As a graphic designer, it’s my job to stay up-to-date on the latest and greatest technologies to bring good design to the end-user. Unfortunately, these technologies often come with a pretty steep price tag. In design school, my supply budget dwarfed my business school friends’ book expenses, even considering that $800 Organizational Behavior monstrosity. Between the constant need to add more hard drive space to my computer to hold my enormous photo collage pieces for Environmental Design and the need to stay up-to-date on the latest software upgrades (because let’s be honest, if Adobe just came out with a tool that gives back ten hours of my life that I didn’t spend clone stamping out that chick’s arm for my Exit Project, it’s worth any price), my budget was toast. While I was forced to  become well-versed in the culinary art of Ramen cuisine, now students and professionals alike can celebrate that this might not be their fate.

Adobe released its Creative Cloud last month, allowing consumers to pay for their best-selling software on a monthly subscription basis ($50/month) rather than paying the hefty $1,299 to $2,599 price tag for the boxed product. The application is unique in that it resides on your computer, but still gives you the benefits of a cloud-based solution. You can save files with the 20GB of cloud storage space included with your subscription and use the Creative Cloud Connection feature to access your files anywhere. When Adobe releases software updates, design students around the world no longer have to salivate over new features they can’t afford, the Creative Cloud will update itself with these new tools and tricks at no extra charge.

In the grander scheme of things, what does this mean? For design students, it means a slower pace in the rat race of keeping up with technology in an ever-changing world, and it means only paying for the software that you need and use, when you need and use it. For the rest of us, it shows a huge shift in the movement toward the cloud. The design realm has long been a place of desktop-exclusive application, but Adobe’s shift to the cloud shows an increased interest in this industry toward a more fluid, shareable and customizable environment. If Adobe can do it why can’t you?

Wondering if cloud could be the right solution for your business? Check out our eBook (designed by yours truly), The Top 5 Mistakes You Want to Avoid When Becoming a Cloud Superhero.

This past weekend was a 3-day one for most in the USA, and it marked the beginning of summer as well. That time of the year when you fire up the grill, uncover the pool, turn on the AC and chill out! Just as you are getting into that relaxed zone, it’s time to head back to the office. And, that “peace of mind” you were beginning to enjoy goes right out the window.

Well it doesn’t have to …at least when considering your IT Infrastructure. Specifically, you have available to you many different ways to tackle your IT needs – one of which is putting it in the hands of an expert. Why would you do that, you ask? Peace of mind. Simple as that. When you engage with the right partner, they can provide you the freedom to focus on your business, while they focus on theirs – whether it be connectivity, cloud, colocation or hosting.

With the game-changing effects of big data and device proliferation, you are probably reevaluating your needs as I write to ensure your business remains far nimbler than your competition. Here are some writings (and benefits) to consider:

• This Year’s Ten Digital Strategies for the Next-Generation Enterprise
• Preparing for the demands of big data
• 9 warning signs of bad IT architecture
• Outsourcing could answer data center capacity questions
• CFOs Take Growing Interest in IT
• Colocation offers businesses data center flexibility

So, we are weeks away from our next long holiday weekend, but you can still enjoy the late days of summer and stay on permanent holiday with peace of mind that your IT Infrastructure is in the hands of experts. Just check out this ebook to learn how leading enterprises have leveraged Internap’s services to gain a competitive edge and gave them one less thing to worry about.

What’s a “Performance Data Center”? I’m glad you asked… I recently purchased my first boat so let’s use that as an analogy to help explain. We spend a lot of time on one particular lake, and towing my boat back and forth from the house to the lake can sometimes be a hassle. So, I’ve been looking into those huge dry docks where you can have your boat plucked from the water with a forklift when you’re done for the day. Your boat, which is no small investment I might add, is stored safe and sound, in the comfort of a huge warehouse filled with other boats. It’s dry, safe, secure, and I can access my boat whenever I want, for any reason. If I need work done on it, well, the dry dock facility can offer those services too. That seems pretty convenient to me, allowing me to focus on enjoying time with my family − which is why I bought the boat in the first place. As a bonus, varying levels of service are available based on individual needs.

