I came across an interesting article in Data Center Knowledge about a device known as a heat wheel, or Kyoto Cooling, that takes advantage of outside air to cool a datacenter. I’m pretty familiar with the concept of air-side economization but I had never heard of this technology before. Sounds pretty cool. My datacenter location probably has the right climate profile to take advantage of this type of technology.
Better than the Kyoto Accord
November 16, 2008
No Comments » | 
Hosting | Tagged: Datacenter, heat wheel, kyoto cooling | 
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Posted by unofficialcto
VISION 2008 Redux
November 14, 2008
Well VISI pulled off a solid VISION 2008 technology conference yesterday in downtown St. Paul. Kudos’s go out to the VISI marketing team for the event organization and the respectable attendance. I don’t know the final attendance count but my guess is it landed in the 150-200 range. The food was good and the networking opportunities were plentiful.
I attended two sessions: Jim Akers from NetApp talking about next generation storage and Misha Govshteyn from Alert Logic talking about security. I’ve known Jim almost my whole career starting back in the old ISP days when he worked at Cisco. I found his discussion of storage virtualization and clones particularly interesting. Misha is the CTO and Co-Founder of Alert Logic and I thought he gave a very high-level, strategic overview of current security threats and defense strategies. His presentation was particularly refreshing since I’m so used to hearing thinly veiled vendor pitches during these types of presentations. I was very interested to learn how worms are becoming more stealthy. A few years ago worms were used as a way to damage computers and now they are used to extract financially valuable information.
I also had the opportunity to meet up with several prominent local bloggers and entrepreneurs including Graeme Thickens, Steve Borsch and Steve Kickert. Steve’s company, Riverock Technologies, recently launched a new team collaboration and productivity solution called OnePlace. The SaaS-based solution is written in Ruby-on-Rails and hosted at Engine Yard.
UPDATE: Graeme Thickens wrote a wonderful blog article detailing Robert Steven’s keynote speech at VISION 2008.
UPDATE2: Steve Brosch wrote an article in Minnov8 describing his experience at VISION 2008.
No Comments » | 
Hosting | Tagged: alert logic, netapp, visi, vision 2008 | 
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Posted by unofficialcto
Sue them and they will come
November 10, 2008
I wrote about the city of Monticello, MN a month ago and their on-going battle to build out a city-wide fiber network for Internet access. They won an important court victory that allowed them to continue building the network in a case levied by TDS, the incumbent telco. Now TDS is appealing the court decision while they frantically build out their own fiber network in the city.
Here’s a memo to the good citizens of Monticello. You will soon be able to choose between two network providers. One is your local body politic. The other is a company that ignored your interests, sued your local government, ate up your taxes, and actively worked to not only slow down but kill your local project. Choose wisely.
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Government, Internet | Tagged: monticello, city fiber | 
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Posted by unofficialcto
Small Businesses: No we can’t
November 5, 2008I don’t have a crystal ball to foretell the future of the economy and industry in America. President-elect Obama doesn’t either. But it is not hard to see that businesses may tread water during his term. Small businesses potentially face a perfect storm of reduced access to capital, increased taxes on businesses and consumers, capital gains tax increases, sales tax increases, material cost increases, energy cap and trading, and increased regulation. Community service is the new form of entrepreneurship. Wealth creation, business ownership, investing and industriousness are classified as sins. The middle class isn’t part of the working class. And those who invest the most in government are asked to pay their fair share. It will be an interesting four years.
3 Comments | Government | Tagged: obama, president, small business | Permalink
Posted by unofficialcto
Big clouds on the horizon
October 28, 2008Several big announcements rained down from the Internet clouds over the past few days. Amazon announced support for Microsoft Windows in their EC2 cloud. They will support both the Windows OS (AD, IIS, .NET, etc) and SQL Server. Additionally they are providing a 99.95% uptime SLA for their services. This is a respectable goal for a cloud hosting service.
Microsoft, not to be outdone, announced their own cloud computing offering called Azure. We all knew that Microsoft was working on a cloud hosting service over the past year. It’s nice to finally hear some of the details. Microsoft’s service is initially geared towards developers but it’s not hard to see that small businesses are the next likely target. Microsoft provides additional support in the cloud for technologies like Microsoft Dynamics, Sharepoint, and Live.
Someone recently asked me the question: “Are clouds going to compete with dedicated hosting services?” My response was both yes and no. Cloud hosting from Amazon and Microsoft will definitely compete with unmanaged dedicated hosters like The Planet and SoftLayer. Cloud hosting is nothing more than virtualized Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). I also think cloud hosting will directly compete with smaller datacenter colocation deals. Think about it. If you are a company looking to colo half-a-dozen servers at a datacenter you could save significant capex and infrastructure headaches by using virtual servers in a cloud. Plus you could take advantage of the global business continuity features of a large cloud.
