On March 16th we went public with our urgent financial appeal for support moving our data center at short notice. It was great to have philanthropist Craig Newmark kindly step up within 24 hours and personally offer to cover the initial $400,000 move cost. Shortly before the (very tight) deadline for signing new contracts to make a May 26th move possible, we received an extension on the data center move deadline to August 31st due, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This has obviously bought us some much needed extra time to continue raising the $1.7M of additional urgently required funding to cover our unexpectedly increased 2020 operations costs. Although we are making good progress and will have more positive donor news to announce later this week, if you or your organization are also able to help support Shadowserver’s public benefit services continuing, please do get in touch.
One of the questions we have been regularly asked is what are our new data center requirements and can hosting companies still talk to us about helping to find us suitable free/cheap/discounted co-location space. The answer is very much yes! We have already spoken with a number of hosting providers, but given how many times we are still being asked our requirements, we thought we would blog more details and try to get the message out as widely as possible. So here goes…
You can read some background about our previous data center moves in our news section.
Currently we have 104 moderately full racks plus a dedicated storage area located in San Jose, CA. They contain 1340 physical servers and ~12 petabytes of storage. We are busy consolidating that server footprint down into the most dense configuration that we can, within standard co-location power limitations. This will reduce our rack usage footprint and therefore costs (both the one off move fees and the ongoing monthly space, power and cooling rental fees). We are also retiring aging, power inefficient hardware where we can, and reducing our storage for spares to a minimum (down to 12 unpowered racks).
Our requirements for new data center space are:
- Number of customer provided racks: 62 (50 powered)
- Power per rack: 2 x 208VAC 3-phase (L15-30)
- Raritan PX3-5665V-C5 PDU (customer provided)
- Initial load of 6.5kW per rack / 323kW total – asking for 350kW of capacity
- Structured cabling:
- 4 x 10Gb 50/125um OM3 LC/LC to each rack
- Wired to a central rack (8 fibers per rack x 49 racks)
- Internet Uplinks: 2 x 10Gb
- 2 x IPv4 /24 per uplink
- 1 x IPv6 /64 per uplink
- Security:
- Racks must be physically separate (caged)
- Does not require ceiling cage cover
- Office space: minimum 200 square feet
- Storage Space: Would like to have on site of 200-400 square feet
- Loading dock: height must be 48″-55″ or provide surface mount dock lift
- Preferred Locations:
- CA:San Jose area
- CA:Sacramento area
- OR:Portland area
- Contract date: 2020-05-04
- Move in date: 2020-08-15
We aim to speak to remaining providers over the next 5-6 business days and be in a position to sign contracts from the start of May, to be able to hit our revised August move date.
If you operate a data center, are an ISP or co-location provider, if you are a company who has spare capacity right now, or if you are someone who could help connect us to people who might be able to help us minimize the costs of Shadowserver continuing to provide our public benefit services, then please reach out and get in touch ASAP.
Likewise, if you can help get the message out on social media, please help get this message to the right audience on Twitter and LinkedIn. We would like to thank everyone who has already reached out to offer their assistance, we really appreciate your awesome support during this difficult time globally!
The Shadowserver Team
Read Next: Our Data Center Has A New Home
Read Next: Second Fundraising Status Update
Read Next: Third Fundraising Status Update