My take on this would be that DNS especially, and the volume of mail that
can be handled via a few 1 and 2u servers, are pretty easy to duplicate.
As such, I suspect you're overthinking some of the risk management pieces.
In any of the places you mentioned, you're more likely to have random
accidental power or network connectivity outages than to be dislodged by a
tsunami, hurricane, or military coup. No matter where you go, if you
design your service such that it can fail over to your network sites
elsewhere in the world, you should be fine.
I ran a 30-location DNS network that included servers in some fairly
unstable places for about four years. Power outages in one location or
another happened a couple times a week sometimes. The ones we worried
about were the ones where the equipment didn't successfully reboot itself
afterward. Hardware failures happened periodically -- again often enough
that I don't have a clear count. We had one location that we lost
connectivity to due to a coup for maybe a week, once.
The real questions to be asking are where you'll get the best network
connectivity and support. For network connectivity, Hong Kong, Singapore,
and Tokyo will all be decent choices. Tokyo can be difficult if you don't
have a Japanese speaker on staff. Hong Kong and Singapore are both full
of people who speak good English. Last time I looked at it, transit
connectivity was cheaper in Hong Kong. Peering was easier in Hong Kong as
well, since everybody was on the HKIX rather than being split between two
exchanges (SOX and Equinix) as they were in Singapore. But it's been a
few years since I've dealt with stuff in either place, so the situation
may have changed.
As for facilities, my usual shopping technique is to figure out who I want
to connect to, figure out where they are, and then figure out which
building has the best combination of price and remote hands support. If
there are any discernable differences in the level of back-up power they
provide, you may want to take that into consideration too. And then
remember, your equipment will be far away. Things will happen to it that
you don't expect. Some of those will be hard to fix from a distance.
Make sure you're able to fail over to equipment in other places if you
need to, because if you do this enough, you will lose a site somewhere
eventually.
-Steve
On Fri, 24 Jul 2009, George Sanders wrote:
I will be expanding a small network infrastructure service (read: DNS
and mail ... a few 1u and 2u servers) to Hong Kong next year.
We don't have any particular customer base in Hong Kong - rather, we
have customers all over southeast asia and would like to serve them
better, as well as attract more SE Asia customers.
I chose Hong Kong for the following reasons:
- South Korea is alternately happy with / upset with Japan, and I don't
want to deal with that
- Japan is is alternately happy with / upset with South Korea, and I
don't want to deal with that
- Mainland China is out of the question, for obvious reasons
- The smaller (Thailand, Vietnamese, Phillipines, etc.) countries all
have their own particular issues (recent coup in Thailand, etc.)
So the choice came down to Hong Kong or Singapore, and I chose Hong Kong
because it seems easier to "just get things done" there. I realize that
in the long term there is a greater risk of social paradigm shift in
Hong Kong because of mainland China, but in the short run it seems that
Hong Kong is more "functional" than Singapore.
Any comments on the above thought process ?
The obvious follow-up is, which datacenter ?
I need a full service center that will give me rackspace and let me just
plug ethernet into their switch. I am not interested in brokering my
own connectivity, nor am I interested in running my own routers. I want
to pay one bill to one organization and get one cable. The end.
I think there are further considerations though ... I read details of
one very modern, very sexy datacenter housed in a skyscraper, but my
research showed me that this building has been built on land reclaimed
from the sea, and there is reasonable concern that the sand
underpinnings could liquify, to a degree, in a seismic event. I'd also
like to be more than a few feet above sea level. Honestly, as sexy as
it would be to be in a slick tower right on the bay in Central Hong
Kong, I would much rather find some nondescript, one story building,
miles from the coast and a few hundred feet above sea level.
What recommendations might someone have ?
Thank you very much for any comments or suggestions you may have.