Not unlike the dry dock housing above, a Performance Data Center offers the fundamental services needed to manage your IT Infrastructure, and so much more. It has the controlled environment you need and a staff at the ready with optional services like remote hands or 24/7 support. More robust than traditional data centers, Internap Performance Data Centers offer our entire product portfolio, so if you need more flexibility down the line (think cloud, managed/dedicated hosting or a combination thereof), it’s all there for you.

Over the last several years Internap has been busy building new Performance Data Centers to meet the growing demand for high-density power colocation, hosting and cloud services. Late last year we opened our Dallas facility, a 55,000 square foot, state-of-the-art data center with lots of great features and services that today’s technology professionals demand. Our newest Performance Data Center is currently being built in Los Angeles, CA, opening for business in summer of 2012. We’re excited about the opportunity to serve a new market and look forward to seeing you at our grand opening. Until then, we’ll keep you updated on progress.

Looking for more information on our Los Angeles Performance Data Center? Check out the data sheet.

Contemplating the massive amounts of data that traverse the web these days is like contemplating the size of a grain of sand compared to the expanses of the universe. You just can’t get your head around it. (And, I think I just got a headache.) The concept of massive data, which can no longer be managed by normal means, does have a simple name however: big data. Big data is a term applied to data that has grown so large that it becomes awkward to work with. This data is basically beyond the ability of commonly used computing tools to capture, manage and process within a tolerable elapsed time. Which begs the question, “How big is it?” Forget megabytes, gigabytes or even terabytes as current definitions are on the order of petabytes, exabytes and zettabytes (that’s a one with 20 zeros behind it!) of data. Can you say mind-boggling?

A recent report from Gartner says to expect an 800% growth in data over the next five years. And it’s no wonder, according to an infographic from Emerson Network Power, every hour enough information is consumed by Internet traffic to fill seven million DVDs. Emerson also reports tweets have tripled from 2010 to 2011, and there are approximately 500 million active Facebook users on earth. (Yowzer! That is a lot of vacation photos!) As an IT professional this presents a challenge that is becoming all too familiar and in fact, was found as the number one challenge faced in 2011 according to the same Gartner research mentioned above. Of course, budget constraints are also a major dilemma (bummer), so adding more equipment and/or space to handle the load isn’t always an option. Finding a way to do more with less is a top priority, as usual.

Eek! So what is an IT professional to do? Enter knight in shining armor. Savvy data center services providers are addressing growing demands for data with non-traditional, high efficiency cost-saving designs for infrastructure. Asking the right questions is key, however, to find out if your provider is prepared. The below list is a good starting point:

1. Six kilowatts may be fine today, but what about tomorrow? State-of-the-art facilities are going gangbusters on adding power… to the tune of 12kW and more (For curious minds, here’s an article to read up on this phenomenon). Ask your provider about the maximum power draw each server rack is capable of in order to maximize your existing footprint.
2. Is your provider a proponent of green design? It may sound like a bunch of nonsense thought up by granola-toting hippies, but in actuality green data center design does make a significant impact. Efficient cooling and power systems mean more of the total consumed power is going to customer resources, which also gives the provider the ability to offer upgrades such as nicer customer amenities. Score!
3. Ask your provider if they offer a wide range of platforms to support your business. Meaning, do they offer multiple IT Infrastructure options like cloud, managed/dedicated hosting or hybrid solutions in addition to colocation? You may get to a point where it makes sense to diversify and spread out your operations over a combination of platforms, most of which give you on-demand access to computing power (bonus points!). In addition, hosted solutions like these let you spread the love so you can get maximum use out of the equipment you are housing in a colocation environment.

Moral of the story? Preparing for big data doesn’t have to be as daunting as once thought if you ask the right questions of the provider you are considering. Speaking of providers (wink, wink) check us out to see how we stack up against your needs. Watch our platform flexibility video now.

