1.1. Newest version of letter to prospective colocation providers, fresh out of the oven

To whom it may concern:

Our Internet hosting cooperative HCoop, Inc. is looking to colocate some servers. Could you give us a price quote on a package that would include all of the following? We are a registered non-profit corporation, so we'd love to hear about any discounts that you extend to non-profits.

We're interested in owning the servers that we host, and we'd also like some kind of hardware support contract, where as part of the package you would fix/replace hardware that failed. We're open to the possibility of buying the hardware through you to make this more feasible. Also, we're flexible on many of the details of our plans, so suggestions based on what you've known to work well in your environment are much appreciated.

Finally, if you do not sell hardware directly with a support contract, we're interested in your "remote hands" rate, as well as the range of hardware that you would be willing to support.

Thanks!

Justin S. Leitgeb

HCoop, Inc. Representative

1.2. Older (deprecated) letter versions and discussion for the curious

In general, I think this sounds too corporate-ese for my tastes; too many information-free but bulky phrases like "please advise us," and a lack of getting to the point in describing exactly what it is we want to buy. There are also some cases where you list a number of options of how they might handle a particular need of ours where I think it would be more appropriate to stay more high-level about our requirements and let them tell us what they offer or suggest. As far as factual differences from my initial draft, I only see the estimate of total rack space utilization. Did you write this new version because you had problems with the style of the original? --AdamChlipala

[Adam, this really isn't that important to me, so if you want to send out the original that you wrote, it's fine. It was a well-worded and concise letter and I'm sure that it would do the job. I was just trying to help out by updating the draft. I think that our different versions were somewhat due to our notion of the intended audience to which we were writing. I couldn't imagine that someone who could think architecturally would be receiving our email; rather I assumed a business person who might understand different "packages" would see it and try to plug available offerings into that framework. That is how I wrote my email without mention of web servers and file servers, etc. Based on my experience, colo providers don't sell hardware anyway (of course, I'm sure there are exceptions), so I reduced the bulleted section in your message to a couple of paragraphs describing how our needs would translate to the three things that colo providers will offer -- rack space, bandwidth and on-site support. Finally, I wanted to figure out how they could support our backup needs. For me, this translated to something that is off-line, so I included that exact phrase. This is because many colo providers might just rsync our data to another server and call that a "backup". I wanted to be specific that our data security needs required something off-line (usually requiring tape), and that shortcuts weren't acceptable -- even an rsync to another network is still susceptible to a major attack, and a hacker who gains root to our system will surely see the connections being made to the backup server.

At any rate, we're both trying to accomplish the same thing... we need to move towards another site and a new architecture, so anything that goes in that direction is great progress. Let's send out the original text that you wrote. I'll volunteer myself to put together a spreadsheet weighing the pros and cons of the different providers, and will update the wiki with responses from each as we receive them so that we can vote on a colo provider and figure out the specifics of server hardware and configuration based on our collective decision. --JustinLeitgeb]

[I strongly prefer talking to technically-minded people about our options here. I would hope that any colo provider worth its name would have people answering e-mail who at least know how to forward an e-mail like the one I suggested originally to someone who understands it. Perhaps we want anyway to avoid huge faceless providers that wouldn't extend us this courtesy.

I've made some small edits to my original below, and I'm up for considering it the official version to send. --AdamChlipala]

1.3. Older draft #2

To Whom It May Concern:

Our Internet hosting cooperative, HCoop, Inc., is looking to colocate new servers and networking equipment. Currently, we are looking to colocate three servers, a switch (unless your facility provides fast ethernet connections with your racks), and a hardware firewall. We estimate that our space needs will be approximately 7U initially, with room to expand as our needs grow in the future. Could you please send us quotes for the following based on your current pricing:

Additionally, we will need some support for our servers and networking equipment in the event that they become unavailable to remote connections. Please advise us on the level of hands-on support that you are able to provide, along with your current service rates or contracts that you may have available. If you sell specific hardware that accompanies this local support, we would appreciate hearing about specific server configurations and network equipment that you sell to colocation customers.

