VeriSign: 48 Billion DNS Queries A Day

VeriSign processed peak loads of more than 48 billion Domain Name System (DNS) queries per day in the second quarter of 2008, the company said yesterday in its latest Domain Report. The number of peak daily DNS requests has doubled since the start of 2007, when they stood at 24 billion per day.

That’s why VeriSign is investing $100 million in upgrading the DNS infrastructure for the .com and .net top-level domains. Last year VeriSign deployed new infrastructure in Miami, New York City, Chicago, Palo Alto and Washington, DC to upgrade its DNS resolution sites. VeriSign’s long-term goal is to expand its capacity to handle more than 4 trillion DNS requests per day by 2010.

Security Moves Into Infrastructure Services

Will a shift in the way security services are delivered create more opportunities for providers of managed hosting and data center services? Security researcher Bruce Schneier thinks so, citing fresh evidence from last week’s RSA conference that security is becoming so complex that it is increasingly being outsourced. Schneier, writing at Wired, describes a growing disconnect between end users and vendors developing new security products and services:

Commerce requires a meeting of the minds between buyer and seller, and it’s just not happening. The sellers can’t explain what they’re selling to the buyers, and the buyers don’t buy because they don’t understand what the sellers are selling. There’s a mismatch between the two; they’re so far apart that they’re barely speaking the same language. … For a while now I have predicted the death of the security industry. Not the death of information security as a vital requirement, of course, but the death of the end-user security industry that gathers at the RSA Conference. When something becomes infrastructure - power, water, cleaning service, tax preparation - customers care less about details and more about results. Technological innovations become something the infrastructure providers pay attention to, and they package it for their customers.

The bottom line, according to Schneier, is that many companies don’t want to be in IT security business.

2.2 Billion Text Messages for Valentine’s Day

Valentine’s Day is traditionally the busiest day of the year for mobile messages, and today is expected to be the busiest yet. A record 2.2 billion mobile messages, including short message service (SMS), and multimedia messaging service (MMS) messages, are expected to be sent and received today in North America alone, according to VeriSign (VRSN).

VeriSign, which powers inter-carrier mobile messaging for seven of the top 10 wireless carriers in North America, said that the number of messages on its infrastructure has traditionally jumped 40 percent on February 14 compared to an average day.

“This is a business where the ability to quickly scale to meet huge spikes in demand is absolutely critical,” said Charles Meyers, VeriSign’s group president for Messaging and Mobile Media. “VeriSign successfully met this demand by delivering 530 million SMS messages on New Year’s Eve, and we’re confident that Valentine’s Day will bring another record day to the network.”

NetMagic Gets $20M for US Expansion

NetMagic Solutions, one of India’s leading managed IT services providers, said today that it has received $20 million in private equity financing, which it will use to expand its remote infrastructure management services in the United States. NetMagic also said that it has appointed Sandip Gupta, former president and CEO of IT automation software maker Ensim, as its President.

NetMagic has four data center facilities and 500 customers in India, and a data center presence in Silicon Valley. NetMagic says its expansion will target US firms that want to retain their infrastructure on-site but need help managing it. NetMagic offers services to monitor and manage IT equipment remotely from its facilities in both the US and India.

“One of the biggest concerns for US companies we’ve spoken to is staffing, especially the number of skilled people who are retiring,” said Gupta, who said NetMagic is already providing remote management services for several large international customers, including a global VPN provider and an American firm offering software as a service (SaaS).

Wikia Search Launches from Iowa Data Bunker

Tomorrow’s launch of Wikia Search, the much anticipated search engine from the founders of Wikipedia, will be powered by servers housed in an ultra-secure underground hosting facility in Iowa. United States Secure Hosting Center (USSHC) is providing colocation and disaster recovery for Wikia, Inc. from its data bunker in Monticello, Iowa. Wikia is the most recent company to turn to ultra-secure subterranean facilities to host critical infrastructure.

Wikia Search is launching a people-powered search engine to compete with algorithm-based engines such as Google. Wikia’s goal is to provide fewer search results with “parked” pages and ad content. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley launched Wikia in 2004 to provide hosted community-based wikis. On Dec. 23, Wales announced that Wikia Search would officially launch on Jan. 7. (UPDATE: The service is now live. See TechCrunch, CenterNetworks and TechMeme for early reviews).

USSHC’s data center is housed in a former government communications facility, and is “designed to survive and operate normally during a major disaster.” The facility is several stories underground and is hosting the core of the Wikia search system, according to Isaac Helgens, sales and marketing director for USSHC.

