Category: Cloud

bit of a catch-all category for all things internet and virtual

Categories
Cloud End User internet

tref moves into the cloud

Stop right there! Before you go any further I know what you are going to say. “I’ve always had my head in the cloud”.

But no 🙂 . What I mean is that we are just moving trefor.net into the cloud. More specifically onto a Xen based virtual server on a resilient hardware cluster. I might say this is to cope with the increasing load imposed by the growing number of visitors but this isn’t totally true, or not at least the main driver.

As much as anything you have to practice what you preach and on this occasion this is what I am doing. Thanks to Ian P. Christian (Pookey) for his help with this.

I can see clearly now the cloud has come…

trefor.net moves into the cloud

Categories
Business Cloud internet UC

2010 is “Year of the Home Worker”

At Leicester Tigers’ Welford Road rugby ground on Thursday Timico launched “Meet Me Now”, a brand new Web Collaboration and video conferencing service with Presence and IM.

I missed it due to ITSPA prize awarding duties at the House of Commons. I also had to miss out on a long planned trip to watch the annual Oxford v Cambridge varsity match at Twickenham which was also on the same day. You might say that this was very poor diary management!

I’m told that all events went really well. I can vouch for the ITSPA one of course because I was there. Timico was a finalist in two categories (SMB and Enterprise).

Anyway this is not the point of this blog post. We have been reviewing the year at Timico HQ today. The business has grown. Considering the market conditions in 2009 and that the interim results of some of our competitors show shrinkage this has to be taken as extremely positive news.

Next year is I believe going to be another tough one for business. We ain’t though this recession yet. This means that customers are still going to be looking for cost savings and productivity improvements. More so probably.

In 2009 Timico very much saw a trend towards home/distributed working. This, for example, saw one hosted VoIP customer shut their office and set their six employees working from home. There was no disruption to their comms as a result – they were on hosted VoIP.

Clearly for 2010 a product that makes it easier for people to work from home makes a lot of sense. Enter “Meet Me Now”.

Meet Me Now is a multimedia Meet Me Voice Video and Web Collaboration service. It can be used in stand alone mode or for customers using the Timico VoIP For Business service it can also be integrated with your existing voice communications.

Our (home working) sales force has been playing with Meet Me Now for some months and using the service the channel team in particular can sit at home churning through 8 or 10 online Business Partner meetings in a day. It is hugely productive and in fact has encouraged a high number of channel partners to take up the product from day 1. They have already seen the power.

There’s also been a lot of talk about “The Cloud” in 2009. For ease of support reasons home worker solutions are largely going to be “cloudy” if that is the right adjective and certainly this is the case for Meet Me Now.

Quite exciting really. Semi sales pitch over.

Categories
datacentre Engineer

Shock Horror – High Performance Laptop Costs $100m

Did you know that a state of the art supercomputer costs $100m?  The price never comes down with time – the speed just goes up. Today’s leading edge box — actually it’s a datacentre full of racks, not a single box — has over 1Petaflops of processing power.

Such is the progress of technology that in three years time this will not even be in the top 500 of supercomputer performances. At that point the maintenance costs also start to ramp up so your average supercomputer owner just bins it and buys another one. It’s what I’d do 🙂

What is also interesting is that today’s supercomputer processor speed flows down to the laptop of 12 years hence. So in 2021 you will get one hell of a bang for your buck. Whether you will need that much power to send emails and operate Word 2021 (or whatever it will be called then) is unlikely.

I guess the power will be usable for improved 3D HD graphics for gaming and TV but I’m not sure what other apps will need it.  Whole brain simulations on a laptop perhaps.  Build it and they will come…  It does point to a huge continued growth in network bandwidth usage.

Of course the laptop won’t cost $100m. I just put that in for effect! My guess is that all laptops will come free with subscription to network services.

Categories
Business Cloud google

Some Clouds are Better than Others

I’ve been thinking about clouds. It’s a very trendy thing to do at the moment. It’s something you notice about trade shows. A trade show will evolve its name in line with what the organisers think will bring in the punters.

For example in the UK “VoIP for Business” became “VoIP for Business incorporating Unified Communications” which then became “Unified Communications”. I fully expect Unified Communications to morph into “Unified Communications with cloudy bits”. It will probably be the same underlying list of exhibitors.