The other day I was flying out of the Newark airport. Crushed into coach, having been awake for the last 20 hours, my neighbor and I struck up a conversation about what we did for a living. As he described his role, I quickly mentally scrambled to “how am I ever going to explain what I do to this guy.” Our companies and roles could not have been more different. I was certain that there would be no conversation with my new friend in 31E if I dove into an explanation of high performance Internet business platforms. Carefully weighing my desire to sleep, I offered “I build facilities for businesses who require a connection to the Internet as a key part of their business — like this airline. All that ticketing and online check-in… All came out of a data center building that is connected to the Internet.” Definitely not the approved corporate pitch.

That was of course, followed by a blank stare. The reality is that despite multi-tenant data centers generating $15 billion in annual revenue, most people have no real idea that outsourced data center services exist. For most people, data centers are computer closets at the back of their office. So I continued: “My company, Internap, invests tens of millions of dollars in building or retrofitting an office building or warehouse so that it can house computers in a secure, reliable environment.” He understood that. He had a server closet at the back of his office.

“In our case, we sub-divide these data centers and make them available for individual businesses.” Blank stare. “Data centers for business follow a path not unlike having kids. When your business is relatively small, like your kids, your IT services live at home with you in a server closest at the back of your office (not to say you make your kids live in the hall closet, but you get the idea). However, your kid grows up, gets big, goes to college and moves into an apartment. Your IT services can do that too. It’s a service that we offer called colocation. Essentially, it’s ‘apartments for servers.’ We also offer furnished apartments for servers – we call that managed hosting which is also pretty cool …” Stare started going blank. “…but a little off topic. Anyhow, eventually, your kid grows up, gets married, has a family and moves into either a condo or his own house. The condo is what we call wholesale or turnkey data center – basically you have a section of the building or a whole building to be customized to meet your needs. The house is for businesses that really want to do it all themselves. We don’t do houses. We do all the rest.” He smiled. “That’s pretty cool. I had no idea.”

Thinking back on it, apartments for servers is a great way to describe colocation. Both products are location-sensitive. Both take large buildings and break them down into private spaces. Both have a professional staff that maintains the property and security personnel to protect your stuff. Both offer you a lot of options to do what you want so long as you don’t irritate your neighbors. Both offer some level of custom sizing, rapid availability, easy upgrades and amenities that help you make the most of being there.

With the analogy of apartments for servers in mind, it seems to me to be completely natural to use a 3^rd party data center as a part of your business evolution. In fact, for those of you with server closets at the back of your office, I’ll suggest that if you just move your business out and into its own space, it might grow up a little faster. Not unlike your kids.

Looking for a colocation solution for your growing business? Check out our “server apartments” map today.

I had a completely unexpected experience at a toll booth recently. I pulled up to make change for my dollar bill but was refused by the attendant. Now, I’m thinking “what the…?” – well, you can imagine what I was thinking. But to my surprise she threw 50 cents into the coin basket and said “the guy in the car ahead of you paid your toll.” Needless to say I was a bit taken aback, but more than that I really apppreciated the random act of kindness. So, before I proceeded through the gate, I decided I would do the same for the car behind me. And, as I drove off I wondered how long the chain of good fortune would go on. I never found out, of course, but I hoped it lasted a good while.

That gesture of goodwill got me thinking too. Good begets good. And in business, good customer service begets good customer loyalty. We all know that bad customer service can spell disaster for companies. In fact, it can put them out of business altogether. But the flip side of that is if you show your customers how much you appreciate their business, they’ll most likely show you how much they appreciate your business by continuing to do business with you.

So my mashup is along those lines…interestingly enough, more and more, technology and social media are playing key roles in the customer experience. Case in point:

• From Your Television to Customer Service: Please Call Me Back
• Fraudulent eBay Buyer Leaves You Minus $1000 And A MacBook Pro
• FastCustomer Unleashes Telephone Call Concierge Service
• Social Media Users Are Squeakier Wheels When It Comes to Customer Service
• Top 10 Social Customer Service Blogs of 2012

(Warning: shameless plug for Internap.) Finally, I’m proud to say that Internap was recently certified by the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) as a Support Staff Excellence Center. Even more importantly, our customers tell us that we are doing a great job. In fact in our recent annual survey they gave us an overall customer satisfaction ranking of 8.62* (out of a maximum of 10.0) – that’s better than the industry average of 8.31 and our peer group of 6.9!

