Valentine’s Day can evoke different reactions from different people. For some, it could be a wonderful day of romance and gifts. For others, you may believe it’s just another Hallmark holiday meant to drive flower, card, candy and teddy bear sales.

Similar feelings of sheer bliss or utter despair can also affect online retailers in any of these industries. The National Retail Federation predicts consumers will spend more on friends and family this Valentine’s Day, possibly totaling as much as $17.6 billion, with 19 percent purchasing their gift online. So depending on your IP provider and your IT Infrastructure, this Valentine’s Day could be a big win or a big bust.

For an online retailer, a one-second delay in website performance means a 7% reduction in customer conversion. Website performance optimization technologies such as TCP Acceleration, Content Delivery Networks and intelligent Internet routing techniques can dramatically improve the performance of your site.

Which technologies do you use, and how have they worked for you so far?

Did you know six of the top ten e-retailers* rely on Internap’s IT Infrastructure solutions to boost their website performance and end-user experience. Want to know more about WPO technologies? Download our Enterprise IP Buyer’s Guide Now.

*Web sales as a percentage of total sales, Internet Retailer 2011 Top 500 Guide

The amount of power consumed in a modern data center is generally incomprehensible.  One hundred MW (that’s megawatts) of power can operate just one Apple, Google, Yahoo! or Facebook data center or 80,000 average American homes.  In Internap data centers we have customers operating with 10KW of power draw in an 8’x2’x4’ locking, seismically reinforced, steel cabinet.  While that’s just 1/100^th of 1MW, it’s also eight homes worth of power in a space barely large enough for two very friendly people to stand.  In the case of our Santa Clara, Seattle, Boston, Dallas, Los Angeles and Atlanta facilities, there will be thousands of such racks.  It’s all a bit overwhelming, but it’s not a bad thing.

I won’t claim though that there isn’t a story here− there is.  It’s just not one that speaks about data center power usage as though it’s squandering natural resources.

In 2009, the primary energy use in the United States was 25,150 TWh (that’s a terawatt hour).  One terawatt hour is equal to a sustained power of approximately 114 MW for a period of one year.  Relatively speaking then, any single data center is only a very tiny blip in terms of total energy consumption.  Still, it’s impossible to argue that there aren’t impacts from energy consumption and we should be attentive to those impacts.  To that end, power consumption overall should be differentiated from a good use of power and bad use of power.  From my perspective, as someone in the data center business, providing clean power to servers is a good use of power.  Those servers power applications that impact every aspect of business today and many aspects of our personal lives.  Losing energy to inefficient equipment in the form of heat or light isn’t a good use of power.

Internap does a number of things – many of which are outlined in our green colocation eBook– to make sure that we are being responsible with how we use our resources when we build and operate a facility.  A good use of power is our focus.  And it’s a focus for the Facebooks of the world as well.  Take a look at their Open Compute Project, which touts a solution where more than 90% of all incoming power is used by servers.

If this is a focus for you too, third party verification by groups or programs like LEED, Energy Star and Green Globes, can help assure you that a data center provider is being responsible in managing their consumption of resources.

Check out our Choosing a Green Colocation Provider” infographic for more on the standards and practices of a green facility. 

Internap was privileged to recently host a cloud roundtable with three IT executives, including Tim Bell, VP, Information Technology & CIO of Greenway Medical, Raymond A. Repic, VP of Information Technology at Dell SecureWorks, as well as Michael J. Smith, Executive Director of NASA Shared Services Center. During this discussion, we heard how these leaders steer their own cloud implementations and the lessons they learned along the way. Tim Bell gave us the following insights when asked about deriving ROI from his cloud implementation.

 We looked at the cloud in two parts: a platform for our software and services, and the other as a platform to serve the needs and requirements of the company.

The most important thing we found is to integrate cloud concepts early in the product development cycle. While this is a new concept by nomenclature, the technologies and the system infrastructures behind cloud computing have been evolving over several years under various names. We began to recognize we wanted to leverage this delivery mechanism, so it had to be integrated into the product development stage. Rather than having to re-tool, we can roll out new products and offerings that are based on that concept without a disruption of our whole product and services delivery timeline.

