Stephenmccarron.com

Hi all,

You will all by now have received an email about the sale of register365 to NamesCo. Let me take a few moments to elaborate on exactly what it will mean for you as a customer.

On Wednesday, the Domain Registration and Shared hosting division of Hosting365 – Register365 – was sold to NamesCo Ireland. NamesCo are one of the leading domain and hosting providers in the UK.

The decision to sell Register365 did not come about lightly, and was fundamentally based on the challenges we faced as a business, trying to cater to two extreme ends of the hosted services market. Through this deal, customers benefit from 100% focus and attention to domain registration and shared hosting services from the new Register365 team, as well as improved support options and significantly broader resources. Hosting365.com will also focus exclusively on providing managed hosting services to companies with more complex requirements and online business at www.hosting365.com.

So, what changes?

- All services will remain as-is, on the same servers, same IP addresses in the same location (the Hosting365 data centre in Park West, Dublin). Nothing is being relocated or moved in any way. Register365 will continue in business as normal.

- Customers do not need to make any modifications or changes in any way – everything will still work exactly as before.

- Payments and billing will also remain as they are; your online payments will work in the same way, and you can continue sending cheques by mail to the same address.

- Support Options

– Since Wednesday afternoon – Support and Customer Care are now available 7 days a week on a lo-call number. Simply dial 1890 944 500

– Live Chat and Email options are also still available, with no changes to addresses.

– Support is available by all of the above options Monday to Friday 8am to 8pm and 10am to 6pm Saturday and Sunday

It was extremely important, to me personally as well as the whole 365 team, that the match we found for Register365 could maintain the same levels of care, innovation and leadership we have done since inception back in 2001. These characteristics and capabilities we found in abundance with NamesCo and I am thrilled that they are taking over Register365.

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the people who made Register365 the leader it became. The staff who, through the years, have helped build the systems, the infrastructure and help the growing customer base, and, most importantly, you, the customer. Through delivering you a good service at a good price you referred your friends, your family and your colleagues and drove Register365 to grow at rates way in excess of the norm for the market. Thank you.

As consumers and businesses become more environmentally aware, the technology sector’s energy use is being closely examined for traces of an excessively heavy carbon footprint.

Much of this stems from organisations operating an IT model where they traditionally bought more hardware and systems than they needed in order to cope with potential surges in computing demand.

Advances in technology offer significantly reduced energy requirements compared to older systems, says Stephen McCarron, managing director of Hosting365. “Intel now have low-voltage Xeon processors that operate at 60w, where the old ones used to be at 300w.

“Blade infrastructure runs up to 40pc cooler and more efficiently than traditional servers. And tie that again to VMware virtualisation and storage area networks and we’re seeing power savings in the order of 95pc.”

Part of the problem is that, having invested in technology prior to the latest developments, many IT user organisations are stuck with systems that aren’t so energy-efficient. An alternative option is to move their IT over to a managed service contract, delivered by a data centre operator that can take on the cost.

“Because of the economies of scale, a guy who has three servers isn’t going to spend €1m on blade servers and virtualisation and the skills to go with that, just to save his power bill or see it go down by half,” McCarron points out.

Rising energy prices are starting to force the issue, although McCarron believes many customers are not aware of how poor IT use is translating to higher bills.

“I don’t think it’s a real enough issue for most people. Our model is, we can say: you’ve got a comms room in the corner, it’s costing you €300 a month in power for air conditioning and your machines. We’ll take all that off you and that will take €300 off your bill. I’m not sure if they equate that to also reducing their carbon footprint, but we certainly sell it that way to them,” he says.

Hosting365 recently announced a €2m investment in blade servers and virtualisation technology at its Dublin data centre. This cloud computing infrastructure is a combination of hardware, memory, storage capacity and software that acts as a single, giant machine.

“Virtualisation is the key to the cloud. What virtualisation allows you to do is to treat all of that storage and processing power as one pool,” McCarron explains.

The system has already won some high-profile customers including Tesco, Cityjet, the Hilton Hotel Group, Carphone Warehouse and KLM. “These are all companies that have unpredictable requirements. The old model would have meant a rackful of kit, storage, security and redundancy on the what-if,” McCarron points out. “We’ve been selling to lots of customers but the power consumption graph of the facility has been steadily decreasing month on month, so we expect that by the time we finish our consolidation project our power consumption, and by proxy our cooling consumption, and our overall power utilisation will be back to levels they were at 24 months ago, which is very nice from a green perspective.”