Anyway the popularity of the cloud buzzword is of course because the world is moving into the cloud. The cloud is still for most an ethereal place that is difficult to get the grey matter around. It appears on the advertising copy of so many vendors how do you decide how to take advantage of it. This is the case whether you are an end user, a business or a potential provider of cloud services.

Consumers will use a few branded services such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon etc. Business however needs something different, even it is just a better service level. So at the moment I think the business world is manoeuvring to understand how the bits of the fluffy jigsaw fit together.

They will end up dealing with specialist cloud integrators. This will provide the differentiation and some clouds will definitely stand out as being better than others.

As it stands you need to be able to keep your feet on the ground and head just above the clouds so that you can look around and see where these better clouds are starting to form 🙂

Categories
datacentre Engineer

GigE replaces old ATM infrastructure at Timico Docklands datacentre

I’ve been rolling my sleeves up at our Docklands Datacentres today. Having decommissioned all our old 155 Mbps STM1 pipes and replaced them with 622Mbps STM4’s we are now gearing up to replacing the 622’s with resilient Gigabit Ethernet connectivity to the BT21CN network.

The picture below shows part of the rack containing our first ever 155Mbps connection.  For those interested this was an STM4 partitioned into 4STM1’s.

For those not interested the real point is that this complete rack that was originally pretty much dedicated to hosting our central pipe connectivity to the BT ADSL network can now be replaced by a single port in a 3U chassis. You can get around 13 of these switches in a rack, each with potentially up to 15  GigE connections. In theory that’s up to 195 connections instead of just 4 with 313 x the bandwidth.

That’s progress folks.

STM4 Mux

Old STM4 chassis. Couldn’t get the whole rack in view. This is only half of it.

3U chassis supporting up to 15 GigE connections
3U chassis supporting up to 15 GigE connections

What replaced it!

Categories
Business Cloud internet

Salesforce.com Cloud Workshop: A Final Word from the CIO Council Meeting

So should you worry about using a service — one such as Salesforce.com’s Force.com, for instance — in “The Cloud”?

Ten years ago Oracle was ahead of its time when it tried to kill off Microsoft with the Network Computer. At that time it was a combination of the cost and reliability of the underlying network together with the lack of applications to run on it that likely killed it off.

Today these barriers have all but disappeared. Connectivity is orders of magnitude cheaper and the number of uses for the network has exploded.

WordPress, for example, is the platform that I use to write this blog. WordPress has 6,760 plugins available for download and they have indeed been downloaded 52,448,569 times to date.

A plug-in or widget is a small application that is used to run on a platform to enable certain functionality. In the case of trefor.net these applications provide the functionality in the right hand column – twitter feed, add/subscribe etc. I also use applications invisible to the reader such as wordpress seo, search engine optimisation.

I think nothing of using WordPress which is a totally cloud based application, unlike Dreamweaver for example, which at one time I used to use to design websites and which resided on my PC.

So as a final note on the Salesforce.com CIO council meeting last week I thought I’d look more into their cloud offering. The Salesforce.com Force.com platform has have 200+ native apps and 550+ partner apps. Not as many as WordPress but there again many of the WordPress plug-ins will never see the light of a real website and they are free.

The Force.com applications that are used, however, are of major interest to business, at least collectively. They must be because Salesfor.com has 63,200 paying customers with 81M+ lines of code with 16M+ customizations – modification that integrate the Force.com platform with other services used by these customers.

New WordPress plug-ins appear daily whilst Salesforce.com restricts itself to three releases a year – coming up to release number 30 this Autumn. In the business world a software release needs to be bug free as possible and fully tested which is certainly not always the case with open source equivalents.

So it is clear to me that the move to the cloud is well underway and anyone looking at their information roadmap strategy should have this at the forefront of their mind. Of course this isn’t going to kill off Microsoft anytime soon…

Categories
Business Cloud datacentre

Salesforce.com Cloud Workshop: More from the CIO Council Meeting

In considering moving some of their business operations to the cloud the CIOs round the table at last week’s Salesforce.com cloud computing workshop voiced some interesting issues that they had had to get to grips with.

Firstly in running with a cloud based service a business is effectively entrusting key corporate data to a third party and effectively relinquishes control over it.

This means that you have to be sure of the integrity of the cloud. Salesforce.com operates 3 global datacentres in North America, Europe and Asia. These are linked with multiple OC48 fibre connections and replicate with each other on an ongoing basis. Of course this doesn’t preclude a domino effect type disaster.

