Archive for the ‘Infrastructure’ Category

Velocity and Structure08

Saturday, June 21st, 2008

A whole lot of conferences are happening this week, and I’ll be attending two of them. On Monday and Tuesday of this week I’ll be attending O’Reilly’s Velocity conference, where I’ll be moderating a panel entitled “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about CDNs (but were afraid to ask).” I’m hoping that seems to be fun, but there ought to be a lot of other interesting people I’d like to see while there as well, including two other very smart folks from AOL (Mandi Walls and Eric Goldsmith). I’ve been thinking about this as “Web 2.0 Expo without all that boring UI and Business Stuff”. 


Velocity, the Web Performance and Operations Conference 2008

The second event I’ll be at will be GigaOM’s Structure 08. Cloud computing is really leveling the playing field, giving small start-ups access to world-class operational assets… which to me only underscore the importance of having brilliant Ops folks to run those systems. I’m eager to see what sort of discussions emerge.

If you happen to be at either, give me a buzz in the comments, and I’ll try and catch up with you. 

Posted in Infrastructure, Web Technology | No Comments »

Really Big Data Centers for Lease

Sunday, October 21st, 2007

This past Friday, DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT) raised $640 million in an IPO. DFT is a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) which specializes in large-scale commercial data centers. More to the point, they specialize in the sort of facilities which are desired by the largest technology companies. I’ve mentioned before that building and operating facilities is often desirable for larger players, but when it isn’t, they increasingly turn to DFT.

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Posted in Data Centers, Infrastructure, Internet | No Comments »

Things Fall Apart, Datacenter Edition

Thursday, August 2nd, 2007

The relentless pursuit by Operations staff of 100% uptime has always struck me as something more than just a job, but a battle against the relentless forces of nature. Everything ultimately breaks down — systems, buildings, even people — and attempting to maintain 100% availability is the Ops equivalent of trying to cheat death. Sooner or later, despite our best efforts, our number will ultimately be up. Most recently in the news, self-proclaimed World’s Finest Data Center operator 365 Main suffered an approximately 45 minute power outage at their San Francisco facility. Much to their credit., and unlike most of their competitors, 365 Main has been extremely open about their investigation. I’ll examine this a bit today, as it’s a rare public glimpse into what goes on inside a large data center facility.
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Posted in 365 main, Data Centers, Infrastructure, Internet | 2 Comments »

Geographic Distribution for Global Web Application Performance

Monday, April 16th, 2007

I’m pleased to announce that on Tuesday, April 17th, I’ll be presenting a brief discussion of Geographic Distribution at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. As the web matures, performance has become a tremendous issue, especially when deploying an application for a global audience. One important way to improve performance is the geographic distribution of application delivery. Join me at 8:30am tomorrow in 2018, or check out my slides, which will be posted shortly after the discussion.

Posted in Infrastructure, Internet, Technology, web2expo | 2 Comments »

Really Big Data Centers

Wednesday, April 11th, 2007

While most of my time these days is spent contemplating software and application considerations, I’d like to take a moment to address a topic which only occasionally gets the attention it deserves: the role of a high quality data center. While a few folks may think that networking and data center infrastructure are dead arts, I’m quite confident that there is still significant work going on in this space. Case in point: Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, Google, and (shockingly) Google are building massive new data centers taking advantage of all of the latest features to increase density and automation and reduce cost. At the end of the day, scale wins, and these facilities (which have price tags in the half-a-billion dollar range) have scale. Not to be outdone, incidentally, AOL has built a few big data centers — and sold them too. (more…)

Posted in Data Centers, Infrastructure, Internet, aol | 1 Comment »