Green (low carbon) Data Center Blog

Moving to a new Cloud Hosted environment for GreenM3, SquareSpace

It's been over 4 years as a happy user of TypePad for hosting www.greenm3.com, but I have new ideas for the blog and a new platform makes things much easier.

In the process of moving I will be making other changes to the blog, and with any move there will be transition issues. 

Please be patient over the next few days.

I will be moving to http://www.squarespace.com/ 

The Platform: Reliability from the Beginning

See the website you're on? It's a Squarespace website. We run our business website off of the same exact systems, using the same exact accounts that we sell to our customers. That means if your site is down, so is ours. Since we run a profitable and well performing business, it better not be down for long.

Nothing to set up, nothing to tweak, nothing to install, nothing to scale, nothing to optimize (SEO).

Squarespace is a completely managed system. We take care of all the tricky details in setting up your site, which means that there is no software to install, nothing to upgrade and that your site will stay online through the most massive traffic storms. Further, we've already used every trick in the book to ensure your site gets picked up by search engines. New features are constantly deployed so that your site is always up to date.

True cloud hosting.

Running a huge site? Getting featured on Digg and Slashdot all the time? You need Squarespace. All sites are hosted on all of our web servers -- which means you never have to worry about a single server failing. The traffic generated from being on the front page of Digg is nothing compared to what the thousands of sites hosted on Squarespace see in a single day. A normal day for the architecture serving your Squarespace site is serving tens of millions of hits. Compare this to the crippling effect this would have on your slice of resources on a shared web host — you wouldn't stay online long enough to receive the traffic from your press.

We have real people monitoring your website 24 hours a day.

Squarespace monitors hundreds of functional aspects of our system automatically every 20 seconds. We eliminate the cost of setting up your own monitors and we take the worry out of your site going down. Squarespace automates the next human resolution step when we've got a hardware failure, and our engineers are on call 24x7 to handle any issue that may arise.

Critical Flaw as Companies buy Cloud Companies, not understanding how cloud environments are built, leverage ex-Amazon Web Services team

I was chatting with a good friend who I worked with at Apple, and we were discussing how cloud environments get built.  We both left Apple 20 years ago, and we have since spent time in the enterprise services space, but we had the fun of building OS solutions while at Apple with a lot of freedom.   So, we are used to making the trade-offs to build an OS.  A Cloud computing environment in many ways is a large operating system.

What is wrong with most cloud environments?  They take too long to build and they are too prone to human error.  Just like any other IT environment.

Now if you were going to change this.  What would you say if here is a new company with these people.

What is the performance of the solution?

What does a good cloud operating system look like?

Curious who can do this?  Nimbula is the company.

How many executives who are contemplating the purchase and valuation of Rackspace spend the time to figure out that there are scalability issues in their operations?  Almost everyone looks at revenue, growth, costs, etc.  And few look at the cloud computing build and deployment processes.

Imagine a company who chooses to build a cloud computing environment with Nimbula.

Ideally you want to have a very lean smart team to build a better cloud.  You don’t want a big team of people who have been building clouds with lots of sweat and effort. 

How much do you think Rackspace is worth now if you know there are companies out there able to use a fraction of the people Rackspace has building a more reliable cloud computing service?

oh yeh, I had the pleasure of meeting Willem and Reza at Gartner Data Center Conference, and I was quite impressed.

Willem van Biljon, co-Founder and Vice President of Products

Willem is a senior technology executive and entrepreneur who started his career building a unix-based operating system for mini-computers and the first retail debit card payment system for one of the largest retailers in South Africa. Building on that expertise, he co-founded Mosaic Software to build the first high-end payment transaction switch for commodity hardware and operating systems. Mosaic became one of the world's leading EFT companies with operations in more than 30 countries and was successfully sold to S1 Corp. in 2004. Willem then joined Amazon to develop the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service business plan and to drive product management and marketing for the service. Willem is a graduate of the University of Cape Town.

Reza Malekzadeh, Vice President, Marketing

Reza brings solid enterprise software marketing experience to Nimbula. Previously, he was Senior Director of Products and Marketing at VMware in EMEA, where he was responsible for all marketing activities in VMware’s second largest theater. Reza had re-joined VMware in June 2007 following its acquisition of Akimbi Systems. He had previously been employee #10 at the company, fulfilling the role of Director of Marketing from 1998 to 2002. Prior to joining VMware, Reza was Vice President for International business at Akimbi Systems where he drove significant international growth, including sales, marketing and channel operations. Before working at Akimbi, Reza co-founded Twingo Systems, which he successfully sold to Cisco Systems in 2004. Reza holds an MBA in Marketing and Business Strategy from HEC in Paris.