A prudent business will also store it’s own data elsewhere. Coincidentally Timico’s own cloud storage service backs up to two secure and geographically diverse locations so customers then have their data stored in three spots – our two and their own local storage. It would be over the top for us to shift data to the Far East 🙂

The nature of the concern voiced at the workshop was not so much the safety of the data but its retrievability in the event that a customer wanted to take it’s business elsewhere. So when looking at a cloud service the portability of your Bytes is important. Whilst simply retrieving stored data is straightforward (bandwidth permitting) retrieving the business logic built into may not be so careful planning is likely to be required.

Different cloud services almost certainly offer different applications and features and it will be a while before these harmonise into a single set of features in the way that PBXs and CRM packages have done over the years. At the moment though you are unlikely to be able to move to a like for like service. Choose your partner well at the outset.

Another comment from the floor related to the fact that although part of the sales pitch from a cloud vendor was ease of scalability typically this meant that they let you scale up easily but were not so accommodating when you want to scale down. It is understandable that service providers want to maximise their take but I tend to agree that people should be able to reduce their commitment as well as grow it. It should be a stimulus for the quality of a service to be kept up.

Our VoIP service does typically allow customers to do this with one month’s notice so it can be done.

Categories
Business Cloud internet

What lies beyond the cloud?

Something for you to think about. Technology comes and goes. What happens after cloud computing? What lies beyond the cloud?

Categories
Business Cloud internet

Salesforce.com Cloud Workshop: Report from the CIO Council Meeting

You may or may not have known that I am on the CIO Council of Salesforce.com. Salesforce.com is a highly professional organisation that I believe really has its head screwed on.

This isn’t a sales pitch for them but I was sufficiently enthused by my Cloud Workshop day, held yesterday in the East Room on the 7th Floor of the Tate Modern Gallery on London’s South Bank, to gush in this post.

The meeting was attended by twenty five or so persons including some global cloud experts from our hosts but also by some heavy hitting CIOs from major international corporates.

What astounded me is the pace of the move away from Microsoft and towards Linux, Google Apps and, of course, Salesforce.com. Their cloud platform Force.com now has 750 Applications you can download. I don’t think anything in this cloudy world comes free but there are seriously well documented business cases and high returns on investment for treading this path.

In the interest of keeping my posts short I’m going to gradually trickle the seven pages of notes I made on the day into discrete bites on this blog.There are lots of really interesting tidbits. Like for example the market for cloud computing is worth $162Bn and that analysts claim that Salesforce.com has a 2 year market lead on its competitors.

I’ll finish this one by thanking my hosts for a very rewarding day and a splendid meal afterwards held in the privileged environs of the Poetry and Dream Gallery on Level 3 which included a couple of Picassos (The Three Dancers) and a Jackson Pollock.

Categories
Business datacentre internet ofcom

Video Streaming Regulation: Is Ofcom Going after YouTube?

This may be something that has been going on for sometime in the background, but Ofcom today launched its consultation into regulation of video on-demand (VOD) services.

Following the Audio Visual Media Services Directive, the Government is to regulate VOD services which are ‘TV-like’. The consultation is looking at whether the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) should regulate advertising in VOD services and is proposing that VOD services be regulated by the Association for Television on Demand (ATVOD).

The regulation will consist of a range of minimum content standard, new VOD rules delivered through a co-regulatory framework,  and Ofcom will be given primary responsibility to ensure the effective operation of the co-regulatory framework.
VOD regulation has to be in place by December 19 and Ofcom is seeking views by October 26.

I did wonder whether this meant that Ofcom would be trying to regulate the likes of YouTube. The consultation document does tell us that whether a service is in scope for regulation is defined by a range of criteria, including: whether the principal purpose of a service is to provide “television-like” programmes, on an on-demand basis, to members of the public; whether such a service falls under UK jurisdiction for the purposes of regulation; and whether the service is under a person’s “editorial responsibility”.

I suspect that YouTube falls outside of the UK for jurisdiction but this might not be the case in my mind if a specific video was stored on servers based in the UK. I don’t know where specific bits of the YouTube cloud are but it isn’t beyond the realms of possibility that some of it could one day be in UK datacentres. Looks like another potentially messy situation to me.

