I don't remember who I was talking to (Tony D?) about this but here's the thought ...
Why don't several of us churches go in together to rent some rack space in a real data center for offsite DR stuff?
I have no idea how much $$ we're talking, but I'd certainly be curious to find out. I'd think if several of us went in together it would/could/might be reasonable?
Anyone else interested in this idea? Anyone looked into this before?
I have looked into this already. I currently have a full 42U rack in a hardened colo in Orlando. I have this connected to a 75Mb Internet Connection and also a 100M back to our Church HQ in Melbourne, FL. This is fairly expensive, but it was rolled into a larger fiber deployment we did to support a satelite church. The funny thing is I am using very little of our rack at the Colo - What kind of things are you thinking about doing? We could possibly work something out...
CK
Posted by: Chris Kehayias | April 10, 2007 at 07:51 AM
Hello,
Long time lurker, first time poster =]
I work in data centers and have been a part of many contract and services negotiations for data center space.
I would be happy to share my experiences and help you get what your looking for. A few questions to stir the pot:
Would you colo your servers, or "rent" a hosted server?
For the idea of DR, is it disk only, or is tape a consideration?
How much data would be stored offsite?
How often would data be sent?
Do you have the bandwidth to move the data offsite in your allocated window?
That should get the conversation going,
Eddy :)
Posted by: FastEddy | April 10, 2007 at 12:10 PM
Jason,
I'd first Check with Tony D. Then get pricing from Grammtel here in South Bend as well. Compare pricing.
Posted by: Dustin | April 10, 2007 at 12:25 PM
Jason, we were discussing this when the NCC team was visiting with your team.
I would be intersted in what you find out.
-jason
Posted by: Jason Lee | April 10, 2007 at 02:23 PM
After looking at a couple of data centers, I'm more and more in favor of this. We'll likely hear some ideas about this from Xcentric next Monday in Houston.
Posted by: Tony Dye | April 10, 2007 at 04:37 PM
Jason,
I'd definitely be interested. I personally have looked at a couple solutions; I currently am working with my cousin who is the Network Admin. for a local company about possibly slipping a 1TB NAS device in their data center as an off-site solution. THe "big guys" are going for around $150-300 per month depending on server configs/bandwidth options. I was thinking it'd be really sweet to have a "hosting exchange" among some churches; where someone could store a server at another church's facility and maybe help with expenses. Definitely keep me posted and let me know what the next steps are.
Posted by: Travis Kensil | April 10, 2007 at 05:14 PM
I'm interested but not necessarily ready to jump in from a financial standpoint. Would love to go through the process as a potential "pool member" and when we have a solution, pitch it to the exec team at that point! Backup and DR is something that's been low on our to-do list but needs to go up.
Posted by: David Szpunar | April 10, 2007 at 06:46 PM
I'd be really interested in doing this. It won't be much of an issue for our public facing servers (we're getting a 100mb fiber connection in June), but I'd love to have a cloned server or two off site.
We actually looked into renting rack space at the underground data center here in Springfield (http://www.springnet.net/), but opted for the fiber connection instead as we're currently saturating our connectivity 80% of the time.
Posted by: Matt Kerner | April 10, 2007 at 08:45 PM
I've been thinking about doing something somewhat similar. My church has an excellent Internet connection, talented staff, and donated equipment. I've been wanting to get our web stuff to the point where they can -- at least -- use our servers to host video, since the only real cost increase would be the cost of hard drives for us.
Posted by: Jordan Nash | April 11, 2007 at 03:54 AM
A buddy of mine is Exec Pastor at my local church here in Sacramento, CA. He sent me this thread becuause I happen to manage the Engineering department at a class A, tier 1 data center here in Sac called RagingWire. I do provide some pro bono services for our church like web site and Exchange hosting. It sounds like you all may be interested in forming some sort of Co-op to reduce DC costs which sounds like a great idea. I can tell you pretty much any thing you want to know about DC and Managed Services so send me an email if you have any questions. [email protected]
-Denoid
Posted by: Denoid Tucker | April 11, 2007 at 02:16 PM
I'd like to suggest that you consider Vine Hosting (http://VineHosting.com). The main reason is that they are located in an amazing data center in Philadelphia. I believe it even hosts the New York Stock exchange. It is huge. Also, Vine Hosting is a Christian hosting company owned by the Foundation for Evangelism which funds Web-Empowered Church. Ginghamsburg Church and Church of the Resurrection are hosted there too. So you can trace route to webempoweredchurch.org to see how many hops they are from you. Glenn Kelley from Vine can provide lots more info if needed. I am confident that he would give this group a low price. And he can provide any amount of bandwidth that is needed.
In Christ,
Mark
Posted by: Mark Stephenson | April 25, 2007 at 08:11 PM
Mark - please send me some contact info for Glenn. Would love to chat with him.
Jason
Posted by: Jason Powell | April 25, 2007 at 08:35 PM