Whether in the drive-through lane at your favorite coffee spot or providing your customers the service they expect, paying it forward may pay off in ways you hadn’t previously considered. How have you paid it forward? If you haven’t, do it. You’d be amazed at how good it makes you feel!

Ever wonder what’s really behind your favorite products and services? Danny Wen and Shawn Liu, co-founders of Harvest sure did. Danny realized “in New York you walk past all these buildings and you never know that a company whose product you use is in a building you walk by every day.” That’s why his company, Harvest, created the WalkaboutNYC event, which asked technology companies from around New York City to give interested parties a sneak peak inside their geeky worlds. We dug the idea, so last week we opened the doors to our data center at 111 8^th Avenue in the big apple. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive, and we’re pretty sure it wasn’t just because of the cocktails served at the after party – although they didn’t hurt J. Here are a few highlights of our New York data center in case you missed the tour:

• Location: Located in lower Manhattan’s premier carrier hotel
• Power Density: Supports up to 8kW power density per rack
• Redundancy: N+1 design providing concurrent maintainability of generator, UPS and cooling modules
• On-site Support: Experienced 24/7 on-site support with remote hands capability
• Carrier Diversity: Carrier neutral environments with 8+ carriers

Want the full effect? Schedule a private tour of our New York facility today.

In my previous post I gave a shout out to the crew at our Silicon Valley data center. As a new member of the Internap team, I was certainly glad for the extra hand the on-site team provided when deploying our cloud and dedicated servers. In this post, I’ll explain how geography comes into play when offering these services.

 Why Geography Matters

A great advantage of having hosting and cloud services around the world, is that we can situate a customer’s hosting installation strategic to their core audience or user group, or even data partner (think financial services for trading apps or latency-sensitive applications). With the addition of Santa Clara and Dallas to our existing sites in New York, Amsterdam and Singapore, Internap and Voxel together now provide one of the best hosting footprints available in the marketplace. What’s unique about the Internap/Voxel offering is that you can spin up dedicated or cloud hosting environments in all of these global hosting facilities using our desktop tool or the new Agile Hosting online configurator and get the same server specs, performance baselines and pricing model, regardless of location.

A few quick and dirty tests show that hosting in our Santa Clara center (powered by a peering rich IP backbone and Managed Intelligent Route Optimizer™ (MIRO) technology offers excellent ping times to Internet destinations not only in the Western US, but all the way over to Asia and Australia:

• 110ms to Tokyo (sony.co.jp)
• 145ms to Australia (australia.gov.au)
• 180ms to Singapore (starhub.com)
• 70ms to New York (nyse.com)
• 40ms to Texas (texas.gov)
• 20ms to Seattle (washington.gov)
• 4.5ms to San Francisco (berkeley.edu)

And with California being the top Internet usage state in the US (which is itself, the top Internet using country in the world) it’s good to be so close to so many eyeballs.

Tried our on-demand hosting services yet? Check them our here

Here at Voxel, (by the way, now an Internap company) we’ve always wanted a California data center — something close to the Silicon Valley tech hub where so many of our startup and web 2.0 customers live, work and sell. But as a previously New York-based infrastructure company, with only 50 employees and a lot going on, we were never able to cost-justify deploying enough gear and staffing as well as enough smart guys and gals in California to make the jump. All that changed a few months ago when we became part of the Internap team — suddenly a West Coast hosting facility was an eminent reality. Internap has a company owned, top-tier data center in the heart of Santa Clara, CA, and a good portion of the cloud engineering and managed hosting support teams work out of the office space.

About Mission College Boulevard

The Internap Santa Clara facility is located strategically in the heart of Silicon Valley, a few shorts miles away from the original “super” data centers on Mission College Boulevard. This hyper-connected Silicon Valley data center building has been built to the highest standards of availability and safety by an Internap “DC Ops” (data center Operations) team that is truly second to none.

The facility boasts:

• Utility power via two discrete electrical grids and substations (PSE&G and Silicon Valley Power)
• 3 x 1.5 Megawatt Caterpillar generators, 4 x Liebert 750kVa UPS systems and true A/B power redundancy
• 2 x 1100 ton cooling towers and redundant, N+1 condensed water cooling systems
• 36,000 square feet of raised data center floor space

Overall, our team couldn’t ask for a better place to rack and stack a few thousand servers and power our cloud and on-demand dedicated server offerings.

