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iWeb Plans Fourth Data Center
January 12th, 2010 : Rich MillerHosting and IT infrastructure provider iWeb has announced plans for a new 31,000 square foot data center, in the LaSalle borough in western Montreal. The facility will add capacity to host 20,000 dedicated servers, bringing iWeb’s total dedicated server capacity to nearly 35,000 servers.
“Automation is one of the company’s priorities in 2010, (and) the new data center will be built with automation in mind, ” said Cyrille Mertes, iWeb’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO). “Because we are essentially building a new center, we can design it according to current standards with no restrictions due to previous technologies already installed.”
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Netcraft Survey Dips by 27 Million Sites
January 11th, 2010 : Rich Miller
Changes at a Chinese blogging service led to a decline of 27 million sites in the number of global web sites found in the monthly Netcraft Web Server survey for January 2010. The drop was the largest one-month decline ever for the Netcraft survey, which has been a leading benchmark of Internet growth since its debut in August 1995. The shift illustrates how the growth of large blogging and social networking platforms has complicated the challenge of tracking Internet growth.On Friday Netcraft reported that it found 206,741,990 sites in its January 2010 survey, down sharply from 233,848,493 sites a month earlier. The UK firm attributed the drop to changes at qq.com (Qzone), a blogging platform owned by the Chinese Internet portal TenCent.
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Rackspace and the Transition to the Cloud
December 15th, 2009 : Rich Miller
John Engates jokes that web hosting is “the original cloud computing.” It’s a reminder of the connection between the past and future for Rackspace Hosting. As the chief technical officer of Rackspace, Engates has helped steer the company through transitions driven by both technology and terminology.As customers focus on the benefits of cloud computing, hosting companies are pondering the best way to reposition their product offerings to compete. Perhaps no hosting provider has navigated the shift to the cloud more smoothly than Rackspace (RAX), a company founded in the early days of the dot-com boom that has emerged as the second-largest player in cloud computing, according to some analyses.
In the first three quarters of 2009, Rackspace’s cloud computing operation grew from 34,820 customers to 61,616. The company’s revenue from cloud computing in the third quarter was $15.3 million, a fraction of the $147 million brought in by the company’s managed hosting business, but more than double the $6.5 million from the same period in 2008.
Build, Buy or Partner
In its journey to the cloud, Rackspace confronted a key question facing hosting providers entering the cloud computing market: do we build, buy or partner? For Rackspace the answer has been “all of the above.” Engates says this approach has provided Rackspace with the flexibility to address a variety of customer decisions.Rackspace developed in-house capabilities through its Mosso unit, which started life as a reseller offering and evolved into the Rackspace Cloud. The San Antonio company also acquired e-mail specialist Webmail.us in 2007 and cloud storage specialist JungleDisk and virtual private server provier SliceHost in 2008. It also added capabilities through partnerships, such as a deal with Limelight Networks to offer content delivery to customers.
“We got an early start compared to some of our competitors,” Engates says of Rackspace’s push into cloud computing. “Many of our hosting competitors wanted to wait and see how things developed. Mosso gave us the engineering capability and confidence to go do it. It helped us do a reboot.”
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Roundup: SoftLayer, Power Loft, Level 3
December 2nd, 2009 : John RathHere’s a roundup of some of some of this week’s headlines from the data center and hosting industry:
- SoftLayer continues data center expansion. SoftLayer Technologies announced the opening of three new data center pods in the Dallas, Seattle and northern Virginia data centers. The new pods add capacity for 20,000 additional servers, bringing total capacity to more than 45,000 servers. “These three new pods meet the customer demand increases that we expect in the very near future,” said Lance Crosby, CEO of SoftLayer. “And they are only preliminary measures in our growth strategy for 2010. We have some big plans which we can’t wait to share with everyone.” SoftLayer has standardized on the pod architecture for data center design, allowing them to optimize space, power, network, personnel and internal infrastructure. The company recently announced that it was on track to report more than $80 million in revenue for 2009 and raised $20 million to fund the continued growth of the company.
