Consulting

Colocation

Especially as an SME (small and medium-sized enterprise), it is becoming more and more difficult to find a suitable colocation provider that offers a good price/performance ratio in addition to your own requirements. Sometimes you have to wait weeks to even receive a response from a sales representative, and you often get the impression that small customers are not interesting for large colocation providers, especially in the greater Frankfurt area, and that they are only geared towards large cloud providers.

This is exactly what I have experienced over the last few years when looking for other colocation providers for IP projects. The search for suitable contacts turned out to be very difficult and there were always a lot of detailed questions to be clarified, such as:

• How much power consumption do I need?
• What certification does the operation of my server landscape require?
• What are cable trays?
• What are mesh trays?
• Do I need rack side panels?
• Do I need combination locks or electronic locking?
• How many patches do you need?
• How big do you want the rack to be?

Many of these issues can have a significant impact on rack price or setup costs. Likewise, organizational issues at the respective data center location can cause a high effort, which can possibly be reduced significantly with few measures alternatively.

If you are not a specialist for colocation space yourself, but are looking for a suitable colocation space for your company, please feel free to contact me!

In addition to Frankfurt am Main, I am also in regular contact with providers, for example in Würzburg or abroad (Poland).

Consulting

Network & Carrier

In recent years, the economic center of Frankfurt am Main has become one of the largest and most important data hubs in Europe, due in part to the large number of banks, the headquarters of the European Central Bank and the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. Every well-known provider of IP routing has a network node in Frankfurt.

Therefore, in addition to choosing the right data center service provider, choosing the right network supplier is also a challenge, because each IP routing service provider offers different network quality, which is also reflected in the bid price. Large colocation data centers can have up to over 300 different network service providers.

I will help you find the right provider according to your requirements!

The following questions need to be addressed:

• Which availability guarantee do I need – redundancy over different carriers / redundancy over the same carrier?
• Do I operate my own ASN or do I need a service provider who also handles IP routing for me?
• How much bandwidth do I expect to need? – 1 G / 10 G / 100 G / 400 G / 800 G?
• How much data traffic do I expect to need?
• Am I dealing with critical infrastructure?

If you do not know a direct answer to these questions, I will be happy to help you with an appropriate needs analysis and the creation of a requirements catalog.

In addition to handling IP transit traffic, I am also in contact with providers of dark fiber routes in the Frankfurt area. If you are planning to build your own ASN across multiple sites, a supplier of path-redundant dark fiber connections is essential.

Hardware consulting

Network hardware

In the course of our various projects at IP-Projects, I have been able to test many different network equipment suppliers over the last few years. These include:

• Huawei
• Juniper
• TP-Link
• HP/Aruba
• Ubiquiti

The network in particular is one of the core pieces of the infrastructure which, in addition to pure availability (maintenance tolerance), can also be very cost-intensive. Therefore, this should be planned thoughtfully!

I am in close contact with certified distributors of well-known network equipment manufacturers up to direct contacts to transceiver manufacturers from China. Because cost efficiency with a nevertheless very high quality standard has always been very important to us at IP-Projects. Not every price is a good price in the end. However, to evaluate this, you need to know the market prices of the different suppliers and assess the technical requirements for use in your own infrastructure.

I would be happy to help you with the technical examination and the search for a suitable network equipment supplier!

If you are also looking for a service provider for later technical support, I can also provide you with contacts. These could be involved as early as the planning of the network construction as well as the routing, so that a seamless transition to technical support is possible.

Server hardware

In the course of my work as managing director of IP-Projects GmbH & Co KG, I purchase server hardware in the 7-figure range every year. Customer requirements are extremely diverse – from storage systems to high-performance clusters.

Due to regular hardware purchasing and the special requirements of customers, I come into contact with very many different hardware constellations and hardware suppliers. Especially in the system house environment, primarily the in-house suppliers are sold, with very high service and hardware acquisition costs. After a few years, hardware environments are often to be completely renewed, even though there is no real technical reason for this.

If you already have an offer for a server infrastructure, or if you have not yet found a suitable partner here, I will be happy to assist you with a needs analysis, offer review or supplier referral!