I actually managed and installed a system at Level 3 (London Office 2 in Islington) last year. I didn't think they were catering for the smaller installations anymore (i.e only one cab) and that they had passed that on to a another company.
Maybe they changed their minds as they lost us, as well as a few other customers.
Anyway L3 are pretty good (as long as the building work at London 2 has now been finished) during the building works there were a few outages.
A couple of things to help you along.
Invest in a couple of APC Smart Mains switches. I had a problem with a machine freezing, these proved invaluable to give me the option of a one finger salute (cold boot) and saved me driving down to London more than once.
Get yourself a Router capable of Committed Access Rate *, if you are going for the L3 option of paying for bandwidth actually used and your site is going public. That way you can insulate yourself against paying for DOS attacks or slashdot effect, and have a nice even bill each month with no nasty surprises.
Also the ACL's on the router provide another handy line of (simple) security.
Get some really good hardware, I built my own rack of custom servers, but these were for a very specific application and were extensively tested before we took them down to L3. Unless you have lots of experience at building machines go for a good name.
Take some earplugs with you. If you are facing a nasty problem the background noise in L3's server room can be very distracting. Do resist the temptation to use your mobile "for that quick call" they will chuck you out as fast as they can look at you.
Don't try an do the initial installation by yourself, it's a long walk with heavy kit to get to your cab (London 2 is huge)
The key to co-location is adding a bit of redundancy, if you don't want to drop everything for a trip down London straight away if some hardware fails. Sometimes it is possible to get someone down there to attend to a failing system, if you think you need this take some photos of the back and front of the installation so that you can guide a 3rd party if required.
Oh and take some time to peer through the vents of other cabs down there, it's a bit rude but there is some very tasty kit in some of them. The Register were a few cabs down the hall from ours.
If you figure out a reliable way of working the combination locks on the cab doors then let me know :o)
* Commited access rates and ACL's can be quite taxing on a router, for Cisco I calculated that a 3600 was required to manage the full 100MB/s link without itself providing a bottleneck, I have the metrics somewhere if you need them.
On Tuesday 04 February 2003 12:20, Andrew Savory wrote:
On Tue, 4 Feb 2003, tom potts wrote:
I would have thought anywhere was cheaper than London