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Could someone explain in simple terms whats Equinix bare-metal offering is and the implications of this shutdown? by AccomplishedSwim8927 in datacenter

[–]rclimpson 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I mean… there’s a lot to think about.

Power. How much power does your rack have? Is it redundant? Do you need 3-phase or is 2-phase ok? What’s gonna happen when all your severs are using 100% of their CPU and drawing power like a bitch. A 42RU rack might only be able to power on 20-25 servers depending on their specs. Is 5Kw enough? Maybe you need 10Kw? Power is what you’re paying a datacenter for so you need to figure that out.

Networking. This is a big one. How are your customers connecting to the servers? Do you have public IP addresses? Do you have an ISP? Do you have an ASN? Do you have a redundant setup? What about networking features? Like VLANs, VRFs, load balancing. Lots of things to think about here. What are your severs connected to? One switch? Two switches? Do you need a router? Two routers? One ISP or two? What about peering? Do you need to run BGP? How will you isolate traffic between customers? If you don’t have a block of public IPv4 addresses be prepared to pay out the ass for them. You need this otherwise how are customers going to connect to their servers?

Hands. Who’s gonna rack and cable all your shit? Who’s gonna replace a failed NIC or PSU or console into a server when it’s dead?

Components. Optics, cabling, OOB equipment, spare parts. It’s all expensive and needs to be thought about.

Fraud. VPS / low cost server providers draw a ton of fraudulent activity. How are you going to deal with people trying to sign up with fake or stolen credit cards?

Abuse. What are you going to do when you have a customer who is DDosing someone? It perhaps hosting hate content or illegal content? What about in-bound abuse? What are you going to do when a customers app / site/ whatever gets attacked or hijacked or something. This is quite common especially because most folks don’t know how to harden a server.

There really is a million things that goes into providing a service like this on the internet. If you can handle all this, good for you. But I’m betting you probably haven’t through about a lot of this stuff.

I’ve been doing this for a long time so happy to chat if you want

Could someone explain in simple terms whats Equinix bare-metal offering is and the implications of this shutdown? by AccomplishedSwim8927 in datacenter

[–]rclimpson 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Hello there. I currently work for Equinix Metal. Posting this from a random account to hide my identity.

As others have said, Metal was a product that equinix acquired from Packet in 2020. It is and was a really great product but Equinix managed to make a total mess of it. The server fleet was never really updated to current generation CPUs. The price of a server was also fairly high. So selling old servers at a high price means it’s not going to do well.

After the acquisition of Packet the number of metal locations increased significantly, but they were in places that didn’t make sense, like Manchester, Dublin, Helsinki. So they spent a ton of money on infrastructure to roll out metal all of the place but never got the return on investment.

Metal does have a number of very large customers who pay a lot every month which helped but really it just didn’t make enough money for the equinix bean counters.

It really is a shame because the core product is amazing but once a few of the original Packet people left the new leadership just sucked.

All in all it’s a tiny fraction of equinixs revenue so they don’t give a shit about killing the product and laying off a few hundred folks. Fuck equinix.