Netflix's no data center strategy expanding International

Netflix wrote about its move to AWS and how well things worked.

5 Lessons We’ve Learned Using AWS

In my last post I talked about some of the reasons we chose AWS as our computing platform. We’re about one year into our transition to AWS from our own data centers. We’ve learned a lot so far, and I thought it might be helpful to share with you some of the mistakes we’ve made and some of the lessons we’ve learned.

1. Dorothy, you’re not in Kansas anymore.

If you’re used to designing and deploying applications in your own data centers, you need to be

prepared to unlearn a lot of what you know. Seek to understand and embrace the differences operating in a cloud environment.

...

5. Commit yourself.

When I look back at what the team has accomplished this year in our AWS migration, I’m truly amazed. But it didn’t always feel this good. AWS is only a few years old, and building at a high scale within it is a pioneering enterprise today. There were some dark days as we struggled with the sheer size of the task we’d taken on, and some of the differences between how AWS operates vs. our own data centers.

As you run into the hurdles, have the grit and the conviction to fight through them. Our CEO, Reed Hastings, has not only been fully on board with this migration, he is the person who motivated it! His commitment, the commitment of the technology leaders across the company, helped us push through to success when we could have chosen to retreat instead.

AWS is a tremendous suite of services, getting better all the time, and some big technology companies are running successfully there today. You can too! We hope some of our mistakes and the lessons we’ve learned can help you do it well.

-john ciancutti.

Part of the commitment is international growth.  Here is a post for a Netflix International Engineering Director.

Director of Engineering – International Services

ECommerce and Systems Engineering | Los Gatos, CA

Send Jobvite

The opportunity is compelling: to lead the Internationalization of Netflix Services, a fast growing and highly admired company. Fueled by the broad appeal of being able to instantly watch unlimited movies and TV episodes, Netflix subscriber growth has been accelerating for the last several years and is now more than 50% year-over-year. At the same time Netflix is well positioned to expand internationally in 2011. Our upside potential has never been greater—both domestically and internationally. And never has there been a more promising time to join Netflix.

Gaming + Advertising, Zynga's opportunity to be one of the fastest

Zynga has made changes in their data center networks with solutions like peering in Equinix facilities with Facebook's equinix presence.  Low latency networks have three big markets - securities trading, gaming, and advertising.  Zynga plays in gaming and will in advertising.

Zynga just hired a Facebook advertising executive to head up Zynga's advertising strategy.

Mike Murphy Takes Senior Advisor Role at Zynga

by Kara Swisher
Posted on January 23, 2011 at 7:02 PM PT

Mike Murphy–Facebook’s first head of advertising sales, who left the social networking giant in October to take some personal time off–seems done with relaxing.

He is now taking a part-time, but significant, role at online gaming phenom Zynga to help formulate its advertising strategy.

In addition, Murphy is also close to formalizing a consulting relationship with Facebook.

Given there has been strong interest from more obvious Facebook competitors in retaining Murphy–including Google and Twitter–his move to Zynga is probably the best outcome for it.

Facebook and Zynga have an interesting relationship.

Although the relationship has been tense at times, Zynga remains one of Facebook’s major strategic partners.

Here is some news that discusses the relationship in more details.

Zynga has been a high-profile user of cloud computing services, using tools fromRightScale and NorthScale to run its gaming infrastructure on Amazon EC2. It’s not immediately clear how Zynga’s data center space will fit into its infrastructure or its growth plans.

The reports of the data center lease come amid rampant speculation of tensions between Zynga and Facebook, which could prompt Zynga to launch a stand-alone social gaming network. Even if Zynga and Facebook grow apart, their infrastructure would remain close. Facebook is a major tenant at ACC5, and will have thousands of servers in the same location as Zynga’s reported new data center space.

Are Telcos ready for Cloud computing?

CNET news has a post on on Cloud Computing listing who the players will be Google, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, VMware, Amazon Web Services, IBM, HP, Hosting companies and Telcos.

Telecommunications and cable companies
One possible industry segment that may surprise us with respect to one-stop cloud services would be companies such as AT&T, Verizon Communications, Comcast, and BT--the major telecommunications providers. They own the connectivity to the data center, the campus, mobile devices, and so on, and they have data center infrastructures perfect for a heavily distributed market like the small-business market (where each small business may be local, but the market itself exists in every town and city).

