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Media delivery class connection provider

C

corbywan

macrumors regular
Original poster
Feb 4, 2008
238
3
Forest Grove, OR
I'm trying to figure out how to ask this so that I don't sound like an idiot. I used to be a CCNA/CCDA and kept up with this kind of stuff for a time but I haven't for quite a while. So I have some smarts about this, it's just some years out of date.

A friend has come into some money (I know, rare these days) and is asking me about this, despite my out-of-date background. We would like to build a data center as part of a project. The most demanding part of the data center is going to be both a live and on-demand audio/video streaming/archiving service for a particular niche market.

I have an idea as to what to do on the in-house side of things (servers, switches, etc.). Where I'm ignorant is the pipe that lets people in and out on the internet. I would like to have a 100mb up/down connection but I'm out of touch with who offers this level of service and who to shop. Redundancy is of course going to be a factor, I just don't know who to go to or what to ask for! Back in the day my specialty was more LAN and DSL was the new thing. I've worked with T1s and SDSL for WAN and an internet pipe but not much beyond that.

Can someone hook a bruthu up? Thanks in advance.
 
belvdr

belvdr

macrumors 603
Aug 15, 2005
5,945
1,372
I'd suggest contacting a local provider in your area, and colocating your equipment there. For starters, you won't have that huge outlay for building the data center yourself. For one rack, capable of holding 42U of equipment, it may cost around $1,000, including dual 100Mb links to the Internet (approximate around the 2003 timeframe). You'll still need to get switches and firewalls, and configure them all for redundancy. However, if you are serious about redundancy, it is going to cost some cash. For example, for really, really high end redundancy, you will host the environment in two separate data centers, for example on the east cost and one on the west, and split the traffic between them. This type of environment can chew through millions of dollars easily in one year.

You might just consider going to a hosting provider and see if the can host the entire environment for you, so all you have to do is pay the monthly fee, and let them worry about the configuration.

For recommendations, I'd suggest Level 3. We checked out their Cincinnati data center and it was very good.
 
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