Tag Archive for Cloud computing

| November 26, 2013
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Data Centers Expand in the D

Online Tech continues its data center build-out in the Metro Detroit area. The new data center, formerly a Sprint-Nextel facility will expand Online Tech’s total Michigan footprint to 100,000 gross square feet. The firm’s $10M renovation of the Westland, MI site will create a 34,000 square foot facility with 18,000 square feet of raised floor space with a total IT load capacity of 1.2 MW. The Metro Detroit data center will feature fiber connectivity to eight different telecommunications providers. The firm will add 15 new jobs in the data center over the next five years to run the facility according to Whir.

The firm operates three other Michigan data centers, two in Ann Arbor and one in Flint. The new facility will bring its total data center footprint to 100,000 square feet. It is the market leader in the Detroit Metro with the top market share in multi-tenant data center space in Michigan, according to 451 Research. Yan Ness, co-CEO of Online Tech called the new data center a milestone for the firm.

This new facility is a major milestone for Online Tech because it is our fourth data center and it brings us to an overall total of 100,000 square feet of gross data center space. This facility will allow us to serve the large Detroit market, where we see strong demand for the secure, compliant cloud and hosting services

Mike Klein, co-CEO of Online Tech explained to Whir that the firm’s advantage is it focus on compliance.

Data centerOur data centers deliver secure colocation and cloud hosting services to clients whose IT operations must comply with regulations like HIPAA, PCI, and Sarbanes-Oxley. Our data centers, including the new Metro Detroit Data Center, reflect our commitment to protecting our clients and their sensitive data

In anticipation of further growth, the firm expanded its Ann Arbor headquarters in September 2013 to meet its rapid growth after doubling its employee count to nearly 50 over the past 18 months.

In October 2011 the company opened a 20,000 square foot data center with 10,000 square feet of raised floor in the Avis Farms complex minutes away from Online Tech’s headquarters and original data center in Ann Arbor. The Tier 3 data center has a fully redundant power and network infrastructure to maintain availability for colocation, managed server, and cloud computing hosting business according to reports.

Data centerOnline Tech invested more than $1 million in upgrades and expansion to its Flint, MI data center during August 2011. The 2011 update enabled 1 megawatt of power to the Flint data center floor. Whir says the Flint site was built in 1986 as a disaster recovery center for General Motors (GM). Online Tech took over the facility in 2005 with its acquisition of Gentech. Separated by more than 50 miles, the Flint data center is on a separate electrical grid to provide clients with production and disaster recovery data centers in Michigan.

Online Tech has plans to grow beyond metro Detroit. Co-CEO Ness told Whir,

… our growth won’t stop there We see similar opportunities for us in other markets in the Great Lakes region and the Midwest, and we expect to continue our growth strategy by expanding our portfolio of data centers into other cities in the near future.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| November 14, 2013
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Cloud Exit Plan

Cloud Exit PlanAnother cloud services provider seems to have closed up shop. NetworkWorld reports that MegaCloud.com, a consumer cloud storage provider has been inaccessible. Users started complaining on social media that they have not had access to their data since at least October 30th. (rb- there is likely lots of enterprise data as well. FierceMobileIT reports that 72 percent of workers are using free file-sharing services without authorization.)

Cloud computingMegaCloud had offered customers up to 8GB of free cloud storage, with another 8GB of free backup storage. That 16GB of free cloud storage was one of the largest giveaways of cloud storage from a consumer cloud provider. MegaCloud offered a desktop client, as well as mobile apps for Apple (AAPL) iOS, Google (GOOG) Android, and Microsoft (MSFT) Windows phones.

At the end of September, San José, CA-based Nirvanix cloud provider gave their mostly business customers 2-weeks notice to get their files back before they went dark, taking all the data with them. There are reports that Nirvanix hosted around 40 petabytes of data. Getting their data out in time must have challenged Nirvanix customers.

Moving data from cloud to cloudCharles Babcock at InformationWeek explained in an intriguing article that data movements in the cloud are dependent on the speed with which the service provider can write data to an external source and the amount of bandwidth made available to do so. He cited tests by Nirvanix competitor, Nasuni, which found that moving 12 TB of data from one Amazon (AMZN) S3 bucket to another took four hours. Moving the same amount from Amazon S3 to Microsoft Azure took 40 hours, and from S3 to Rackspace (RAX), just under one week. Moving data from Rackspace into Amazon took only five hours.