PS I note that my post titles are getting more and more tabloid-like and sensationalist. I rely on my friends to tell me when it is getting out of control 🙂

Categories
Apps Business storage backup & dr

Bandwidth Bandit – Offsite Backup Case Study

One of the big drivers for bandwidth usage is offsite back up and storage.

The amount of backup and storage capacity required by a business is to a large extent dependant on the nature of that business. An organisation which regularly processes a large amount of financial transaction or billing data is going to need a lot more than somewhere whose main concern is the safekeeping of CRM data and perhaps the security of information on individual PCs. Moreover as a rule of thumb the larger the amount of data that needs backing up on a daily basis the more critical that data is likely to be for a business.

One of Timico’s customers performs a 50GB daily backup to tape. The tape is removed from the premises every night to an offsite storage location. This is far from ideal. The company until recently operated over a bonded ADSL connection which gave them approximately 2Mbps uplink.

Backing up 50GB over the 2Mb connection was going to take 555 hours. This was not a practical proposition. The company has just put in a 100Mb leased line. The time taken to perform the backup would now be 11 hours which makes an overnight run a real proposition.

Not everyone has a 50GB requirement but as faster broadband technologies come along at cost effective prices more and more people will use an offsite on-net backup facility which will in turn drive bandwidth usage.

bandwidth

The chart is self explanatory. I’ve made some assumptions regarding packet overhead on the pipes

 

Categories
Business datacentre voip

Discussing VoIP Strategy and Solutions

We were discussing VoIP strategy today.  Timico supplies a mix of hosted VoIP and in-premises equipment based on what is best for the specific customer need. In looking at PBXs it occurred to me that there should be a standard platform that will run anyone’s PBX software just like it is in the PC world.

Then I realised that this is where the world has been for some time now and that platform is actually the PC. With the advent of SIP trunks replacing the need for analogue or ISDN line cards all you need is a PC running a PBX software application plugged into your network somewhere (or at one of our datacentres).

I’m sorry if this is stating the blooming obvious to most of you but the fact is it has crept up on us to the point that most PBXs are now really just PCs and the vendors are trying to exit the hardeware game.  No longer do you need the specialised modules that handle conversion of IP traffic to outmoded devices and services.

The vision that came with SIP when I first started working with the protocol almost ten years ago has finally come to fruition.  You can now buy an off the shelf piece of hardware (ie the PC), run a wide variety of PBXs on it – take your pick, the choice is yours – and choose from hundreds of different handset  types at all sorts of price points and feature sets.

The problem now is that actually at the moment this choice still introduces a level of complexity to the game that will take some time to go away.  It still doesn’t make sense for a service provider such as Timico to offer a huge range of PBXs and handsets to our business customers.

When they go wrong, and this they are certainly going to do, you out there running your businesses and concentrating on what you do best need us to come and fix the problem. Or at least to send a replacement PDQ so that you can get on with life.  Nobody can do this if they have a hundred telephone handsets in their product range.

I’ll keep you posted on my exploration through different handsets and solutions. It is where I started in this game  and is a fun part of the job.

Categories
datacentre Engineer peering

Interexion talk on green datacentres at Linx66

Some interesting talks at the today’s Linx66 sessions at Goodenough College in London. Lex Coors, VP of international datacentre operator Interexion discussed the green datacentre. One of the slides that caught my attention related to best practice in how end users can keep their power consumption to a minimum.

Most of these are pretty obvious but worth reproducing here with the percentages being the potential efficiency gain:

eliminate comatose servers 10 – 25%
virtualise 25 – 30%
upgrade older equipment 10 – 20%
reduce demand for older equipment 10 – 20%
introduce greener more efficient servers 10 – 20%

If you add that lot up you potentially get more than 100% but it does give people a feel for where their efficiency savings and therefore cost savings can be made.

The original source was McKinsey and the Uptime Institute (2008).

Categories
Cloud Engineer internet

Virtual Machines

I’m doing some research into Virtual Machines, storage trends and cloud computing. I’d be interested in hearing from people who use these services, thinking about using them or from software vendors offering solutions in this space.

I’m particularly interested in who is using such products in the UK. Timico already offers these types of services but I’m looking at expanding this area of activity and would welcome input with product definition and market segmentation.

Anyone wanting to contact me can either just leave a comment on this post or email me (tref at timico.co.uk) and I will happily call them back.  Thanks in advance.