The problem is the same as it has been for decades: business models and regulatory requirements of these companies make it difficult for them to address software services effectively. These companies have traditionally been late to new software market opportunities (with the possible exception of the mobile market). You don't see AT&T, for instance, competing with others in bidding for a platform-as-a-service opportunity. So until they show signs of understanding how to monitize business applications, they are not in the running.

One other area that the author James Urquhart misses is that gives Telcos an advantage. 

They have access to every account due to their network services.

Verizon says they have 200 data centers worldwide.  The number 200 is hard to imagine.  But, think of all the Verizon telephone switching rooms that are much smaller as technology has advanced.  All that power, air conditioned space in locations where network access is top in the industry.

Add to the list, Deutsche Telecom, Chunghwa Telecom, China Telecom, Singtel.  They all have this advantage and all are looking to add cloud computing.

My bet is Telcos are going to be big.

Retaliation for Cloud Computing coming?

Who would protest the coming of Cloud Computing?  The staff it replaces.  And, many times they are the ones who are involved in evaluating a large move to the cloud.

MSNBC has an article that discusses the privatization of the TSA service to improve customer service vs. Federal TSA staff.

Airports toy with the idea of tossing the TSA

Privatizing security won't affect cost or protocol, but could bolster efficiency, customer relations

Jeff Chiu  /  AP

A security contractor pats down a traveler at San Francisco International Airport last year. Security checks at San Francisco International are conducted by private contractors, not federal TSA agents.

By Harriet BaskasTravel writer

A new year has brought new resolve for airport managers who are fed up with the Transportation Security Agency.

"The TSA has grown too big and we're unhappy with the way it's doing things," said Larry Dale, president of Orlando Sanford International Airport. "My board is sold on the fact that the free enterprise system works well and that we should go with a private company we can hold directly accountable for security and customer satisfaction."

Dale isn't alone. Airports in Los Angeles, the Washington, D.C. metro area, Indianapolis, and Charlotte, N.C., are also considering tossing the TSA.

How many end users feel this way about their IT departments?

'People at the top are idiots'
"The screening partnership program may be a step in the right direction, but ultimately, it doesn’t change the fact that people at the top are idiots. The real problem is that TSA needs to be totally rebuilt," said aviation consultant Michael Boyd, of Colorado-based Boyd Group International.

So, what happens?  Stalling.

Cindi Martin, airport director at Glacier Park International in Montana, said her airport sent an SPP application in October of 2009. They, along with three other Montana airports, are still waiting for action.

The delay is creating a new set of problems. Knowing that a private contractor will eventually take over, "[Transportation Security Officers] are retaliating against authority and the airport management staff," Martin said, "and we’re getting no help from TSA management."

So, even though the Cloud has momentum.  Don’t think there are people out there like the TSA who want the problem cloud to go away.

This will frustrate the end users of IT services even more as others make progress faster.

Think of all those start-ups who own no data center assets and everything has been in the cloud since day 1.  Many times it has been said the greenest action in data centers is keeping from building your next data center.  Many start-ups wouldn’t even consider building a data center.

Can a company who uses the cloud claim they have a green data center?

Could Amazon or some other cloud provider give an environmental impact statement as part of their cloud use?  I think someone in Europe will do this before the US.

Expanding the role of Network Operator to include Cloud Operator

Amazon Web Services is a benchmark in cloud computing.  They have added DNS services to improve the performance of AWS clients.

With Route 53, you can create a “hosted zone” to add DNS records for a new domain or transfer DNS records for a domain you currently own. Route 53 is also designed to work well with other AWS offerings, such as AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). By using AWS IAM with Route 53, you can control who in your organization can make changes to your DNS records. In the future, we plan to add additional integration features such as the ability to automatically tie your Amazon Elastic Load Balancer instances to a DNS name, and the ability to route your customers to the closest EC2 region.

Route 53 is also designed to be fast and simple. It uses a global network of DNS servers to respond to end users with low latency and has an easy-to-use, self-service API. There are no long-term contracts or minimum usage commitments for using Route 53 – you pay $1.00 per month for the hosted zones you manage, $0.50 per million queries for the first billion queries, and $0.25 per million queries above a billion. To learn more about Amazon Route 53 visit the Amazon Route 53 detail page or the Getting Started Guide.