Hosting365 is currently consolidating some of its older hardware for use in the cloud computing architecture and is working on a project aimed at significantly reducing energy consumption still further within the data centre. This will include installing solar tubes on the top floor and putting in place a photo-voltaic system backed by a wind turbine to power most of the office lighting. All of the office-space air conditioning units will be replaced with a system that takes the energy from the data centre server rooms and converts it to hot air in winter or cold air in summer.

“There’s a lot of noise about green this and green that but we’re talking about using the actual heat we generate in the data centre with natural gas turbines to produce the electricity to both power and cool the facility again so you get a complete energy cycle. The amount of power we need from the grid will just be to supplement things we lack power to run,” McCarron explains.

Hosting365 is putting the finishing touches to the plan with some external consultants and expects details on the estimated savings in tonnage of CO2 shortly.

“Our angle is, if we take all of those measures, we’re certainly the most energy-efficient data centre in the country,” McCarron claims. “If you tie that to the blades and the virtualisation, then all of a sudden we’re using 3pc of the power of an identical data centre in the city. It’s a vast difference in terms of credentials.” He points out that Hosting365’s green strategy helped it to sign a contract to host infrastructure for the Environmental Protection Agency.

McCarron believes meeting environmental requirements could be brought into legislation before long, making it obligatory for organisations to comply. “Our plans on carbon reduction are attractive to the big corporates because they know that’s coming down the line and they can make decisions based on 36-month contracts, knowing they’ll be better than compliant when it does come down,” he concludes.

By Gordon Smith

Over the last number of years, the data centre space industry has changed dramatically. Way back in 2001, when I first moved into this industry, data centres were are their lowest ebb. Facilities were shutting down, getting mothballed and generally the market was in poor shape. In Dublin, Ireland alone, more than half a dozen facilities were shut down, sold or taken over in the space of 12 months.

Now, things have changed, changed utterley. The hype and hysteria of the dot.com ‘boom’ has been replaced with the heady realism of the ‘late noughties’ and with it, the realisation of two fundamental truisms:

1 – more and more and more IT services are moving into the ‘cloud’ (I mean the internet cloud here, not the new cloud platforms)

2 – the cloud needs data centre space

At a global level, there is an excellent short summary on the data centre dynamics blog, some of the key points of which are:

“The last six months have seen continued expansion of datacenter space in Europe, with much of the growth coming from the established markets in the UK, France, the Netherlands and Germany. The degree of the increase can be seen from the effects of the Datacenter Price Tracker, where average carrier neutral space per rack has increased from 776 euro per month (July 2008) to 865 euro per month (January 2008), an average price increase of 11.5 per cent over the last six month period according to price tracker Tariff Consultancy.”

11.5% increase in 6 months is rather more than inflation, and over the last year or so, the increase has been even more dramatic.

So, are the data centres becoming money grabbing? Quite the opposite! Consumers have been used to articifically low pricing from the hosting world for a number of years now, few remember the prices charged for hosting 7 or 8 years ago (a lot more than today) which were possible because pretty much everything was cheaper. Staff, space, bandwidth, servers, infrastructure were all available at great rates after the ‘bomb’. That artificial situation, which was basically paid for by all the poor souls who funded ‘web 1.0′ has now run out, and providers are having to actually build and invest in their own facilities (as well as paying significantly more for utilities and staffing).

The current costs for data centre fit-out (assuming you already have the physical building) runs to around €1,000+ per square foot of data centre floor space, but, if anything, more and more space is currently being built.

While space at the moment in major markets (particularly London, Amsterdam, etc) is getting very tight, there is also a hugh amount of building underway. Locally, there are facilities either in build, plan or open in Cork, Shannon, Limerick as well as company’s like Data Electronics, Interxion and more planning expansion or new sites and even the incumbent, Eircom, opening a new 100,000 square foot facility in North Dublin. (This is outside the work underway from large corporates, such as Microsoft, who are building a 500,000 square foot facility in West Dublin).

