Power, Power, Everywhere

As some folks may remember, one of the machines in the Pit is running on degraded power (long-story short, it's running on 110VAC only due to the fact that the older IBM power-supplies were auto-sensing on input voltage, and current ones aren't, and they require 220VAC, which is all the machine was ever rated for).

So, it's been running without its hot-spare power-supply for months. Sitting below it in the rack is 18U of RS/6000 report-server ready and waiting for juice, but also decidedly lacking in 220VAC.

Now, the long story is - of course - that we've been hounding our crappy-ass mega-corp hosting company to bring a 220 line to our cabinets for the last three to four weeks. They consider us "ungrateful" because we're pissed off that after four weeks we still don't have power, because "the normal turn-around on that is 60-90 days" (mind you, the receptacle they need to make live is already present, it's just a matter of lighting it up).

Oh, did I mention that the price-sheet lists a 30A 220V power line at $1200 per month? Yes, gentle readers, that's right. $1200 a month, $40 an amp.

So, literally, as the corporate bureaucracy was just kicking the ticket out to the colocation facility to "go work it", I personally called and halted the ticket's progress.

Why?

Because there's no sense paying $1200 a month and a huge-ass installation fee, when this latest round of "You'll get nothing and like it" with the mega-corp made us decide to kick them to the curb.

The current front-runner is a small company which near as I can tell from everyone I've talked to has great customer service, has taken over an old IBM manufacturing facility, so it has like five times the redundant power/air/telco that it actually will ever need, and - most importantly - will end up saving us literal rafts of cash per month from what the megacorp would be charging us.

F them, I tell ya. ;-)