Performance of cloud computing solutions is where the top guys are fighting it out.  Why? The top clients find latency and performance of their services has a direct impact on business and value of their services.

Equinix is one choice to improve the performance of applications.

Applications are not all one and the same. You need to be able to set, measure and achieve individual application performance targets to successfully empower customers and employees. Identifying and prioritizing latency-sensitive applications is key to end-user satisfaction.

You can maximize performance for business-critical and latency-sensitive applications by deploying Application Performance Nodes in Platform Equinix sites, which are strategically placed close to major population centers and key user groups.

Equinix provides the widest metro-level coverage of key business and population centers across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific—over 6 million square feet and growing.

Another alternative ramping up is from the Telcos.

One report from Ovum discusses the role of Telcos.

Major telcos will be strong force in cloud computing, experts predict

The major global telecommunications companies will become strong players in the cloud computing market as interest from previously cautious end users increases rapidly over the next two to three years, Ovum has predicted.

A new report* by the independent telecoms analyst states that AT&T, BT, Orange Business Services and Verizon Business have made considerable progress in the arena in just over a year, and in terms of services, can now compete with established players from the IT industry.

According to the report, these companies have led a ‘competitive march’ from telecoms into cloud computing, and now have widely acknowledged credibility in the field.

As companies like HP, Cisco, IBM, and Dell build solution stacks that go across their products.  Another integration paradigm is to integrate the network operator with the cloud operator.

Peter Hall, report author and Ovum principal analyst, said: “The major telcos have a long heritage in providing managed data center services and hosting and have combined this with their networking and security expertise to meet the needs of customers for cloud computing services.

The Telcos are ramping up to be cloud computing players.

2011 Data Center Fight Club–Google, Facebook, Twitter, Skype, & Zynga

In Data Centers a “Fight Club” metaphor can be used to describe the secrecy behind a competitive group.  Where little is said out in the public.  The big fight in 2009 was a Google vs. Microsoft for PUE and efficient data centers.  PUE is now a common term and even used by some to specify data centers. 2010 Facebook has emerged as a competitor, and there are many other companies that tops in their category like Twitter, Skype, and Zynga.

TechCrunch discusses the talent wars for top engineers.  Data Centers are not mentioned in the article, but none of these companies can exist without data centers.

Begun The Talent Wars Have – Why Twitter needs a London HQ: Google Engineers

by Mike Butcher on December 30, 2010

We’ve reported before about how the escalating warfor talent in Silicon Valley is effectively creating a kind of arms race between tech companies.

For example, Google is offering employees a 10% pay increase for 2011; companies like About.me are getting acquireddays after launch; and job postings in the IT industry are shooting to astronomical levels. Even Google’s Eric Schmidt has admitted to this battle.

Facebook, Google, Zynga and Twitter are hiring like crazy – and this insatiable desire for staff is likely to spill over into other countries. And perhaps the obvious first target outside of the Valley is London: English speaking, and a magnet for existing tech people in Europe working for US multinationals. And the latest to consider extending its reach there is Twitter. Europe is highly attractive to Twitter, since its advertising markets, particularly the UK where Twitter has exploded in adoption, are waiting to be milked.

Twitter’s first office outside of the US, will be headed up by Katie Jacobs Stanton, the company’s head of international strategy. Stanton was recently in London, where the UK government has been going all out to try to woo tech companies with its ‘East London Tech City’ policy.

What gets little press is the talent battles these companies have to find the best data center staff.

What is wrong with the integrated IT infrastructure stacks? lack of choice

WSJ has an article on behavior that strikes fear in retailers.

Phone-Wielding Shoppers Strike Fear Into Retailers

By MIGUEL BUSTILLO And ANN ZIMMERMAN

Tri Tang, a 25-year-old marketer, walked into a Best Buy Co. store in Sunnyvale, Calif., this past weekend and spotted the perfect gift for his girlfriend.

Last year, he might have just dropped the $184.85 Garmin global positioning system into his cart. This time, he took out his Android phone and typed the model number into an app that instantly compared the Best Buy price to those of other retailers. He found that he could get the same item on Amazon.com Inc.'s website for only $106.75, no shipping, no tax.

Brian L. Frank for The Wall Street Journal

Tri Tang uses his mobile phone app, TheFind, to scan product bar codes and immediately troll online for the best price at various retailers.

Mr. Tang bought the Garmin from Amazon right on the spot.

"It's so useful," Mr. Tang says of his new shopping companion, a price comparison app called TheFind. He says he relies on it "to make sure I am getting the best price."

