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What should I do with all this excess infrastructure?
farmerjohn
Member
Hello all,
I am looking for some ideas to make use of some excess infrastructure that I have
Right now I have about 200 physical servers sitting idle in a Toronto datacenter. They are mostly quad core E3-1241 v3 @ 3.50GHz with 32 GB ram and a SSD. As well as another 50 or so sitting in storage.
There are also 6 or so dual processor E5-2620 v3 @ 2.40GHz with 128GB or 256GB of memory as well as hundreds of TB of spinning disk each (they used to be part of a HDFS cluster)
They are housed in a tier 1 datacenter with redundant a/b power and network. I own 5 /24 IP blocks as well as a /44 V6
Connected to 2 transit providers at 10Gbit/s each as well as the local IX (also 10G). I pay for the full 10Gbit/s commit on each. We peer with all the cloud providers on the IX so we have free transit to google, aws, cloudflare, etc, etc
The servers have long been paid for and all the costs are fixed and covered by other operations
There is also a full rack sitting empty in fremont california with 10Gbit private transport back to toronto and another 10Gbit/s transit on that end. Also with A/B power and connected to local IX
Our Toronto router is located within a local MMR where we have free cross connects to any other transit provider (there are MANY)
Why is there such an excess you may ask?! Our business model changed over the past 2 years which allowed us to generate far more revenue with far less resources.
What do you think I should do? What would you do with all that?
John
Comments
The best business practice if you've changed to generate more with less is to sell off the old stuff while it's still worth a small amount and remove the recurring costs if the space/power/network. Not sure what you can do with a bunch of older E3's while it being worthwhile and not loading down with extra support time.
I would set it up and provide cheap VPS with good specs to those who can't afford the more expensive options. I will generate enough revenue to cover the costs and some profit so I can provide infrastructure support in the future to those VPS holders.
It would actually cost me more to throw them away than to keep them. Same with removing / selling. They are not worth very much outside of the rack.
Also - my costs are fixed with or without them in the rack. So taking them away would not save me any money.
The monthly cost is also surprisingly low.. under $4K
Hire someone to do support/abuse handling for you and rent them to people here. Many people will be more than happy to use these dedis at reasonable price.
Considering you clearly have a lot of experience and contacts, remote hands at the DC should not be a problem.
This post alone gives you a good advertisement, not many providers here can operate something at such a scale.
Interesting in renting one of the dedi
That would be the biggest issue - I do not want any of my IP's to be abused, etc
They are super clean - plus I just acquired a new /24 from Arin's waiting list the other day
Keeping them clean and offering affordable services will be difficult due to malicious actors.
But I'm pretty sure a good abuse handling team would do a great job, even if you decided to stop later on - "cleaning" them should not be that difficult.
All you really need is good "relations" with UCE and Spamhaus as they clearly run the party.
Also with that amount of servers, you can partner with some provider here and let them bring their own IP's - so you don't have to do much "abuse" handling work.
tagging someone that owns his IP's and wanted a US loc - @MannDude
you could offer dedis at really nice prices
It would be better for me to lease some IPv4 space or get some assigned to me from one of my transit providers
Or even better if people just bring their own IP and I give them a BGP session
Yup, many providers here rent subs - you can find offers under this thread https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/160162/aio-ip-related-ipv4-ipv6-asn-thread-only-providers-lirs-are-allowed-to-post-offers#latest
Yeah - I saw that..
What would be perfect for me is for someone who wants to start their own service to just rent my all or part of my infrastructure in one go.. Infrastructure as a service
I can guarantee you will get offers in your inbox soon
@jar
Make the world a better place. Run hentai@home client maybe.
start something like Kimsufi/soyoustart and sell those dedis..
or make cheap vps for $10/yr out of those E3 and E5.
I hope some LE providers here will also be interested to rent those dedis from you in bulk.
Maybe you can rent them out.
start a low end hosting wing exclusively for LET
Start selling dedis and hire some good staff to manage IP reputation, its not hard.
Why UCE, its is nothing, nobody cares about them, they list whole network for no reason and ask you for ransom money to delist.
Hey @farmerjohn -- shoot me a email [email protected], I'd be willing to work something out.
M$ and other big corpos still use them.
If you want to host Mail servers, you will have bad time with UCE.
Most likely, you will not find a better solution than selling such servers to other providers, or give for rent. All participants almost unanimously speak about this. At the same time, it is clear that you want to rent out your servers and the entire infrastructure in bulk, but at the same time there will be few medium-sized providers who want to use such outdated servers, albeit dedicated ones. Because all servers have middle price on the market, taking into account the rise in price at the moment of this kind services in new configurations. At the same time, the moment with a high price for IP addresses is also known, but there are good discounts for black Friday and for the new year among suppliers of new server configurations and IP addresses. Of course interest in your servers will be better from smaller providers and those who deal with dedicated servers and especially for relative newcomers to lowentalk, but they would like to get servers along with your ip first.
Therefore, in your case, the best thing would be to offer the lease of such servers to small providers who offer cheap services and tell them to come with their own addresses. Or entrust management to more average providers who can approach the matter more responsibly. But in both cases - I think it’s unlikely that you will be able to completely transfer such infrastructure to someone at this time.
From small and relatively new ones, you can look at these providers for example - @Crunchbits @Abd @aqua (he has already responded), from medium ones, for example - @Francisco @Dustinc. Well, according to the reviews on the site, see who is more trustworthy and that the company offers such services, as well as whether such a company is registered in the United States - for more productively check the safety of interactions with such a company in any matters. I think that most likely you will have to divide this number of servers by 50 pieces at least per provider, perhaps many do not want to deal with all servers for one time. But you definitely need to try working with @Crunchbits @Abd @aqua first and one of them will agree one way or another, since they are smaller companies.