Piers Daniell

Along with our recent move to a new office in London we also this year opened a dedicated Network Operations Centre (NOC) in Hemel Hempstead. With a growing client base it was important we kept service levels the same and had staff within a few feet of client’s hosted equipment. With our four datacentres in the city predominantly used for connectivity, most customers have taken space in the Hemel site, Centro. The site went live last year and is cutting edge, offering high levels of power perfect for virtual environments.

With part of the site unable to take racks due to loads on the floor it was deemed perfect for a new support team who will operate on a 24/7 rota. With the rest of the site already manned 24/7 it also helps with Health & Safety regulations on lone workers.

But what has proved most successful in my mind is the technology we deployed to link the two offices together. With Fluidata’s current support team based in London it was important the two teams could communicate effectively with each other. Therefore when designing the offices we implemented HD video conferencing which sits permanently at the end of each team to allow them a ‘window’ to the other. By running it continuously it means that very quickly the technology is forgotten about and the relationship between the staff could flourish.

It doesn’t mean there isn’t any on site contact, but it does mean it can be reduced, and both offices are able to work more as one. Visitors have been impressed by the quality and its effectiveness. You just walk up to the screen (or for the support teams sit at your desk) and talk to each other. I think the perception is one that video should be the thing sitting in the boardroom collecting dust, rather than an integral part of the office environment. There are, of course, other benefits such as green credentials and ROI (in terms of reduced transport) but for me the main driver is the collaboration it drives within the business.

I visited Microsoft’s London offices today in Victoria to learn about their hosting strategy and new products they are launching. Being involved a little bit in this internet industry I thought it was important to keep up to date with the application layer. Obviously being Microsoft they are a little behind on the curve but nothing prepared me for how boring they made it all sound.

Never before have I ever felt like sleeping in a conference but within ten minutes of the presentation starting I felt myself drift away. How can anyone make such an exciting industry so dreary? They have a fantastic office, with top of the range everything, even a fully catered subsidised canteen but still talk as though the world is coming to an end. There was really nothing new apart from little bit better Exchange, little bit better Outlook and little bit better Windows. It is like the software equivalent of Porsche where every new model is pretty much identical to the previous one but goes that tiny bit faster. Their biggest growth product is SharePoint which apparently got to $1bn in sales quicker than any other product in its history. Well great, but it is still boring and is definitely no IPod moment for Microsoft.

The business has to be very careful over the coming years because, from what I can see, it is becoming very much like IBM. It is becoming the goliath with companies such as Apple and Google retaining the right to David. Cloud computing is a very exciting time for our industry and something we have fully adopted in house (Fluidata) as an example for our clients. I just wish Microsoft used its might to help lead rather than follow and come up with something new that would set my pants on fire.

From the amount of emails I have received from companies over the past few weeks pushing hosting space I believe we are seeing a glut of capacity currently in the market space. Interestingly not much of it is located within London which still struggles with power supply.

We are on the bandwagon as well but see it much more as a strategic addition to our connectivity offering rather than a standalone solution. Key points to note with any hosting is the long term commitment especially if your requirements change and you need more space or power. It seems most of the offers focus on rack space rather than power, which is good for the headline price but becomes expensive when you realise the power offered will only support a few servers rather than the rack you have paid for.

Another consideration is how well served the datacentre is for connectivity as a lot of these deals seem to be for sites in the middle of nowhere. Make sure that any hosting you do take is within easy reach of the sites you need to connect to and scalable for future needs.

I was speaking to a client yesterday on the merits of virtualisation and what needed to be considered before moving his company ‘into the cloud’. A lot has been said in the press and by manufacturers about the benefits of hosting services, however little covers the specific problems that you are inevitably left with. In this client’s case the business was at a junction in terms of IT investment as it evaluated its creaking server infrastructure and to plan the next steps.

With eight separate servers, each carrying out a specific function it was easy to recommend sharing one larger server using something like Vmware to convert each server into a virtual environment. My word of caution came with trying to share resources between servers and better instead to over specify the base machine to ensure each server got exactly what it needed. Modern virtualisation software is clever in sharing resources but in my experience if you have a Microsoft Exchange server gobbling up 4 GB of RAM then it isn’t going to share very well with a Microsoft SQL server requiring the same. Better to ensure there is at least 8 GB on the base machine and allocated 4 to each. The same goes with processors, only hard drives can really be shared, and with RAID, reliably too. So now instead of buying eight cheap servers the client can instead buy one or two (for extra redundancy) high specification servers to carry out the same role.

The next problem is where to host the platform. While the customer knows it should be in the cloud so that it can be accessed from everywhere and highly secure it does mean handing over parts of the business to a third-party. This can be done by fully outsourcing the virtual machines and not even owning the hardware, however without full due diligence what could appear to be a good service today, could fall over when another hundred customers have the same idea. Also no SLA will ever compensate your business should the worse happen so I believe it is better plan as though everything is about to go very wrong. Therefore a good solution would be to collocate some hardware in a datacentre but also maintain a local version and replicate between the two. That way there is maximum resilience should the internet fail, supplier go bust or office burn down.