Secondly when talking about ROI for the delivery of services to the company, to get the returns we were looking for we needed to spread our deployment across the entire cloud deployment spectrum. We couldn’t take everything and put it into a Software as a Service (SaaS) model because it was cost prohibitive and it didn’t make sense for us to take our IT services and roll them to one place. So we began to look all three tiers of cloud services [Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service and SaaS] to deliver the solutions we needed for the company to operate. That allows us to spread out the risks and costs and to learn more about the different tiers as we roll out more critical services.

For more on assessing cloud risks, deriving positive ROI and overcoming barriers to the cloud, listen to the webinar instant replay

What about you? Have you developed a method to derive ROI from your cloud implementations?

The 2004 film “Super Size Me” made us all aware that bigger isn’t always better. During the course of a month the independent filmmaker, Morgan Spurlock, consumed three meals per day at the nationwide fast food chain, McDonald’s, and each time he was asked if he wanted to “super size” his meal he agreed.  On average Spurlock consumed the equivalent of 9.26 Big Macs per day, and his fast food binge eventually lead to a weight gain of 24½ pounds in just 30 days. The reason for Spurlock’s investigation was the increasing spread of obesity throughout U.S. society, which the Surgeon General has declared “epidemic.”

Many data center providers take a strikingly similar approach when constructing their facilities to epic proportions. These providers have a bigger-is-better mindset and build their facilities to excess in order to minimize the risk of not having enough space, power or cooling later in the data center lifecycle since it is very costly to increase capacity. According to a recent white paper written by Schneider Electric, these providers know the load requirement of the data center will increase, but this increase cannot be reliably predicted. As a result, the physical and power infrastructure of data centers is typically oversized by more than 100%, leading to increased costs passed on to the customer. As Schneider Electric writes, super sizing might work great at the drive-through, but when it comes to the physical and power infrastructure of your data center, bigger is not necessarily better.

The ideal situation, according to Schneider Electric, is to provide a method and architecture that can continuously adapt to changing requirements. The solution then is for the data center infrastructure to be provided in pre-engineered modular building blocks.

Internap believes in a holistic design approach to scalable space, power and cooling, and the ability to install a right-size system on day one. Our modular build-out process allows us to offer quality, high-availability and high-density data center services.

Have you been subjected to the “super size me” mentality? Check out a new approach to data center design that is not only more efficient, but cost-effective.

It’s been a few weeks since Voxel was acquired by Internap and now is a good time for some reflection. Much of the “post-deal” craziness has started to die down and we’re back to our day jobs. A few high level points for those of you who don’t want to wait for my take on things:

• Internap is full of seriously smart, hard-working people with 15 hours-a-day work ethics.
• MIRO and XIP™ are hot stuff, we can’t wait to use them.
• The company-owned facilities in major cities like New York, Dallas, Santa Clara, etc., are run really nicely (and they look good too).
• The Voxel brain trust and product set really ‘clinks’ with the IT platform Internap has developed.
• There is huge excitement within the company about automation, intelligent software and scalability solutions. Basically the engineers at both Voxel and Internap seem to have a lot to talk about over lunch.

One personal journey that I’m starting on is that this is the first time in 11 years that I’ve got a day-to-day boss. I’m sure I’ll have some adjustments and missteps in the process of working with a larger team, but Steve Orchard, who heads up the entire operations and service organization at Internap, is making it pretty easy so far for the guys and gals on the Voxel operations team. His team has a culture of service that I’ve found throughout Internap — one in which C-level execs all the way down to new engineers are willing and excited to roll up their sleeves, hop onto an SSH (Secure Shell) session and fix a problem or improve the experience for a customer. Internap has an engineering-based culture similar to what we’ve grown up with at Voxel and one I know our clients will appreciate. Plus, as soon I saw Steve load up PINE (Program for Internet News & Email) and rapid-fire respond to a couple dozen emails over horrendous airport WiFi in the time it took me to load up my Outlook client, I knew the guy had street cred and could relate nicely to the customers and partners that make up Voxel’s client base.

