I would
suggest suggest that any new major backup colo in North
America should be in a different power grid area. This
would protect
from the possible consequences of a major
blackout such as
occurred in
2003. As I understand the situation North
America has two
major power
grids, one in the East and one in the West. Only
Texas and Quebec
have independent grids.
Agreed.
I'd further recommend that a West Coast location NOT be in
California, for economic reasons (and, by extension,
political reasons that affect politics). Washington state
seems to provide a good balance of sorta regional
technological "savvy" and livable costs. Plus, y'know, if it
turned out to be a good idea to move me to the new location,
I'd really like an opportunity to live in Washington for a while.
California is better connected though that Washington. In California you
also have PAIX which is still quite a major NAP; also MAE West and a few
others. Also the opportunity to private peer with some of the Asian networks
should be very attractive. From memory at the PAIX site networks like KDD,
NTT, China Telecom, Singtel, etc are all there. Using 3rd party transit to
some of these networks (especially China Telecom) is awful; China Telecom
seems to use Sprint for most of its US transit and the interconnect between
the two networks is normally saturated. So for users in China their
experience of Wikimedia is going to be substantially improved by a private
peer.
Bandwidth will probably be cheaper in California, from previous experience
in Oregon we found we could get a 20-30% cost reduction. If you also look at
most carriers network maps, the routes going through Oregon and Washington
do not have the level of protection and redundancy that their central
Californian networks do.
//Eden