In a Data Center Knowledge article, Gartner (IT) analyst Kyle Hilgendorf reinforces my point that cloud meltdowns should prompt cloud users to get serious about contingency planning. Gartner’s Hilgendorf wrote in a blog post:

Exit plan“Cloud exits are not nearly as sexy as cloud deployments – they are an afterthought …  It’s analogous to disaster recovery and other mundane IT risk mitigation responsibilities. These functions rarely receive the attention they deserve in IT, except for immediately following major events like Hurricane Sandy or 9/11.”

“If you are a customer of any other cloud service (that is basically all of us) – take some time and build a cloud exit strategy/plan for every service you depend upon,” he added. “Cloud providers will continue to go out of business. It may not be a frequent occurrence, but it will happen. ”

Nicos Vekiarides, co-founder and CEO of Natick, MA-based cloud storage provider TwinStrata told NetWorkWorld that in the long-term, the economic draw of the cloud should overcome the fear and hesitancy of many businesses considering cloud storage solutions He predicts that the shut-downs will drive businesses toward larger, better-known cloud storage brands instead of to smaller, newer providers. He says:

Afraid of cloudsThe storage needs of businesses haven’t gone away. Organizations’ data storage requirements still are growing at 40 percent to 60 percent a year … What will change is how CIOs shop for and deploy cloud services, in that everyone still wants choice, but they’ll be much more wary. There’s always the need for choice among a number of vendors, and CIOs will want the best of breed. That might mean they will gravitate toward more established vendors.”

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These events may put a few firms off the cloud, but not all. These events should point out the need for due diligence when planning what to do with their data.

Barb Darrow at GigaOM said it most Data centerpoetically, “cloud storage offerings have multiplied like rabbits over the past year, and the notion that you could entrust business data to a company that appears to be well-funded only to see it shutting its doors could be more paranoia-inducing than the NSA spooks.”

IMHO, continuity plans need to account for data in the cloud. Cloud providers can offer better availability and redundancy, but still pose risks. But do they guarantee your data?  Continuity plans need to protect complete business services, including parts that may rely on a cloud piece.  Some of the questions I would ask:

  • Does it make sense to have all data in the cloud?
  • Is the firm’s data categorized so that when another cloud provider folds, IT can spend any time they have moving data to another provider? Mr. Babcock demonstrated that move would not be instantaneous.
  • Can the data even be brought back in-house? Did you throw out your old SAN when the data was moved to the cloud?
  • What format is the data in? You did check your contract right?
  • Will a firm going under even worry about contractual obligations?
  • Can IT and legal get together to make a deal with another cloud provider fast enough?

Does your Business Continuity Plan cover cloud melt-downs?

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

 

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| June 25, 2013
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Box Beefs Up Backbone for Business

The evolution of Box from an idea to let its customers share and manage and access their content from anywhere to a cloud file-sharing and storage start-up to a business serving over 150,000 businesses, including 92 percent of the Fortune 500 continues. DataCenter Knowledge reports that half of Box’s activity comes from outside of the U.S. and 40% comes from mobile devices.

In order to support the growth, DCK says Box is touting Accelerator, its global data transfer network, as well as adding several key certifications in a bid to make its global enterprise customer base happy. Further infrastructure expansion lies ahead. “We really think we’re solving a problem for an end-user,” said Jeff Quesser, VP of Technical Operations for Box. “But we’re also solving an IT concern; they can get all the auditing, compliance they need. This can be run in a very safe way.”

With over 150 percent growth last year the company has had to tailor its service in the best ways possible to serve the enterprise crowd.  The blog says 50 percent of Box activity is happening outside of the US, either from international firms or U.S. enterprises with a global presence. Mr. Queisser told DCK. “Speed is absolutely critical. If you have sites all around the world, you need blazing fast download speeds.”

This enterprise customer need was the impetus behind Box Accelerator. The company has established upload endpoints in key global data center hubs featuring end-to-end encryption. The company has built patent-pending intelligent routing and optimization technology that delivers uploads 2.5 times faster on average. It has built a network that helps you get data into Box as fast as possible.

Box Global Data Transfer Network

Box Accelerator tweaks the TCP stack to get better performance. Mr. Queisser explained to DCK.

“(With) most consumer operating systems, networking stacks are not optimized … There’s the bandwidth delay problem. TCP is an amazing protocol, but wasn’t made for these types of distances and this kind of bandwidth. It’s a testament to how amazing the protocol is that it’s done what it’s done.”

The article says the biggest problem for Box is how to handle inbound traffic.