I don’t believe clouds will compete with managed hosting providers — yet. The simple reason is that cloud hosters don’t provide server management. They are purely infrastructure plays with some cool APIs. I’m sure some smart group of people is thinking about building a managed services business on top of a cloud platform. You just need the technical talent, marketing, and luck.
No Comments » | Cloud computing, Hosting | Tagged: Amazon, clouds, microsoft, softlayer, the planet, utility computing | Permalink
Posted by unofficialcto
A hoster looking up
October 21, 2008
If someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up I would say “SoftLayer!”. I’m impressed by their focus, their open architecture, and their frictionless business processes. SoftLayer probably looks like another me-too Internet hoster to a layperson. But to someone in the business this company is a shining example of how to do-it-right. I own and work at a hosting business and companies like this keep me awake at night — not out of fear, but because they prove what is possible in our industry. And I think everyone needs to identify a business in their industry that they look up to.
I love the fact they provide an open API that customers can leverage to manage their computing resources. Customers can use the API to integrate internal business processes with their service provider’s processes. As service providers become more of an extension of corporate IT’s internal resources these types of APIs will become more critical.
SoftLayer engineers also designed a network architecture which provides both performance and management benefits. They can easily connect multiple dedicated servers using a private internal network. The big benefit of a private network is that customers don’t have to pay for bandwidth consumed by servers talking to one another (i.e., web app server talking to a database server). Hosters like The Planet used to make oodles of cash off of companies that had heavy bandwidth utilization between servers. This kind of bandwidth effectively costs the service provider nothing.
SoftLayer’s frictionless business processes really separate the company from the pack. Take the service ordering process for example. You can go from an online order to a fully provisioned dedicated server in minutes. You can manage that server remotely using KVM-over-IP functionality. Need to reboot the server? No problem. They provide managed power port access. Need to rebuild your server? Again, no problem. You can rebuild your server using one of their server imaging systems.
SoftLayer didn’t invent anything new in the sense that most of these technologies have been around for years. Their success is based on their ability to elegantly bundle these technologies in a way that can be fully managed by their customers. The company recently announced a partnership with Citrix to build a cloud computing infrastructure. I plan to follow this new effort very closely.
No Comments » | Cloud computing, Hosting | Tagged: Hosting, softlayer, dedicated servers | Permalink
Posted by unofficialcto
The role of the CTO
October 21, 2008
I came across a very insightful article describing the role of a Chief Technology Officer. Some of the key points include:
- The CTO should not manage developers
- A CTO should not manage a hardware team or an infrastructure group
- The Chief Technology Officer matches new technological capabilities with business needs
- The CTO is not an advocate, but a strategic planner and thinker
- The CTO needs to understand the abstract potential that a new technology might offer, and must know the underlying architecture of the firm’s business processes
- The CTO must have a high degree of professional integrity
No Comments » | CTO | Tagged: chief technical officer, chief technology officer, CTO | Permalink
Posted by unofficialcto
Me for President!
October 21, 2008I’m getting all kinds of press for my write-in campaign for President. Here’s a news video that recently appeared covering my fast growing campaign. I promise that if I’m elected all citizens will receive a free Xbox360.
No Comments » | Government | Permalink
Posted by unofficialcto
Do more with less
October 16, 2008
You probably think I’m going to talk about how IT shops have to reign in spending given our current economic forecast. But I’m not. I’m actually commenting on a recent article out of Pennsylvania:
Pennsylvania has begun a major effort to cut electricity use, requiring the state’s 11 utilities to not only stop power usage from rising, but to cut it starting in 2011.
How would you like to be a company with a datacenter located in the Philly area right now? If you are a datacenter company you need to start making plans to get out of Pennsylvania. The problem is politicians get warm fuzzy feelings about these kinds of efforts and don’t understand the collateral damage. What if New York tells businesses they are going to start cutting power generation? Or California? Or Minnesota? I know that my business would be seriously impacted.
You can’t grow businesses — especially IT businesses — today without increasing power. I agree that conservation and energy efficiency are good things. But we can’t conserve our way out of an economic downturn. We have to build our way out of it with increased business productivity, sales, and yes power.
1 Comment | Government | Tagged: energy, power utilities | Permalink
Posted by unofficialcto
Some like it hot
October 15, 2008
Google apparently runs its datacenters hotter than most companies achieving millions in cost savings. Industry standard datacenter temperature ranges were recently adjusted upward to between 68 and 77 degrees Fahrenheit (20 to 25 degress Celsius). I’ve oftentimes had polite disagreements with customers that tour my datacenters and balk at the 70-72 degree average temperature reading. Most people don’t realize that datacenter operators have gradually been raising acceptable temperature limits over the past decade. And it’s with good reason: that 5 degree temperature difference could mean as much as 20% energy savings.
No Comments » | Hosting, Internet | Tagged: Datacenter, Google | Permalink
Posted by unofficialcto