Categories
Business Cloud storage backup & dr

Cloud Computing Summit – Martin Bellamy to Speak

The Cloud Computing Summit got my attention, and it should have yours, too.

I don’t typically go around endorsing conferences and trade shows, but this one looks quite interesting. What caught my eye initially was the fact that Martin Bellamy — the Government’s “Cloud Computing boss” — is speaking.  It was certainly news to me that the Government had such a person, though looking at his bio he is actually Director, Office of the Government Chief Information Officer Cabinet Office.

I have a feeling that I will be writing a lot on the subject of cloud computing during the coming months. It is starting to come of age and certainly arousing interest amongst our customers. The conference is being organised by BusinessCloud9.

In a similar vein worth a read is this arcticle published by The Register last week. It’s all based on the same general principle, call it what you like, cloud computing or virtualisation.

Categories
Business Cloud storage backup & dr

Storage trends

I thought it would be interesting to look at storage requirement trends. This isn’t based on anything scientific other than a look at my own personal photo storage needs over the last few years.
storage1
The first 2009 datapoint is August 2nd and the second is an extrapolation to year end. I don’t know what happened to the file sizes in 2007.  There is otherwise a trend to be seen.
It would be interesting to see whether anyone else has similar, not necessarily scientific, data to share. If you email me at tref at trefor.net or leave a comment I’ll try and compile the results, assuming there are any.
Categories
datacentre Engineer

It’s all about wiring

Following my post on our fibre installation earlier in June The build of our new datacentre module in Newark continues.

Datacentres, whilst giving the appearance of being high tech,  are all about wiring and plumbing.  So I’m getting in the cable monkeys and plumbers.

Couple of photos below give you a feel for part of the process. Underfloor power connections to each rack space and a coil of fibre that might look innocuous but will carry the lifeblood of the datacentre, ie the data itself.

It makes me think of the pony express, or the old stage post mail system and how things have changed. I’m getting romantic in my old age.

cabling

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

fibre

 

Of course it will be tidied up a bit before we open for business.

Categories
datacentre Engineer

It's all about wiring

Following my post on our fibre installation earlier in June The build of our new datacentre module in Newark continues.

Datacentres, whilst giving the appearance of being high tech,  are all about wiring and plumbing.  So I’m getting in the cable monkeys and plumbers.

Couple of photos below give you a feel for part of the process. Underfloor power connections to each rack space and a coil of fibre that might look innocuous but will carry the lifeblood of the datacentre, ie the data itself.

It makes me think of the pony express, or the old stage post mail system and how things have changed. I’m getting romantic in my old age.

cabling

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

fibre

 

Of course it will be tidied up a bit before we open for business.

Categories
Business datacentre internet

Powergate initial tranche is 95% sold

Following on from yesterday’s post re Telecity’s new capacity plans in Europe the company told me today that the first tranche in Powergate, its new West London datacentre, is 95% sold. That’s 95% of 4.5MW according to Telecity, and in less than a year!

With a total of 10MW potentially available there is still some way to go but it wouldn’t mind betting that they are already looking for a site for their next UK build.

Categories
datacentre Engineer internet peering

LINX 65 and Telecity

First day of LINX65 produced the usual interesting mix of talks. Today included IPv6 and VoIP QoS.

The sponsor’s talk at the end was given by Rob Coupland, COO of datacentre operator, Telecity. In Europe Telecity operates in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Milan and Frankfurt. A good footprint to have.

What was interesting was the statistic he floated that the company is doubling its datacentre power capacity over the next couple of years.

I counted 26.5MW in total! They plan to sell this over the next 3 – 4 years. This is a big bet that they appear to be confident of placing based on the uptake that they are already seeing. One of the big drivers they are (unsurprisingly) seeing is content provision.

I’m not making any comment re the effect on Global Warming here seeing as we at Timico are also in the business. I guess at the scale that we are talking about though cooling efficiencies will make a huge difference.

Categories
Business datacentre security

Security Tightened at London Datacentres for G20 Summit

Security is already pretty tight at our London datacentres.  This coming week will see security stepped up further as the G20 Summit takes place in town.  I’m not going to go into any details but at least BT are less likely to have any 21CN line cards stolen next week.

