Energy efficiency is a big deal for our data center and as early as 2004 we realized that energy efficiency was going to shape how we operate our business.  We measure every watt of consumption in real-time so we can better identify opportunities for savings in power and cooling.  We recently identified a clear opportunity to reduce our power and cooling consumption in our UPS systems.

This month we are completing a replacement of our secondary battery based UPS with a flywheel based system from Active Power.  While the physics behind flywheel systems are rather old, the actual use of kinetic rotational energy  in a data center environment can be measured in dot com years.

UPS systems provide ride-through time until a generator can start and assume the electrical load.  A battery based UPS system uses energy stored within a string of batteries to provide emergency power.  The problem with traditional battery based UPS systems is that if one battery is bad within a string, the UPS will not function properly.  For our UPS systems we previously deployed redundant battery strings to minimize this risk.  If you are trying to differentiate service providers ask them about their UPS systems and the level of redundancy in their battery strings.  At Profitability.net we operate an “A” UPS and a “B” UPS to provide our clients with a dual source power option. 

The Active Power Cleansource UPS uses several flywheels in motion to provide Profitability.net with sufficient ride-through time until our generator system can handle the load.  According to the vendor, our new flywheel UPS is seven times less likely to fail versus a legacy UPS.  This makes sense because as long as those flywheels are spinning you should have ride-through power.  In addition, the Cleansource UPS operates at a much higher level of efficiency at partial loads and emits less heat than the system being replaced.  All of this adds up to reduced energy consumption for our data center.  Stay tuned for further announcements regarding several more energy efficiency initiatives we have planned. 

Virtualization solutions such as VMware, Xen, or Microsoft Hyper-V can generate significant ROI in the right application environment.  While the demand on IT resources continues to increase, physical servers are often underutilized, wasting hardware, space, and electricity.  Application compatibility issues traditionally forced IT to separate applications by running them in silos on different server platforms. 

By consolidating workloads into a virtualized environment, you can reduce server count and typically improve availability of critical business applications.  Availability is further improved through colocation in enterprise data centers.  In our Cincinnati colocation facility, we provide redundant UPS systems and branch power circuits to each cabinet to ensure power continuity.  The UPS systems are protected with redundant battery strings and 5,000 gallon fuel reserve for the generator set.  With this type of environment readily available in Cincinnati, it’s just too risky to place critical business applications in an insecure office environment.  Colocation is a cost effective alternative and creates an opportunity to address other gaps in IT infrastructure.

Many organizations are solving business continuity concerns as well through the use of disaster recovery or business continuity solutions.  In a virtualized environment, the server count and investment required to replicate certain environments is dramatically reduced.

So what is the catch?  When you add complexity to an environment you create risk.  Licensing, support, and deployment costs are fairly steep, but may become more competitive as there are more alternatives in the marketplace.  You might also be creating a new single point of failure even though you eliminate others.  If something happens to the physical machine or virtualization software that controls all of the virtualized servers, you would have a widespread outage acorss your virtualized business applications.

Many of these challenges are solvable with the right investment and deployment strategy.  There are many resources available if your organization is considering a virtualized environment.  If you want to simultaneously use colocation for your equipment and/or create a business continuity site in Cincinnati, we welcome your call at 513.361.0800.

When email goes down, your computer may as well have just flown through a window. There isn’t a worse feeling than customer interaction coming to a standstill. For many businesses, revenue generation and service suffer. The days of paying an IT consultant to place critical servers and data in the office closet are over.

Relax. There is a better way. You may have heard of Software as a Service (SaaS), which allows you to access a hosted application and pay as you go, much like a utility. Rather than deploying servers in your office, you can merely outsource the applications you need and access them from anywhere in the world.

Our core business has been colocation and data center services with a mix of hosted applications. The launch of Hosted Exchange marks a large effort on our part to help our clients operate more efficiently. I challenged our technical gurus to put together an enterprise quality Hosted Exchange service offering that would wow our customers. The result is a zero point of failure solution that is infinitely scalable, flexible, and reliable. We’re branding this effort “Exchange Your Way,” and delivering s customized solution that yields significant cost savings over in-house systems.

We are including an Exchange Control Center that enables our customers to add and remove users and allocate storage as needed to individual users. This storage flexibility eliminates wasted storage and reduces operating costs for our clients.

Exchange Your Way is powered in our enterprise data center. We’ve launched an environment that will support thousands of users and includes no less than two Foundry load balancers, four Cisco switches, sixteen custom Dell servers, and a LeftHand high availability SAN.

We also invested in an enterprise point-in-time backup and recovery solution that will enable rollback and restoration of individual emails and mailboxes. Our Managed Exchange environment is also compatible with numerous third party email archiving solutions including Microsoft Exchange Hosted Archive.

Knowing that we help our clients compete better is very rewarding for our team. Our clients have an opportunity to work with us to make their email more reliable and their business more competitive. You can reach one of our Exchange gurus like Ben Baker or Tim Humbert by calling 513.361.0800 for a free demonstration.

It’s 2008, and we just launched our new customer portal and blogs by me and Andrew Cruse, our CTO. In short, we are providing one interface that enables you to better manage your relationship with our company. From this central console, you can now reboot devices, view bandwidth graphs and backup reports, or view invoices. You can also create support requests, manage user permissions, and set maintenance notification preferences.

Managing user permissions is critical for our clients, especially those with compliance requirements. We also added a portal audit and logging feature that allows administrators to view what actions users took within the portal. An example of this in action would be to restrict access to your AP team to just viewing invoices while your IT team would have access to request changes to backup schedules, update firewall rules, or view facility access logs. I invite you to start using this valuable business tool.

Why start blogging now?

We hope to deliver invaluable information about Profitability.net and the data center and hosting industry and welcome your thoughts. Andrew Cruse’s CTO blog will detail technology we use and some of the cool things we are doing behind the scenes to ensure we over deliver on our promises to our clients.

Domains never tasted so bad…

Domains never tasted so bad for Network Solutions who is in the news for holding domains searched for from their site for five days. You can still purchase the domain from Network Solutions but you can’t buy it from other registrars during that time. I first heard about this from Adam Strong’s article at DomainNamenews. Network Solutions isn’t the first vendor to break a general sense of public trust regarding whois and they won’t be the last. Is this a case of good intentions gone awry? There are serveral posts from purported Network Solutions employees who claim this is an effort to protect their clients from “domain tasters.”

ICANN can eliminate domain tasting by simply removing the 5-day grace period for registrations. Furthermore, registrars should be specifically prohibited from using whois information to speculate and/or advertise on these domains. Pay to play at least changes the economics of domain tasting and eliminates the need for Network Solutions to further “protect” their revenue, err clients. To their credit, ICANN is currently reviewing domain tasting and released an initial report on January 7, 2008. Hopefully ICANN will make the right decision for the industry and eliminate this practice.

–Aaron Larkins