[SATLUG] RackSpace Expanding

[Al Castanoli]

On Sun, 2007-08-05 at 23:00 -0500, tom weeks wrote:

> On Sunday 05 August 2007 11:58, Walt DuBose wrote:
[...]

> > I didn't realize that the San Antonio area had that much pipeline
> > capability.

> For Bandwidth, we're pretty well set.  Most of the big backbone node clusters 
> are in Dallas and Houston.  However if you pull up a BIG backbone map (e.g. 
> UUNet node map) you'll see that both Austin and Houston have quite a bit of 
> connectivity.
> See here:
> 	http://www.caida.org/tools/visualization/mapnet/Backbones/
> -select US only
> -commercial backbones only
> -and UUNet
> to get an idea of the quantity and redundancy that we have here in SA.  No, 
> not the biggest pipes.. and one extra hop some times, but definitely on the 
> map.  Maybe someone who knows more about backbone evolution here in town in 
> the past 5 years could comment more.

> Also.. keep in mind... with Lowes, MS and other BW heavy DCs coming to SA.. 
> it's only going to attract yet more provider nodes and POP clusters (IMHO).

> Tweeks

The government and industry both use huge data pipes into and out of San
Antonio - imagine the traffic generated by the Air Intelligence Agency,
the Texas Cryptology Center (which was called the Medina Regional
Security Operations Center when I worked there), the Air Force Medical
Support Agency, the USAA HQ, the Valero HQ, the Capital Group's NOC,
AT&T, not to mention the huge medical center data centers such as the UT
Health Science Center San Antonio.

The Enterprise Help Desk at the US Army Medical Information Technology
Center on Ft. Sam Houston supports the entire Army medical community and
one of the gigs I worked as a consultant was an international calling
center at the MCI complex at Stone Oak and 281, across the street from
where Clear Channel built its huge data center.

When I worked at another telecomms company, we had to expand to an OC48
to handle all the Caribbean and Central American traffic that is hosted
here.  Cisco and Foundry are still selling lots of routers to the local
market to handle all the new network traffic that's being generated.

There's also a trend of San Antonio catching up to the rest of the
Internet support industry in running redundant data paths to circumvent
network outages, as more and more data centers are moving toward high
availability.  What's this mean for the linux sysadmin?  With increasing
capacity of data centers, there are more and more linux servers and
network control stations going into racks and onto desktops.  This
brings more employment opportunities for linux users, and not just in
the systems administration arena.  One of the best Oracle programmers
I've ever worked with is a SATLUG member.

Al Castanoli