I’ve also had a number of meetings rescheduled from next week due to “security concerns”

Categories
Business datacentre events

Terrific Tina Turner at the O2

Tina Turner was great. Amazing in fact considering she is 69 years old (allegedly). What’s that got to do with a technology blog?  Only that I went along to a concert at the O2 Arena last night and was absolutely bowled over with the quality of what I saw.

The quality of the show, the quality of the venue – wonderful acoustics, and the quality of the hospitality on offer. My thanks to hosts,  Telcity and specifically sales manager Sharon Newling for looking after us in their suite.

Telecity is one of Timico’s high quality datacentre partners – we have a number of suites and cages at both Harbour Exchange and Sovereign House in London’s Docklands.

Just to round off the story I was pleased to take along with me Barry Skillett of Paypoint and Terence Long of RTP Solutions, both Timico customers. What’s more the O2 Arena is run by AEG, also a customer.

tinateam

From left to right Barry Skillet, me, Sharon Newling, Terence Long. I am obviously enjoying myself and obviously in need of a haircut!

Below – Tina herself on stage.

tina

Categories
datacentre End User internet

Gmail Down for the Morning Yesterday

Google themselves use Gmail, so someone certainly noticed that the service was down.

Gmail email was down yesterday, you may have noticed.  Certainly you might if you were one of their 113m strong userbase although I imagine that most are consumers and because it happened in business time it may not have had that significant an impact.

The service fell over because one of Google’s European datacentres failed which in turn had a knock on effect on some of their other datacentres. I have recently been visiting datacentres with a view to planning our next phase of expansion. Datacentres are rated in Tiers from 1 to 4, 4 being the most secure reliable and therefore most expensive.

In a Tier 4 datacentre you will find the ultimate in security mechanisms, biometric security, weighing machines etc. You also find the highest levels of resilience to power and connectivity failure. I was interested to learn recently though that there is a sensible limit to how much it is worth spending on a data centre as even Tier 4’s have been shown by modelling that they are vulnerable to catastrophic chain reaction failures .

I don’t know what Tier datacentres are operated by Google but they do employ someone specifically to manage reliability of their site. It just goes to show that when software and computers are concerned there is no such things as a 100% reliability.

In this case if you are totally reliant on a single email system it seems that there will always be a potential reliability issue. What you can do is have a totally separate mail system coming from a separate platform. I use both timico.co.uk from an Exchange server and trefor.net from our ISP platform.

Although I don’t ever recall the ISP mail platform letting me down certainly the Microsoft product has occasionally given me cause to resort to the backup. With a backup you can always call someone and ask them to resend to the other mail address and also use it yourself to send.

Most people have a personal email address but you might not want to give that out to a business acquaintance and in any event this type of email typically has file size storage and download restrictions. I’m sure others will have views on this subject but that’s my five pence worth.

Categories
datacentre Engineer H/W hosting

Containerised Storage

In the process of checking out our datacentre expansion options I have been meeting with a number of vendors. Today I met Verari Systems who manufacture high density blade based storage solutions and sell datacentres in a container. Yes that’s the same type of container you see hauled around on the back of trucks world-wide.

The beauty of containerised datacentres is the time to market. Four months from ordering you can be up and running with new capacity. You just need to supply the power and a secure place to put the container.

What impressed me was the quoted 11Petabytes of storage that Verari could achieve in a 100KWatt container designed to hold between 10 and 15 racks. This, for the mathematically challenged/lazy amongst us is in round terms the equivalent of eleven thousand Terrabyte PC hard drives.

Keeping the maths simple a rack can hold 42 servers (PCs) so ten racks would have the equivalent of 420 servers. The Veraris solution offers 26 x more density of storage than a PC. I have been buying Servers with 3Terrabytes of resilient storage – Verari still offeres 8 x the density.

Categories
Business datacentre internet

Building Datacentres: The Costs are Rising

Datacentres are quite a hot topic in the Internet Service Provider world, and their costs are rising, largely due to the increasing costs of power and cooling.

In the UK the major datacentres have typically been located in London’s Docklands. This is because Docklands is where most of the world’s major network providers connect. The cost of connectivity has traditionally been far too high to locate critical network infrastructure outside the capital.

I am sat in the LINX meeting in London writing this post listening to Bob Harris, Technical Services Director of Telehouse, one of the major datacentre players in Europe. Timico is already located in Telehouse North and East. Well the news is that they are building a Telehouse West (not particularly new news).

What is interesting are the financials associated with this project.

