Dublin datacentre recommendations?

Zenith74

Hi guys,

Looking for some input if anybody has any wisdom to give .

Our company currently has a half cabinet colo space in a Dublin based datacentre and have had for 5-6 years, however in the last 18 months the datacentre on a whole has become considerably less stable. Their network is regularly being hit with DDOS attacks that is presumably saturating their WAN connectivity and thus causing outages for all customers in the datacentre. It might only be once every couple of weeks and only for 5 mins, or like today 2-3 times during the night then about 30 mins during business hours. While I know DDOS attacks are very difficult to mitigate, our monitoring tools monitor services in other datacentres around Ireland/Europe and we very very rarely see unexplained outages like this - so tbh I think the current colo is not taking sufficient steps to fully deal with the problem.

So, thinking about moving to a new DC but would like to make the right choice and tbh there isn't a huge amount of info available on the different locations, particularly comparing them. Wondering if anybody has any thoughts, not the end of the world if it's purely anecdotal, just trying to get a general idea?

We'd be looking for 1/2 cabinet, ideally dual power to the cab but not required, relatively low bandwidth requirements, 24x7 access, must be standards (ISO27001 etc.) compliant. However we are a small company so certainly not looking to pay over the odds either.



Thanks!

ED E

Don't have a recommendation but that sounds really poor of the current provider. The bigger players like Level3 will null route a DOS'd customer pretty sharpish to protect the rest. The victim, unfairly or not, should be told to purchase a mitigation product or be left dark.

Zenith74

It's rather frustrating alright! They do have some form of null routing solution in-place, but however it's setup we still see outages for about 5 mins each time there is an attack. Today's attack apparently targeted one of their primary routers so the outage was much more significant and difficult to null route. I can only assume other DCs have some way of null routing faster or offering an alternative path because as I say we monitor servers in lots of datacentres and don't see this volume of outages even though I'm pretty sure all DCs face this kind of thing.

feylya

I had decent experiences with Interconnexion in Blanchardstown, in a former life http://www.telecitygroup.com/data-centres/colocation-data-centre-dublin.htm

Zenith74

Thanks feylya, I've dropped them a mail now to see how their pricing looks etc.

Also curious if anybody has tried to move public IP ranges from one datancentre to the other? The ranges are registered to us with RIPE, but the DC provider looks after announcing these, routing them to us etc.

axer

Take a look at ServeCentric. For a migration like that I'd get more IP addresses if I could so that you can have both sites operational at the same time.

geecee

TeleCity have now been take over by Equinix - which makes them the biggest Data Centre provider in the world - they have 4 DCs in Dublin and have an Arbor networks DDOS system to protect the DCs during a DDOS attack

My company has 9 racks with them and have been there 12+ years, highly recommended.

BTW if you are willing to consider the UK, you will find that the DCs there are a hell of a lot cheaper than Ireland. They usually include free electricity, allow more KWatts per rack (thus you can fit more kit in a 40U rack) and their bandwidth costs are a fraction of Irish costs.