The Internap Crew

When you work in data centers all day long like I do, you really start to appreciate the people who build and maintain these huge, always-on, “never-can-fail” facilities. It takes a special breed of engineer to spend a majority of their waking hours inside a temperature-controlled box of power circuits, fiber connections and whirling fans — and like it! But I can tell you from experience that it makes all the difference in the world when you, as a customer, show up to install your equipment.
Lucky for me, the Internap Santa Clara team is a truly dedicated group of professional site operators — the facility is immaculate, the pride in each installed cabinet, cross connect or power receptacle is clear, and our crew always had extra hands on deck from the data center site staff to help us deploy our West Coast dedicated server and cloud hosting installation. A special shout out to Matt Brown and his DC Ops crew in Santa Clara for all of their help — it looks nice to see you standing next to so many of our servers!

Looking for data center services in the Bay Area? I’ll have my guys hook you up. Schedule a private tour today. In the meantime, stay tuned for my post tomorrow on how data center location comes into play when shopping for cloud services.

Speed, performance, high-tech. Just a few of the things that come to mind when you mention Formula One racing, which we have been heavily involved in since the season started this year. (Go Nico Hülkenberg and Paul Di Resta!) Interestingly though, these same words are synonymous with the demands of IT professionals today across many industries — which is why we set out just a few weeks ago to find out how these professionals are leveraging their IT to meet these demands. Roadtrip!

Kicking off the F1 racing season, we traveled to the Sahara Force India (SFI) Formula One racing team’s headquarters in Silverstone, United Kingdom to capture the SFI story and operations first hand — but we didn’t stop there. In fact, we interviewed several IT professionals from well-known companies like YouSendIt, Hi-Rez Studios and The Vermont Teddy Bear Company. In addition to some interesting travel debacles (including how to get a shower at Heathrow airport after traveling 12 hours, all before meeting SFI for the first time) and some unique food adventures, such as sampling a Vermont-style bacon cheeseburger with real maple syrup (which is the real deal by the way), what we came up with are the success stories of brands that have driven their IT to deliver speed and performance to their end users:

Sahara Force India:

Although SFI is technically the national Formula One team of India, they pride themselves on being a global team with a worldwide fan base. In order to reach this global audience, SFI created a new interactive website, ForceIndiaF1.com, that acts as a portal to integrate the team’s social media with real-time video, news and information. In doing so, they created fast, streamlined communication with fans through a single web site portal. Watch their story.

YouSendIt:

With more than 30 million registered users in 193 countries, YouSendIt helps enterprises and business professionals streamline collaboration by enabling them to instantly sync and access content in the cloud, send files, share folders and sign documents from anywhere — the desktop, Web or mobile devices. Watch their story to find out how YouSendIt increased scalability to rapidly grow with its exponentially expanding customer base.

Hi-Rez Studios:

Hi-Rez Studios, Inc., located just outside of Atlanta, GA, is a fully independent studio established in 2005 to create exceptional online interactive entertainment. Hi-Rez Studios has released two free-to-play self-published titles, the AAA shooter, massively multiplayer online (MMO) game: Global Agenda, and the fast-paced, sci-fi multiplayer shooter game Tribes: Ascend™.  Check out this video to see how they successfully launched these two games to a worldwide audience, supporting traffic growth from 100 gigabits per year to over 1.6 petabytes per month.

Vermont Teddy Bear Company:

The Vermont Teddy Bear Company has been creating personalized bears since 1984. Through the years, Vermont Teddy Bear has created several sister companies, including PajamaGram and Calyx Flowers. Network traffic greatly affects Vermont Teddy Bear’s business, especially since 80% of their products are sold online. Watch how the company supported a 700% spike in traffic with no downtime this past holiday season by clicking here.

In businesses where speed and performance are paramount to success, it only seems fitting to choose a IT Infrastructure solutions partner that is equally concerned with these demands. Watch the videos above, then build a “performance package” to get a custom solution for the way you drive your IT.