Finally, we are interested in any information on backup services that you may provide in your facility. Specifically, we will need to have periodic back-ups to a location that is secure in the event of a system attack. Please advise us as to if you have centralized, off-line backups on your own network, if you would be able to provide tape rotation services from our machines, or if you currently use another method for helping your customers to achieve this level of data security.

Thank you for your time. We are looking forward to reviewing your response and the possibility of forming an ongoing relationship with your organization.

XXX some member of hcoop

HCoop.net Representative

1.4. Older draft #1

To whom it may concern:

Our Internet hosting cooperative, HCoop, Inc., is looking to colocate new servers and networking equipment. Currently, we are looking to colocate three servers, a switch (unless your facility provides fast ethernet connections with your racks), and a hardware firewall. We estimate that our space needs will be approximately 7U initially, with room to expand as our needs grow in the future. Could you please send us quotes for the following based on your current pricing:

Probably include serial console in the list of hardware. --AdamChlipala

What model or type of serial console are you thinking about? I don't know much about these devices, and looking on google I didn't see anything... are we sure that we need this, or can we just depend on the colo provider to bail us out if something gets really screwed up? Basically what are we looking for - a device that routes the RS232 interface over TCP/IP so that we can see it remotely? --JustinLeitgeb

Question: How do you see these 7U being used? I was expecting more like 4U for servers and no more than 1U for all other equipment. --AdamChlipala

I was thinking about 2 x 1U servers, plus 1 x 2U fileserver, plus 1 x 1U ethernet switch, plus 1 x 1U firewall. Then I added one to bring us to 7U because this seems to be a common offering, e.g., he.net gives 7U standard with their base plan -- JustinLeitgeb

Additionally, we may be interested in purchasing our new hardware through your company, if you sell hardware that you would be able to support. If this is the case, we would appreciate information on different server configurations that you offer, as well as pricing for networking equipment, such as switches and firewalls that you frequently use in your environment. (Being more specific about the kind of hardware support we're looking for couldn't hurt. --AdamChlipala)

What kind of support are we looking for? Feel free to edit the text ;) -- JustinLeitgeb

Otherwise, if you only offer "remote hands" services, we would be interested in hearing about your hourly rates, as well as the range of hardware that you are able to support. In the case that we do need technical support for hardware, how soon are you able to respond to requests?

Finally, we are interested in any information on backup services that you may provide in your facility. We want a comprehensive file back-up set-up. We can handle most of this ourselves using the fileserver we want to include, but we will also need less frequent back-ups of all of our data to locations that couldn't be compromised without physical access, even if an attacker managed to get root access on any of our servers. We're hoping that you can provide such an off-site back-up service.

Thank you for your time. We are looking forward to looking over any information that you are able to send us.

XXX some member of hcoop

HCoop.net Representative

1.5. Other comments about our quote request

[JustinLeitgeb -- Remember that the 4 x 500 GB drives on the fileserver are SATA, so they should be cheap. I was thinking about 3 active plus one hot-spare to increase redundancy in a critical part of our infrastructure. Remember that if we started with RAID 1 we would have to delete all data with a 3Ware escalade card to go to a different RAID type such as RAID 5. Perhaps we could consider adding another RAID 1 set later, though... ideas welcome! Also, I wrote a second draft below, which would give us an overview of basic rates, along with a request for information on hardware pricing if available.

AdamChlipala -- I still think that 500 GB of storage space is an overestimate for the near future, but I guess we'll see what price we can get.]

[JustinLeitgeb -- Actually since we had these 3 drives in a RAID 5 configuration, it would have given us 1 Terabyte of storage. We could trim it back to something in RAID 1. SATA RAID 1 would cost about $900 or so to give us 500 GB of available space, based on current costs of 3Ware Escalade controllers and disks, or maybe about $1200 total to buy us the next controller in the Escalade series which has more available ports to add another RAID 1 array later. Or we can spend about the same amount and get less space, but with all SCSI components, which are better tested. I could see benefits and disadvantages to all of these scenarios.]

OurHistory/ProspectiveHostsQuoteRequest (last edited 2008-07-07 04:28:17 by localhost)