  1. £165m over 5 years (£80m over 1st 2 years for the first two floors)
  2. 5 floors with 985 sq metres per floor
  3. 425 racks per floor providing 4KW per rack = total 2125 racks
  4. Business plan to fill the facility over 3 – 5 years

That works out roughly at £78,000 per rack or just under £20,000 per KW. In terms of contribution to the operating costs the capital depreciation is £258 over 25 years, which is incidentally a long time in this game – 10 years might be considered more normal and the period has been arbitrarily chosen by me for illustration. Remember this is before anyone starts charging for operating costs.

I think the costs of this project point towards a trend to start building datacentres outside of London. Communications costs have plummeted and service providers and businesses are going to start hosting all but their most critical, perhaps latency sensitive, infrastructure outside the M25.

You can follow the progress of the Telehouse West building on their webcam here. I’ve pasted a picture of a typical backup generator that is used by datacentres to give you a feel for where the costs are incurred.

generator

PS I don’t think there is room for a Telehouse South, in case anyone was wondering.

Categories
Engineer virtualisation

Virtual Machines for Email Platform

We have stepped up our use of Virtual Machines at network level at Timico and recently rolled out a significant number of Xen based platforms. Xen (see Xen.org).  For those that don’t know a Virtual Machine is a virtual server that can run on multiple hardware devices simultaneously but can be seen as a single entity by the network. 

Because the company has been growing the need to scale up easily has become more and more pressing. Over the Christmas break (the Network Operations team is allowed two hours off for Christmas lunch which they take communally in the kitchen at the NOC 🙂 ) a new email platform was rolled out on Xen based hardware. As the burden of mail inevitably grows all Timico will have to do is add new hardware capacity with no need for network downtime or reengineering.

The beauty of Xen is that it takes very little time to add capacity to a server farm and downtime is minimal or non existent. You can therefore move a service from a small machine to a more powerful one with perhaps as little as 60 milliseconds interruption. 

All new servers are rolled out with Xen now at Timico. Whilst Xen is open source  and therefore free Citrix does sell a commercial version. If you have no skills in this space it could be an option but otherwise drop me a line if you want any advice on the subject.

Categories
Business datacentre security

It’s all about Security, Security, Security

I enjoy this business so much because of the wonderful diversity it provides me in terms of issues, problems and successes. The latest is the fact that the firewall at our corporate headquarters has been the subject of a number of attacks by some unfriendly person.

These attempts to break into corporate networks happen millions of times daily around the world, which is why businesses need to be on top of their security strategy. What interested me here was the fact that this was the same attack coming from a number of different places around the world.

The sources were in China, the USA, Poland, Australia and a couple of other countries whose names escape me. The same common username and password combinations were used each time from each different source (lesson here – never use “admin” and “password”) .

Of course the same individual or organisation is almost certainly involved in all of them. That person will have systematically hacked into a certain type of server whose operating system and security patches has not been kept up to date. It is likely a company server hosted at a datacentre somewhere.

Our course of action, if the attack persists, is to look up the owner of the IP address from which the attack is coming and ring the business up to let them know they have a problem. In the case of the Chinese source we send them an email – only because they will almost certainly be in bed. 🙂 Usually this sorts the problem out and indeed the recent spate of attempted break ins has abated. No doubt there will be more.

We know what to do in these cases but it is a lot to ask of a business that is not and ISP or doesn’t have a highly skilled IT department, which is why it very often makes sense to outsource your security management.

Categories
Business hosting

CoLocation rack support

Companies with their own colocated racks might want to consider getting their set up audited, particularly if the rack has been managed by a third party.

Timico engineers went to Docklands yesterday to perform such an audit for a customer. Their rack was intended to be set up with a fully resilient server architecture. In fact, although, there were two redundant switches in the rack the ethernet connections from each server were connected into the same switch. Each switch had a single power supply. It is easy to see that a problem with a single power feed could have resulted in a total outage for this customer.

Our audit report will include the proposal that the equipment should be distributed across two locations to provide a genuine level of resiliency. Of course Timico could provide this.

Categories
Business datacentre

Looking in on Microsoft’s Internet Strategy

In spending over $2Bn on network infrastructure, Microsoft is showing just how seriously it is taking internet business. And opening windows into its internet strategy.

I happened to be reading the New York Times today – as you do. The specific article revealed that Microsoft’s share price has dropped 5% – simply because Microsoft President Steve Ballmer mentioned that he thought technology stocks were overvalued – oops.

