

Ask YC:  What is your company's datacenter footprint? - patrickg-zill

I admit to being very curious about how much datacenter space startups and others are using (either renting of individual machines or of racks).<p>Right now all of my space comes to about 2 racks' worth, including stuff I run on behalf of my customers.<p>We all know about e.g. Second Life and their 2000 (equivalent to about 50 racks or more, depending on density and how much other stuff is in the rack) servers.<p>Are you running on one or two servers to start?<p>Or are you using 5 racks each in 2 different DCs to be redundant and ready for insane levels of traffic?<p>Do you have a growth strategy, or are Amazon's services what you intend to use when you get bigger?
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patrickg-zill
Amazingly, I would have thought that datacenter space would peak at some point
as more virtualization, and more CPU power in the same space (4-core and dual-
CPUs = 8 cores in 1U) takes hold, but it seems that more and more DCs are
being constructed due to strong demand.

There is a publicly traded company called Digital Realty Trust (NYSE: DLR)
that focuses on buying and building colocation facilities etc.

They are being upgraded, even though this is a "down" market and we can expect
corporate spending to be throttled somewhat.

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bkrausz
I'm several months away from launching (SaaS product), but since our service
is targeted towards paid clients, we figure the growth will be much smaller.
We'll probably use S3 for daily backups when we go live, growth after that
will be determined based on sales volume, etc.