“USSHC is serving as our critical hub for this launch,” said Jeremie Miller of Wikia Search. “Their level of service and security is as unprecedented as the disaster tolerance of their facility itself.” Miller, who was hired by Wikia in May, is known as the developer of the Jabber instant messaging program, and is based in Iowa.

Cable Labeling! Let’s Party!

How do staffers from a large hosting company unwind? A recent Thursday night found the staff at SoftLayer participating in an unusual group activity: a cable labeling party. Managers, developers and staffers from the sales, accounting and marketing departments got together after hours to sort and label all the cabling for the company’s new Seattle data center expansion. Mary Hall has more at the Inner Layer.

It’s an innovative approach, but perhaps more productive than other recent data center team building strategies, like playing Halo 3. And there were no reports of anyone trying to label cables using the Gravity Hammer. One thing’s for sure: data center culture is never boring!

Plenty of Fish: Small Back-End, Big Valuation?

We’ve previously noted the success of Plenty of Fish, the free dating site operated by Markus Frind that manages huge traffic on a minimalist infrastructure. Read/Write Web has an update that examines the potential value of PlentyOfFish.com in an environment in which Facebook is valued at $15 billion. While other bloggers are warning about the emergence of a get-rich-quick bubble mentality, RWW’s Richard MacManus reports that Frind now says his site is on track to earn $10 million this year from a combination of AdSense, banner ads and affiliate marketing.

The headline wonders whether Plenty Of Fish would be worth $1 billion in the current climate. “It’s very hard to quantify this, but at the very least POF would be worth in the 9 figures due to its annual revenues of $10M,” MacManus writes. One factor is that Plenty of Fish appears to get much better performance from its ads than social networking hubs like Facebook and MySpace, according to Frind.

Frind says his site gets 1.2 billion page views a month, and 500,000 average unique logins per day, which are handled by a handful of servers and the use of Akamai’s content delivery network. High Scalability has additional details on the architecture and load balancing supporting PlentyOfFish.com.

New 20,000SF Data Center Opens in Maryland

Xecunet LLC has opened a new 20,000 square foot data center in Frederick, Maryland to accommodate its growing colocation business, the company said this week. The new facility on Industry Lane in Frederick is three times larger than Xecunet’s previous data center, which will continue to operate, Operations Manager Dallas Kincaid told local media.

Kincaid hopes to buy more space at his location by the end of 2008 or early 2009. While there are many large data centers in Washington and northern Virginia, there is not enough capacity north of the city in the Maryland suburbs north of the city, according to Kincaid. Xecunet hopes to fill that void. “I foresee us having 60,000 to 70,000 square feet in the future,” Kincaid said.

Findory to Shut Down Nov. 1

The personalized search engine Findory will shut down Nov. 1, founder Greg Linden announced Sunday on his Geeking with Greg blog. Findory, which was launched in 2004, has been on auto-pilot since January, when Greg said development was being shelved as he focused more on his health and family. Here’s Sunday’s update:

Sadly, all good things must come to an end. On November 1, 2007, Findory will be shutting down. It was a wonderful experiment building Findory. Information personalization is in our future. Some day, online newspapers will focus on your interests, building you your own unique, customized front page of news. Some day, search engines will learn from what you do to help you find what you need. Some day, your computer will adapt to your needs to help with the task at hand. Some day, information overload will be tamed. But not today.

On Friday, Greg wrote about his experience scaling Findory’s infrastructure, which offers an interesting window into how to design a personalized service for speedy performance and growth.

NaviSite Raises Revenue Guidance

Shares of managed hosting provider NaviSite Inc. (NAVI) are higher this morning after the company forecast revenue well above Wall Street’s expectations. Investors liked the results, as shares of NaviSite are up 80 cents to $8.58 a share (+11.5 percent) in early trading today on the NASDAQ exchange.

The company said late Tuesday that it expects sales between $36 million and $37 million for the quarter ending in October, while analysts polled by Thomson Financial had predicted revenue of $34.3 million. The company’s results will benefit from its recent acquisitions of netASPx, Alabanza and Jupiter Hosting, which totaled $56 million. Navisite expects full-year revenue of $170 million to $180 million, compared to analyst expectations of $150.5 million.

NaviSite has more than 1,000 customers and 14 data centers in the U.S., United Kingdom and India. The Andover, Mass. company provides application hosting services and operates a content distribution network. It has also added data center capacity with the Alabanza and netASPx acquisitions, expanding its colocation footprint.