Remote Hands in Amsterdam

Many large Dutch institutions have their headquarters in Amsterdam, the commercial capital of the Netherlands. AMS-IX says it was established in 1994, after academic institutions at the Science Park in Amsterdam sought to exchange data directly. AMS-IX says it has become one of the largest internet exchange points globally, connecting internet service providers, content providers and streaming services. For a company that runs equipment here but manages it from another city or country, that history translates into a practical need: someone has to be physically present at the rack when a server hangs, a cable needs checking or a drive has to be replaced. NIKHEF Amsterdam stands on Science Park in Amsterdam. Reboot Monkey provides that presence. It is a third-party datacenter services operator, not a hosting company and not a datacenter owner. It works inside data centers that other companies own and run, and it sells rack space, IP transit, leased IP addresses, network connectivity and data-centre hardware together with the services that deliver, install and support them. Remote hands is the narrowest of those services: physical tasks carried out on the customer's instruction, with the customer's own engineers keeping control of the technical decisions. The work happens under the facility operator's rules. That is why a request names the facility, the rack and the task before anyone is dispatched.

Data centres in Amsterdam, ordered by the number of networks present:

A remote hands request in Amsterdam is built around a written task list. You tell Reboot Monkey what must be done, where the equipment sits and what a finished job looks like. The engineer follows the instruction as written. Typical tasks fall into four groups.

The first-contact step is the task description. Send the facility, the rack location, the equipment involved and the exact action you want. If the job needs a decision rather than an instruction, for example diagnosing an intermittent fault or changing a configuration, it belongs to smart hands: technical work that needs diagnostic judgement and configuration knowledge. Naming the right service at the start avoids an engineer arriving at a rack with a task list that cannot be completed as written. Once the request is accepted, a Reboot Monkey engineer is dispatched to the facility, works under the operator's access rules and carries out the listed steps. You receive a report of what was done, and photographs where the task calls for visual proof. For every customer site, a second, briefed Reboot Monkey engineer is named as backup, so the work does not depend on one person being available. Network work follows the same pattern. Reboot Monkey sells the network for the rack: it orders the cross connects and carrier circuits from the facility operator and the carriers present in the facility, and Reboot Monkey engineers install and patch the cabling in your rack. A remote hands request can therefore sit alongside a connectivity order instead of being arranged through a separate party. In practice this means one supplier relationship can cover an Amsterdam rack and equipment elsewhere. Prices are quoted on request and depend on the customer and the size of the job, so a quote is based on your actual task list.

These terms apply in every facility in Amsterdam where Reboot Monkey engineers work.

The data centres we work in hold their own certifications, such as ISO/IEC 27001 and ISO 9001. Ask us for the certificate of your site.

Remote hands is often the first step in a larger piece of work, and the same engineers handle the neighbouring services. If hardware has to move between racks, rooms or facilities, plan it as a Server Migration in Amsterdam (/en/server-migration/netherlands/amsterdam/), where equipment is moved, recabled and checked at its destination. If you are still deciding where the equipment will sit, Colocation in Amsterdam (/en/colocation/netherlands/amsterdam/) covers rack space inside a facility that another company owns and runs.

Other services follow the same request model. Rack and stack means installing, mounting and cabling new hardware. Data center decommissioning means removing and disposing of retired hardware. Hardware monitoring means the Reboot Monkey NOC monitors your servers and network equipment, so a fault raised by monitoring can be passed straight to an engineer for a physical fix.