Just email sales@centauricom.com

Thanks,

Chris Demsey

Ahh, yes, that makes sense. It didn’t even occur to me that we were comparing apples to oranges.

We’re multi-homed with transit with multiple backbone providers, so we use ED as a relatively inexpensive way to “fill in the gaps” without nasty long term / high commit contracts.

Your use case makes perfect sense, and in that regard, InterNAP is very useful. We just outgrew that use case years ago.

The comparison I’m making is more about between being single-homed with Internap and utilizing EquinixDirect with your own AS/BGP routing; you seemed to be implying that using EquinixDirect results in faster routes and I’m disagreeing with that. If you have your own AS than using Internap with a mix of other carriers probably doesn’t make a lot of sense; it dilutes the performance benefits of Internap and as you mention increases the AS hop count by one so it can make traffic shaping more difficult. I would guess that the majority of their customers don’t run their own AS; unless you need a lot of portable address space it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I view Internap differently than just a transit provider; I think of them as someone you outsource your BGP to so you don’t have to do that yourself. They don’t really have a network or backbone per se (my understanding is that they do have a small network for shuttling traffic between their POPs, primarily for their CDN); they’re just aggregating transit from 7-9 Tier 1 carriers and using path-based route optimization.

From what I understand route manipulation by the customer is still a major limitation of EquinixDirect, and as I’m sure you’re aware straight AS-based routing using BGP frequently does not chose the optimal performing route. My point is that being single-homed to Internap is going to give your end users better performance than strictly using EquinixDirect; I don’t think there’s any question about that. EquinixDirect doesn’t have route optimization via path probes and has a much smaller list of Tier 1 carriers, so even if you use every carrier they offer you’ll still have less route diversity than Internap. There’s nothing magical about Internap; purchasing transit from 7-9 Tier 1 carriers gives you access to a lot of routes, and using path-based route optimization gives you a better chance of getting the best route out of that mix. You can do essentially the same thing on your own using either Internap’s Flow Control Platform or the Avaya/RouteScience devices. To do that at the level of redundancy of Internap, you’re talking a couple hundred thousand dollars just in initial capex outlay, plus the cost of network engineers, bandwidth, maintenance contracts, etc. For most organizations that doesn’t make fiscal sense.

We haven’t had any power issues, which is all I can really comment on.

We *have* had some major package acceptance problems which completely slipped my mind when I wrote this, but I’ll have to post a follow-up or something. Thanks for the reminder!

As for InterNAP vs Equinix Direct (We were a customer of both), the big big difference is that Equinix Direct doesn’t show up as a BGP hop. It doesn’t have it’s own ASN, so it “looks” like you have transit directly with each provider. This is a big major win over something like InterNAP because BGP sees the route as being shorter. Having the InterNAP ASN in the routing table means InterNAP is rarely chosen as the best route simply because it traverses more ASNs.

You certainly have had a much better experience with Equinix remote hands than we have had, and we’ve never used them for anything as complicated as BGP or high level network work. We’ve had a range of issues, mostly with package handling and the occasional slow response to emergency requests. Equinix brands their remote hands service as “SmartHands”, which is jokingly referred to as “DumbHands” by many of the end users in the datacenter due to the quality of their work. We’ve ended up contracting out our remote hands work to other local companies in the area.

I really don’t care much for EquinixDirect in practice, though the idea is interesting. Pricing is usually not that great (the downside of buying spot or sort term bandwidth contracts), and the mix of carriers is pretty weak at most locations. Your comment vis a vis Internap is incorrect. EquinixDirect uses standard BGP (i.e. best path is determined by the number of AS hops), while Internap does route optimization based on path analysis. The performance of Internap is going to be demonstrably better than EquinixDirect; aside from route optimization they simply have access to more, better performing routes after purchasing transit to 7-9 Tier1 carriers. One other major downside of EquinixDirect (or at least the last time we looked at it) is that as an end user you have very little (if any) control over the routing. If an end user contacts you with a subpar route using standard BGP, the way EquinixDirect is architected it’s almost impossible to change that (though in fairness this may have changed; we haven’t looked at it in over a year).

All of this being said, I still feel Equinix is the creme de la creme data center operator. They are among the most expensive but you do get what you pay for.

then that’s no good! It all falls down to planned maintenance. Data centers should always make sure that backup IS or WOULD be working and not SHOULD be working.

The biggest problem I have with their expansion in the bay area is that they rely almost 100% on the Metro fiber loop to get all of their connectivity from 11 Great Oaks (the original bay area location). A couple providers pop at Lundy or Caspian, but not many. If you’re at 11 Great Oaks, connectivity life is good. But they ran out of power a while ago.

If the providers would build out to the newly expanded Datacenters, I’d be extremely happy, but They don’t feel the need to, because most people are happy using the metro network. Maybe I’m just overly paranoid, but I want my provider popped in the same building.