As VP, hosting operations and support, I’ve got the task of scaling up the team that provides 24/7 support for hosting and cloud customers. It’s somewhat familiar territory for me — growing a highly technical team of global engineers that help make our customers raving fans — but on a whole new scale. You can be sure I’ll be taking pro tips and leveraging the experience of the top notch NOC and customer service team that Internap has built over the years. I’ve seen the call logs and ticket reports from the NOC, and it’s pretty impressive to see how proactive and professional this group is.

Overall it’s been a great experience getting to know this new, much larger team over the past weeks. I’m excited for what we’ll be able to accomplishe with our combined resources — essentially we’ve strapped on a rocket to many of the Voxel projects that were always hampered by resources, budget or hours in the day — and we’re ready to bring even more market-leading hosting and cloud solutions to our customers at an accelerated pace. As we do so, make sure you keep in touch with us and let us know what we’re doing wrong, doing right or not doing at all — we’ll be anxious to hear your feedback.

Managed hosting offers a variety of advantages. To help you understand its appeal, here is a list of the benefits most valued by customers. Drumroll please…

1. Reduced Capital Costs

Instead of investing in equipment every three to five years, your IT Infrastructure becomes an operating expense (opex), reducing your up-front capital investment (capex). Plus, when the equipment breaks, needs repairs or maintenance, you don’t incur additional charges.

2. Predictable Cost Model

Managed hosting fees are billed as a monthly flat fee so you can easily predict costs, making budgeting for IT expenses simple.

3. Time Savings

The learning curve for new enterprise-level equipment is eased. You no longer need to spend time and energy to understand and manage new hardware that would typically be placed on your own network.

4. Customized Options

Managed hosting solutions aren’t “one-size-fits-all.” You customize a solution to meet the particular needs of your business. For a company with significant IT staff, many different business units and diverse technologies to support, a more customized managed hosting solution makes everyone’s lives that much easier.

5. Scalability

Managed hosting allows you to easily scale your infrastructure as your business grows. Scalability can help accelerate global expansion through a managed hosting provider with a global footprint rather than building data centers in-house, managing employees and coordinating third-party providers.

6. Technical Support

Leading managed hosting providers have a staff of skilled engineers delivering customer support. Make sure there is always a person on the phone when you need support. Check if you will receive alerts or a prompt phone call when something comes up. Knowing the provider is really keeping an eye on things frees your staff to focus on business critical issues.

7. Single Partner

With managed hosting, you don’t have to worry about managing vendor relationships for standard hardware and software. The provider handles this, and you never have to be bothered. In addition, by selecting a hosting provider that offers other services you can “future-proof” your infrastructure with the option to leverage other solutions such as colocation or cloud from a single partner.

 8. Network Availability

A managed hosting provider should be able to offer you an advanced network connection that dynamically routes your traffic over the Internet. Availability is usually expressed as a percentage of uptime in a given year. Many providers will state their availability in their Service Level Agreement (SLA) as a percentage such as 99.999 or 99.9. The difference? Two fewer nines means an average of 86 seconds more downtime every day, or 43 minutes more downtime every month. An SLA with five 9’s will ensure your network is up and running when you need it.

9. Controlled Access

A managed hosting environment offers top-notch security with limited physical access to the facility where your data and applications are housed. Some important features include 24/7 on-site guards, biometric fingerprint and retina scanners and, of course, key card and padlocked doors. Providers should be accessing your equipment through Secure Shell (SSH) or Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). This ensures that the interaction with your data is secure. You will also want to know who has access to your servers and how passwords are distributed and stored. Ask how often passwords are changed and make sure the provider always changes passwords after churn. All access to your environment should be logged as well.

Sold on managed hosting? You now have an even more important decision to make: which provider? Download our managed hosting checklist to help you get started.