- Power Loft opens Virginia Data Center: Power Loft LLC announced the substantial completion of their first data center, Power Loft @ Innovation. Located in Prince William County, Virginia, this 225,000 square foot facility has signed an international IT technology outsourcing company as its anchor tenant, and was recently awarded the first Northern Virginia Technology Council’s Green Award. “Power Loft is in the forefront of creating energy efficient data center space,” said Bobbie Kilberg, President & CEO of the Northern Virginia Technology Council (NVTC). “Having our company singled out to receive the NVTC Green Award, turned four years of hard work into a very unexpected night of celebration for us all,” said Jim Coakley, CEO of Power Loft LLC. “We are very
proud to be so honored and we commend the NVTC for elevating the visibility of the many companies in Northern
Virginia who are making an increasingly positive impact on our environment.” - Level 3 to support Clearwire’s 4G network. Level 3 Communications announced an expanded relationship with Clearwire Communications Tuesday to support their CLEAR 4G WiMax services. The agreement provides Clearwire with network transport services as a part of their deployment of CLEAR WiMax services in major metropolitan markets across the United States. Level 3 will provide high speed connectivity to Chicago, Dallas, Philadelphia, Seattle, Washington D.C., Houston and the Bay area. CLEAR 4G WiMax is a next generation mobile internet solution from Clearwire that claims to be 4 times faster than 3G. Clearwire has been growing rapidly and in their third quarter 2009 results reported that 4G network coverage increased by 67% to over 10 million people. They also recently had a $1.564 billion equity financing round. Is there a map for that? – you bet.
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Slashdot: Evaluating A Data Center
November 20th, 2009 : Rich MillerEarlier this week there was a discussion on Slashdot about how to evaluate a data center. The thread features more than 200 comments about items to look for and avoid when selecting a data center, including questions to ask while touring a facility. As always, there’s a variety of views, some more informed than others. But the discussion may provide useful feedback, whether you’re shopping for colo or looking for insight into potential customers.
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Roundup: Equinix, Switch & Data, The Planet
November 11th, 2009 : John RathHere’s a roundup of news announcements from the data center and hosting industry:
- Hibernia Atlantic expands to two Equinix data centers. Submarine transport cable provider Hibernia Atlantic announced Tuesday the expansion of its Global Financial Network(GFN) into the Equinix New York-2 and New York-4 data centers in Secaucus, New Jersey. The expansion from Hibernia aims to provide low latency, redundancy and connectivity to global banks and exchanges in the New York metro area. Hibernia’s GFN spans 24,000 Kilometers (14,913 miles) of fiber optic cables across key financial cities around the world. “Our continued GFN expansion in New York metro and in other major financial centers reflects our core commitment to provide ‘security through diversity’—our company philosophy that offers world-class, redundant solutions to our financial customers,” said Bob McMann, VP of Provisioning and Procurement for Hibernia
- Switch & Data selected by Pragma Securities. Switch & Data announced that Pragma Securities, a trading solutions provider has selected their New York Financial EcoCenter to optimize the performance of its quantitative trading solution. After an extensive diligence process Pragma selected the North Bergen, New Jersey data center to host its trading execution services, and will be one cross connect away from the other electronic trading customers in the site.
- Nimsoft introduces alliance program. Following the October launch of their Unified Monitoring Solutions, Nimsoft announced their charter members in the Unified Monitoring Alliance Tuesday. The new monitoring solution provides a total, unified view of both internal and external IT resources. The Unified Monitoring Alliance partners are made up of service providers, solution partners and technology development partners. Partners like FusionStorm, Ingram Micro, Shavlik, Service-now.com, Rackspace and many others are among the first to join the alliance. “The alliance not only expands opportunities for growth and collaborative innovation for our partners, but also effectively increases the breadth and depth of the systems monitoring and management solutions that Nimsoft offers to its customers,” said Nimsoft President Gary Read said
- The Planet signs Ayuda Networks. The Planet announced Tuesday that Ayuda Networks has signed on to join the company’s recently launched Partner Plus program. Ayuda Networks consults with clients to evaluate connectivity requirements and implement the best solutions for their specific business. Ayuda will add The Planet to its portfolio of top-tier solution providers and include them in recommendations to clients evaluating managed and dedicated hosting, as well as colocation services.