What first came to mind when I read this is the set of people I know in the data center industry who I can reach out to get a 2nd, 3rd or 4th opinion on almost any part of a data center project.  No one person can know it all, but if you have a network you can tap you can make different choices.

Retail shopping has changed as retailers can no longer count on spreading out high margin products in the midst of selling the power of a big merchant’s buying power.

Until recently, retailers could reasonably assume that if they just lured shoppers to stores with enticing specials, the customers could be coaxed into buying more profitable stuff, too.

Now, marketers must contend with shoppers who can use their smartphones inside stores to check whether the specials are really so special, and if the rest of the merchandise is reasonably priced.

While many holiday consumers refuse to pay full price, retailers are trying to outdo one another by encouraging shoppers to spend more, but without giving away the store. Elizabeth Holmes discusses some of retailers' most popular discount tactics.

"The retailer's advantage has been eroded," says Greg Girard of consultancy IDC Retail Insights, which recently found that roughly 45% of customers with smartphones had used them to perform due diligence on a store's prices. "The four walls of the store have become porous."

Integrated HW, SW, Networking, Storage, and manageability is the popular way to sell services.  And, even Larry Ellison has changed his position on cloud as cloud is a great way to sell an integrated stack.

Oracle Rolls Out Private Cloud Architecture And World-Record Transaction Performance

Posted by Richard Fichera on December 6, 2010

On Dec. 2, Oracle announced the next move in its program to integrate its hardware and software assets, with the introduction of Oracle Private Cloud Architecture, an integrated infrastructure stack with Infiniband and/or 10G Ethernet fabric, integrated virtualization, management and servers along with software content, both Oracle’s and customer-supplied. Oracle has rolled out the architecture as a general platform for a variety of cloud environments, along with three specific implementations, Exadata, Exalogic and the new Sunrise Supercluster, as proof points for the architecture.

Cloud vendors are busy partnering and buying companies to build cloud stacks, but what happens if the buyer wants choice?  The answer most will give is you don’t want to do that because the stack works best with our products.  Or worse we can guarantee performance if you buy only our products.

Imagine what Apple would look like if the iPod or iPhone only worked with the Mac.

People expect choice.  Even in Cloud Infrastructure.

No vendor wants this in the same way Best Buy would love to be able to disable cell phones or more specifically smart phones that are hitting shopping sites.

All of this creates a good opportunity to be disruptive.

Dell DCS Cloud Evangelist, Barton George

One of the main lessons I learned and had ingrained in my thinking when I worked for Apple is focusing on quality and not quantity.  This same idea rubs off when I pick who I look to network with. I have only 157 twitter followers, 1,200 RSS subscribers to www.greenm3.com.  my linkedin connection is only 200, and 80 Facebook friends.

There are many who want these numbers to be as big as possible.  I don’t really care about the quantity as much as the quality.

One of the good connections I found only a few weeks ago is Barton George who blogs at http://bartongeorge.net/

About

What I do, and have done, for a living

Last year I joined Dell as their cloud computing evangelist.  As such I act as Dell’s ambassador to the cloud computing community (I had to supply my own sash).  I also work with analysts and press and am responsible for messaging as well as blogging and tweeting (you can follow me on twitter at barton808 and you know where my blog is).

Prior to Dell I spent 13 years at Sun Microsystems in a variety of roles from manufacturing to product and corporate marketing.  My last three years there I spent as an Open Source evangelist, avid blogger, and driver of Sun’s GNU/Linux strategy and relationships.

I was lucky to connect with Barton at Gartner DC LV and after an hour or so chatting he asked to interview me to discuss the data center ecosystem.

The Data Center ecosystem of players

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As I mentioned in a recent entry, last week I attended the Gartner Data Center conference where I learned a ton.  One of the folks I learned a lot from was Dave Ohara who consults in the data center arena.  Dave is uber connected in this space and pens the blog, Green (low carbon) Data Center blog.  Dave provided a bunch of introductions while I was there and sat down with me to do the following short video on the ecosystem of data center players.

Some of the ground that Dave covers:

• What he covers in his blog Green Data Center
• How do you go about building a data center and who are the players in each phase e.g site selection -> architecture/engineering design -> construction…
• What are some of the key disruptions coming to this long standing industry e.g. cloud, Google

I am looking forward to future conversations with Barton as he learns more about data centers.  And my learning what Dell DCS’s group is doing in cloud computing.