More locally still, here in Hosting365 we’re building out another 8,000 square feet of facility space at our Park West Facility (altho as we don’t provide colocation in the general sense, our model is rather different).

The race is on, fueled by a lack of data centre space, higher returns on that space for developers and operators and the relentless drive of all services into the cloud !

I read a piece this morning from Network World (http://url.ie/cuf) which detailed the challenges and concerns facing adoption of co-called ‘cloud’ or ‘grid’ platforms.

The piece included a quote from Kirill Sheynkman, head of start-up Elastra – “Equipment inside the corporate data center isn’t going away anytime soon,” Companies remain reluctant, for a variety of reasons, to trust the cloud for their mission-critical applications.

I was surprised to read such a perspective, as running on our Cloud right now are ‘enterprise’ or ‘blue chip’ companies like Carphonewarehouse, Tesco, Citijet and many many more, but as I continued through the article I realised the 8 points being raised as ‘blockers’ to adoption have already been addressed by hosting365.

Specifically:

1. Data privacy. Many countries have specific laws that say data on citizens of that country must be kept inside that country. That’s a problem in the cloud computing model, where the data could reside anywhere and the customer might not have any idea where, in a geographical sense, the data is.

The Hosting365 cloud service is maintained in Dublin, Ireland. Currently in one physical facility, it is currently ‘growing’ to encompass two facilities for redundancy, but both are in Ireland, in the European Union, and regulated by Data Protection and Privacy legislation in this jurisdiction.
2. Security. Companies are understandably concerned about the security implications of corporate data being housed in the cloud.

With our platform, the concern is no greater than with traditional colocation or dedicated servers. Our cloud is protected by best-in-class Cisco Firewalls and VPN devices, with comprehensive filtering, monitoring and netflow analysis, 24/7.

3. Licensing. The typical corporate software licensing model doesn’t always translate well into the world of cloud computing, where one application might be running on untold numbers of servers.

Simply track how many servers you are running in real time – we need to do this ourselves so we can report license usage to both VMware and Microsot (as just two examples)

4. Applications. In order for cloud computing to work, applications need to be written so that they can be broken up and the work divided among multiple servers. Not all applications are written that way, and companies are loathe to rewrite their existing applications.

Our cloud platform allows horizontal and vertical scaling that does not force application developers to ‘build for the cloud’.
5. Interoperability. For example, Amazon has its EC2 Web service, Google has its cloud computing service for messaging and collaboration, but the two don’t interoperate.

VMware (our cloud platform of choice) is pretty ubiquitous. You can move VM’s to your own kit, you can convert back to physical servers, you can move to another data centre, you can move between virtualisation platforms. You can even use something cool like VMware Fusion on your Mac laptop to build a Debian server just the way you like, then put that online in our cloud, without having to change anything! By adopting enterprise standard virtualisation, and probably the most mature virtualisation platform available, we’re ensuring zero ‘lock in’ for our cloud users.

6. Compliance. What happens when the auditors want to certify that the company is complying with various regulations, and the application in question is running in the cloud? It’s a problem that has yet to be addressed.

For all of the reasons above, we’ve built an environment that can achieve PCI compliance (among others).
7. SLAs. It’s one thing to entrust a third party to run your applications, but what happens when performance lags. The vendors offering these services need to offer service-level agreements.

We offer better SLA’s on our cloud than we do with any other offering. Want 24/7/365 support, 100% network and power uptime SLA’s and a guarantee of no more than 15 minutes downtime even in the event of physical hardware failures – step right in! Our approach from day-1 with our cloud platform was to build an enterprise solution that could replace the ‘old’ way of building bespoke kit, but still deliver the same or better SLA’s.

8. Network monitoring. Another question that remains unanswered is how does a company instrument its network and its applications in a cloud scenario. What types of network/application monitoring tools are required.

We provide comprehensive network and application level monitoring on our grid, with full web access for customers to the same.

There are lots of misconceptions about what a cloud actualy is (or can be) in the marketplace, but, from the customer interest and take-up we are already seeing, I feel we’ve provided a solid, enterprise grade platform, that can deliver better performance and reliability than dedicated hardware, with the same or better SLA’s, but also offer the flexibility and control of rapid scalability, complete mobility of resources and workloads, all backed up with our dedicated support.