The main intent of the article was to look at Microsoft’s internet strategy. Its attempt to buy Yahoo has been high profile. However, what is slowly emerging is its other plans in the general area of “internet”.

Microsoft is moving into the Software as a Service (SaaS) game, which I’m certain means online based versions of the type of application that business buys today and sticks on a server in the corner of the office.  Microsoft Exchange and Sharepoint, for example. It likely means much more, though. Another interview on the web by Om Malik with Debra Chrapaty, Microsoft VP of Global Foundation Services (!!??) revealed some of the extent of the Microsoft investment in this area.

Two years ago Microsoft was said to be spending $2Bn on its network infrastructure. Some of today’s facts are absolutely astounding:

  • The company is adding 10,000 servers a month to its network.
  • New data centers being planned/under construction are equivalent of over 15 US football fields of data centre space (sounds a lot but it is probably the same as five rounders pitches J ).
  • Plans to cut of 30% to 40% in data-centre power costs company-wide over the next two years. (not buying it’s electricity from my UK supplier then – mine has just jumped UP about 150%)
  • Current network backbone runs at about 100 gigabits per second, but soon Microsoft plans to bump it to 500 Gigabits. For comparison BT21CN connectivity being offered to ISPs is based on 1gigabits rising to 10gigabits although I’m sure that their backbone must be faster than that.
  • Building out its own Content Delivery Network – 99 nodes on a 100 gigabit per second backbone.
  • For Microsoft, total data grows ten times every three years. The data in near future will soon approach 100s of petabytes.
  • Their datacentre opened in Quincy, Washington opened in April 2007 and when complete will consume 48 megawatts of energy. Microsoft can tap up to 72 MW of energy coming from hydro-electric power.
  • In San Antonio, Texas two further datacentres are planned for opening in September 2008 covering  447,000 square feet on 44 acres.

These facts and figures are just beyond comprehension for us mere mortals and are an indication of how serious the internet business is becoming.

By the way did you know that Microsoft owns Expedia, the travel site. I didn’t.

Categories
Business datacentre

Microsoft's Internet Strategy

I happened to be reading the New York Times today – as you do. The specific article revealed that Microsoft’s share price has dropped 5% – simply because Microsoft President Steve Ballmer mentioned that he thought technology stocks were overvalued – oops.

The main intent of the article was to look at Microsoft’s internet strategy. Its attempt to buy Yahoo has been high profile. However what is slowly emerging is its other plans in the general area of “internet”.

MIcrsoft is moving into the Software as a Service game which I’m certain means online based versions of the type of application that business buys today and sticks on a server in the corner of the office.  Microsoft Exchange and Sharepoint for example.

It likely means much more however. Another interview on the web by Om Malik with Debra Chrapaty, Microsoft VP of Global Foundation Services (!!??) revealed some of the extent of the Microsoft investment in this area.

Two years ago Microsoft was said to be spending $2Bn on its network infrastructure. Some of today’s facts are absolutely astounding:

The company is adding 10,000 servers a month to its network.

New data centers being planned/under construction are equivalent of over 15 US football fields of data centre space (sounds a lot but it is probably the same as five rounders pitches J ).

Plans to cut of 30% to 40% in data-centre power costs company-wide over the next two years. (not buying it’s electricity from my UK supplier then – mine has just jumped UP about 150%)

Current network backbone runs at about 100 gigabits per second, but soon Microsoft plans to bump it to 500 Gigabits. For comparison BT21CN connectivity being offered to ISPs is based on 1gigabits rising to 10gigabits although I’m sure that their backbone must be faster than that.

Building out its own Content Delivery Network – 99 nodes on a 100 gigabit per second backbone.

For Microsoft, total data grows ten times every three years. The data in near future will soon approach 100s of petabytes.

Their datacentre opened in Quincy, Washington opened in April 2007 and when complete will consume 48 megawatts of energy. Microsoft can tap up to 72 MW of energy coming from hydro-electric power.

 

In San Antonio Texas two further datacentres are planned for opening in September 2008 covering  447,000 square feet on 44 acres.

 

These numbers are just beyond comprehension for us mere mortals and are an indication of how serious the internet business is becoming.

 

By the way did you know that Microsoft owns Expedia, the travel site. I didn’t.