[brianwski]

Our inbound is not completely full, and we always try to have extra capacity/headroom for new customers. But if you plan to upload more than 5 petabytes at a rate of faster than 15 Gbps sustained, you probably want to contact us ahead of time to let us know it's coming and we'll increase our capacity for you. We can absorb anything less and it won't cause us any issues.

As somebody else mentioned, since we're in a commercial datacenter with a bunch of network providers already serving us, it's pretty easy to dial up our capacity as we need it.

[samstave]

>we're in a commercial datacenter with a bunch of network providers already serving us, it's pretty easy to dial up our capacity as we need it.

Whats the lead time in your case?

In my historic experience doing this regardless of if I was even in MAE-West... cross connects and provisioning were eons in internet time...

[brianwski]

I'd estimate a week? That's probably what you meant by "eons". :-)

It could go faster, but if we need to buy a new (expensive) network switch that can take a few days to arrive. And as you mention, the datacenter guys are happiest if you give them 3 - 4 days and a work order to do the cross connect.

Building out more vaults (the blocks of 20 storage pods we store data in) is usually about the same if we rush it, but we have a big (multi-petabyte) buffer spinning ready to accept data at anytime. We have a regularly scheduled delivery of pods once per month based on projections, but we have been known to tell our provider to go ahead and build three months worth of pod chassis (everything except for the drives) immediately and ship them to us. We supply the hard drives, so that either comes from our own stashes or we quickly order some more from various sources.

[mentat]

It's a pretty different world now, both price and speed-wise.