We turned the calendar over and there was the Zhiguli Valley
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Difficulties in choosing a site: what we looked at and what we settled on
Samara Oblast, namely Tolyatti, is far from the first candidate for a new location. Commercial and product reasons pulled us towards a site in Kazakhstan, and we really worked through this issue quite thoroughly. However, due to limited network protection capabilities and the usual operation of data centers at the proper level, we stillOmajor problems with equipment supplies and legal issues of using the site, which would inevitably lead to serious delays in the launch, we decided to change the vector. Including in order to diversify our own growth risks and possible difficulties of expanding locations in Moscow and St. Petersburg. In addition, there were rumors about the imminent relocation of the St. Petersburg site (and they turned out to be reality, but more on that next time). All this switched us to searching for options within the country.
We considered sites in Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Kazan and other large cities of the Russian Federation. Almost all the time we were faced with either a lack of places (with possible expansion, but unclear launch dates) or non-compliance with our selection criteria.
How did you choose?
We have collected high-level criteria.
We looked at references from major providers.
The main thing is to focus on the optimal balance of quality and speed of obtaining results.
The criteria for making a decision on the choice of location were as follows:
a region with a dense population, ensuring a quick response from nearby areas, communication channels with other countries;
sufficient distance from two capitals (disaster resistance);
technological advancement of the site (Tier III, high uptime, wide communication channels);
racks from 7 kW;
availability of space in rows, machine rooms;
duplicated large telecom operators, independent fiber-optic communication channels;
lack of competitors in a particular region.
An additional factor was the presence of competent “hands” on site, SmartHands services.
Our finalist
Based on all the requirements, including the need to quickly launch a new location, having visited several sites, we chose the Zhigulevskaya Dolina technology park. The location largely met all our criteria (not without nuances, I will tell you about them below). The offer is unique on the market, satisfied us in terms of technology, is quite far from the current sites, but at the same time is quite close relative to foreign channels to neighboring countries (according to connectivity map).
Not the least factor was that Samara is practically a small homeland of Reg.ru, one of those places where we actively hire employees and have our own office. Some of our own engineers, ready to back up the data center engineers, were also within close transport accessibility. They also participated directly in the installation.
And of course, there is delicious beer there!
A little bit about the Zhiguli Valley
The Zhigulevskaya Dolina data center is located on the territory of the eponymous technology park in the Samara region. The data center complies with the Tier III Uptime Institute fault tolerance level. It has been certified by the Uptime Institute for compliance with Tier Design and Tier Facility standards. And — what is important — you can place your own equipment here.
The data center has six machine rooms with a total area of 843 sq. m, containing 326 racks with a capacity of 7 to 20 kW each. The data transmission network is built using HP FlexFabric and Juniper QFabric switches. The uninterruptible and guaranteed power supply system is built on diesel-dynamic uninterruptible power supplies. If the electricity supply stops, the rotor rotates by inertia and the electrical installation continues to generate current for several more seconds. This time is enough to start the diesel generator. Thus, the equipment does not stop working for a second.
A-a-a, let's go! Or not?
What challenges did we face?
First: there were no free ports of the required capacity from the current operators, so construction was launched by two new independent ones.
Second: the delay in the delivery of equipment relative to the planned order was 8 months. If we had waited for the equipment we initially ordered, we most likely would not have launched until now. Therefore, we placed a parallel order and received equipment from another vendor in 3 months, which did not affect the deadlines so significantly, and we were able to launch within the framework of previously announced promises and without going too far beyond the roadmap.
Third: during the installation process, already on site, we discovered some incompleteness of the order. These problems were resolved promptly thanks to our own stocks. Couriers promptly delivered consumables such as patch cords directly to the site.
All the difficulties were overcome and we launched to the song of Shufutinsky September 3rd.
What we got
At the moment, several racks with compute nodes based on Gigabyte platforms of the following configuration have been launched in the Valley:
2x AMD EPYC 7543;
1024Gb RAM;
4x SSD 7.68Tb NVME;
2x 40G NICs.
For the control plane, we used dual-processor platforms based on Intel Scalable Gold.
The communication node is assembled on the basis of Cisco and Juniper equipment. All nodes are connected by a duplicated 40Gbit connection, the entire network stack is duplicated and connected by a 40Gbit aggregation.
Communication channels are also duplicated by two independent suppliers.
So far we have only launched IaaS based on the “productive” tariff linehowever, other key cloud services (DBaaS, KaaS and S3) will soon become available for order in the region.
The location allows for expansion. We are also considering requests for private cloud hosting and dedicated server rentals on this site.
And, of course, we are not stopping there and are already planning further expansion of the Reg.ru Cloud. Who knows what territory we will be exploring and where we will meet next time? Follow our updates!