“What we’ve done is unique in that it’s optimizing inbound data … How do you ingest 100MB rather than send it out? The other piece is that we built these nodes, and a routing feedback loop technology.  It determines the fastest way to get to Box. Sometimes it’s an accelerator node, but there are times when direct is the fastest path.”

Accelerator started off small but has added nine new points of infrastructure. It’s a small footprint that provides a big performance boost. The goal is to have cloud-based endpoints in all regions. The article claims that Neustar conducted a performance analysis test and found that “Box had the lowest average upload time across all locations, about 66% faster than the closest competitor.”

The company is also planning to apply this technology to file downloads. Accelerator has added speed to enterprise uploads, but the company told DCK it is looking to speed up downloads in a similar fashion. “We need to do that in a way where it’s encrypted and it isn’t cached,” said Mr. Quiesser.

ISO 27001It in terms of certifications, Box has recently added ISO 27001 and support for HIPAA. ISO 27001 is the international standard for information security management systems (ISMS) and demonstrates how the policies and controls put in place at Box protect user data.

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Better performance and security are great things from a cloud vendor. But what impact does the NSA spying scandal is going to do on the cloud storage business model. There could be repercussions if vendors don’t cooperate.

What do you think? is the Box network ready for the enterprise?

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| May 21, 2013
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Hotmail is Dead

Hotmail is DeadHotmail is dead. Microsoft (MSFT) has completed the transition from Hotmail to the new Outlook.com. The Hotmail replacement has more than 400 million accounts. According to a blog entry at Office.com most Hotmail users will not notice much difference. They can continue to use those accounts as long as they choose and can claim an Outlook email address whenever they like.

HotmailWriting in the company blog, Dick Craddock, Outlook.com’s group program manager said that Hotmail had more than 300 million active accounts that had to be moved. MSFT completed the epic live upgrade in only six weeks. The upgrade from Hotmail to Outlook.com required communicating with hundreds of millions of people, upgrading all their mailboxes, and making sure they preserved every email, calendar, contacts, folders, and personal preference.

The new Outlook email client has several different features from Hotmail, such as two-factor authentication, an updated calendar, and app as well as integration with cloud service Skydrive and Skype. it allowed users to connect easily with Facebook (FB), Twitter, and LinkedIn (LNKD).

GigaOm reports that MSFT will even allow collaboration with Google users. They report that:

.Outlook.com logo.. if you’re reading an email from a Gmail user, you can reply with a chat icon from your Outlook.com inbox. Or, if you and your Google-oriented buddy are collaborating on a document in Microsoft Skydrive (as opposed to, say, Google Drive), you can send an instant message to your Google contact with the click of a button. Microsoft is also rolling out Google Chat integration.

All of these new features haven’t thrilled everyone, Mr. Craddock is quoted in the IBT, “Of course, whenever a widely used consumer service makes any substantial change, there will always be some folks that don’t like it, and that shows up in the feedback…”

Microsoft logoHotmail was one of the first web-based email services. Founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith it was launched on July 4 1996 as “HoTMaiL”. Microsoft bought the web email service in 1997 for an estimated $400 million, and it was rebranded as “MSN Hotmail”.

Outlook.com was launched in February 2013.  It’s based around Microsoft’s Metro design language, and closely mimics the user interface of Microsoft Outlook.

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AmazedFor anyone who has ever had to be involved in a hot email upgrade, you should recognize the technical feat moving Hotmail to Outlook.com really was despite occasional problems. During most email system upgrades, anything that can go wrong will go wrong. There will be power or network issues that will interrupt the mailbox transfer across the wire, there will be users with 32 Gb of email messages, there will be people who file their active messages in the trash can (yes, I’ve seen it) there will be strange shared calendars and accounts that just won’t transfer unless you move them item by item to find the corruption.

Kudos to MSFT for migrating Hotmail to Outlook.com, lets see if it matters in the face of Google’s (GOOG) Gmail and Doc’s.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| April 18, 2013
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Enterprise Resisting Office 365

Microsoft has bet big on Microsoft Office 365 but CITEworld says so far, the big enterprises that make up the bulk of Microsoft’s revenue haven’t jumped on board. Microsoft channel boss Jon Roskill told Redmond Channel Partner that “90 percent” of Office 365 customers are from businesses with fewer than 50 employees, and explained, “small business is at the core of this product customer base.” Mr. Roskill also said that Office 365 “penetration is still in the low single digits” in other words, less than 5%.

Microsoft Office 365Office 365 was originally introduced in June 2011, and the first focus was on Microsoft-hosted versions of servers like Exchange and SharePoint. But enterprise customers tend to have multi-year license agreements.

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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