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Virtual Goods and the Cost of Infrastructure
November 2nd, 2009 : Rich Miller
Some of the customer racks supporting online gaming operations inside a GNi data center.
In an economy built atop virtual goods, how do you manage capacity and sort out whether the business model is able to pay for the infrastructure required to power it? That’s an important questionas as virtual item purchases become a key revenue stream for fast-growing social networking platforms like Facebook.
Managed hosting specialist GNi, which offers an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) hosting platform for online games, offers a window into the evolving infrastructure requirements of virtual economies. In the U.S., popular understanding of online gaming has been shaped by the popularity of World of Warcraft and other virtual worlds that generate through monthly subscription fees. That approach is increasingly yielding to a “free-to-play” business model.
“A lot of games are free, and now make their money by selling virtual items,” said Robert Yusin, General Manager of Field Operations at GNi. “The most popular games that we see are the virtual item games.”
Pioneered in Asia
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This gaming business models based on virtual goods developed in Asia, where some industry watchers say virtual goods is a $7 billion market. One of GNI’s large gaming customers is Frogster Interactive, whose free-to-play game Runes of Magic has more than 2 million users. -
Roundup: The Planet, Dell, Juniper, Cisco
October 28th, 2009 : John RathHere’s a roundup of news announcements from the data center and hosting industry:
- The Planet Reports Third Quarter Results. Hosting company The Planet discussed results for the third quarter of 2009 Tuesday. “Our performance this quarter provides cautious optimism about an emerging economic turn-around, with indicators moving in the right direction,” said Chairman and CEO Douglas J. Erwin said. “Our business experienced an upturn with new, more complex transactions and a healthier, more robust pipeline of opportunities than we’ve seen during the past three years.” Highlights of the quarter included a new partner plus channel program, hiring CAPSTAR commercial real estate to lease Dallas space, and joining the Microsoft BizSpark program.
- Juniper and Dell Collaborate. Juniper Networks (JNPR) has had a flury of news lately, with an announcement Tuesday that it will collaborate with Dell to offer networking solutions under Dell’s PowerConnect brand. Additionally the two companies plan to work on open, standards-based solutions for virtualized data centers and deliver technology solutions using Converged Enhanced Ethernet. Dell plans to market, service and support Juniper’s high-performance networking solutions to its large enterprise, small and medium business customers and public organizations. Juniper also announced that Australian Government superannuation administrator ComSuper has selected Juniper Networks to implement a completely new network infrastructure based on Juniper’s EX Series ethernet switches and Unified Access Control solution. A third announcement Tuesday reported that Juniper’s executive and management team will ring the NYSE opening bell on Thursday, October 29th.
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Roundup: Last Call for GeoCities
October 26th, 2009 : Rich MillerToday, Oct. 26, is the day that Yahoo has said will be the final day of availability for its GeoCities hosting service and the hundreds of thousands - perhaps even millions – of free web sites it contains. There’s been a burst of news and nostalgia around the shuttering of the site. Here’s a roundup:
- There have been a number of efforts to preserve the GeoCities sites for posterity, including one by the Internet Archive and another by Archive Team, a separate group. Both efforts began this spring.
- Another effort was begin on Oct. 20 (yep, last Tuesday) by ReoCities, which has generated interest for its mad scramble to backup all of GeoCities in less than a week. Hmmm … did they know the Archive was working on this?
- Gawker, with its usual snark, cites the evaporation of value represented by the closure, noting that Yahoo paid $3.5 billion for GeoCities in 1999.
- Netcraft notes that the impending closure will wipe out at least 930 known phishing sites, including 143 that were launched in the last month.
- News.com has invited readers to share their “favorite stories about GeoCities.”
- Slashdot links to a number of tributes around the web, including ones at xkcd and Homestar Runner.