While the industry will remain very positive on the concept of the cloud it is important not to loose sight of the technical challenges your company will face and how that would impact your ability to do business.

Interesting announcement by Google that they plan to pull out of China if the government can’t curb the hacking of email accounts on it’s free service offering, Gmail. It appears that there is a lot of activity with human right activist’s email accounts specifically, being compromised.

Being in the communist state has always gone against the grain for Google but with the promise of increased advertising revenues (for a business with a motto of ‘don’t do evil’) they were very happy to restrict content for Chinese users. However as time has gone on revenues haven’t increased and many believe China is still a loss leader for Google.

So the best way to gain more market share? To publically humiliate the Chinese government and get more column inches in every paper globally than any marketing campaign could achieve. I am sure Google couldn’t give to hoots about the compromised email accounts, but by voicing it’s concern publically not only wins public support but also dramatically increases advertising revenue as people flock to the website.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not advocating China’s way of doing business, but to suggest Google is taking a stand for human rights and not commercial gain is short sighted. I wouldn’t be surprised if more western businesses join the bandwagon as China beating becomes more popular. It is a communist state with appalling human rights abuses – what do they expect?

Small news release on the recent launch of our new datacentre in Hemel Hempstead. For the last few years our clients have been demanding more from hosting and so to meet this need we were very keen to bring on a new cutting edge datacentre that could keep up with their requirements. The new Hemel site suited this, not only because it was a new building designed with high density servers in mind, but also as the site was located outside of London and far away from the main datacentres most people are familiar with. This gives companies high levels of resilience should something happen in London but close enough (less than 0.3 ms) to replicate live data.

Interesting development in the final draft of the Digital Britian report is the £6 a year telephone line tax. It is proposed that every single line in the country will be subjected to this tax and that its proceeds will be put towards providing high speed internet (in Government’s eyes this is 2 Mb/s) to those in the countryside. The cynical side of me would suggest that this money will never materialise, much like the taxes on cars that never seems to be spent on the road infrastructure. And if it does, is it right that the 90% of the population close enough to receive 2 Mb/s should subsidise the remaining few? For one I would expect they enjoy a slower pace of life (one of the reasons I love to go back to the Cotswolds each weekend) and hence don’t have the high demands on broadband.

In a way it is like trying to put a motorway outside every house in the country. While it would be a great achievement, when I am in Gloucestershire I like the fact that there aren’t any motorways. Sure future services will put more of a requirement on the use of broadband and faster internet services but surely the politicians should be wondering why there isn’t a higher take up in the areas that can already get services. Don’t get me wrong I will be very happy when I have 20 Mb/s at my home but I doubt many of my neighbors will notice.

Good article by one of my colleagues, Max Stoner on the Work Wise UK initiative.

This afternoon saw a large number of users across the internet fail to access Google. We had a high volume of customers this afternoon report that Google.com and Google.co.uk were unavailable. And looking across our wide range of transit peers it was affecting a lot of other carriers as well. Google have yet to issue a full statement but reports from all over the world point to a problem on their network.

A couple of years ago if the same had happened we wouldn’t have had one call but now with the proliferation  of Google and its services it has become a cornerstone to most businesses. One thing is for sure that no matter how small the glitch it shows the key problem of cloud computing. As users rely so heavily on the delivered service, if it fails it immediately affects you where as the standard server/client relationship is less susceptible. I always go on about connectivity needing to be resilient for businesses in the last mile, but obviously no point if the cloud provider isn’t there!

Interesting developments going on at Tiscali. With shares suspended and talks at an end with Sky, the company is currently worth about €100m. With debts of over €500m they are having big problems keeping their head above water and some reckon there will now be a fire sale on a number of assets.

From my perspective this is no bad thing. For a number of years Tiscali has been bullish in the marketplace and always over promised and under delivered. With their purchase of Bulldog last year when they took on Pipex it was inevitable that they would hit the buffers as that client base does appear to be one very hot potato. It nearly brought Cable & Wireless to its knees (sold for £12m even though it cost C&W closer to £120m), ruined Pipex and now making it’s mark on Tiscali. It may be a coincidence but with Tiscali eager to just gain market share at any cost it was a telling sign that they were prepared to take on the Bulldog client base when buying Pipex.

What does it mean to us? Well it adds to the point I have made before that the consolidation in telecoms market has not been to the benefit of users and that dealing with a large multinational does not provide any level of guarantees or security. At least with a smaller company you have more visibility in how it is performing and in dealing with a business such as Fluidata risk is spread as multiple networks are used to deploy services.

Business already using Tiscali’s platform for DSL and MPLS are already starting to hit the phones to minimise risk and move off the network. If Tiscali don’t move quickly to stabilise their position they could find they don’t have a client base to sell.