Stephenmccarron.com

… but never had the skill or budget to realise it?

The guys at Contrast have just launched App School 2008 -  they will pick an idea submitted by an Irish startup, charity, non-profit or individual and teach it how to be a fully-grown app. And, will cover 95% of the cost!

I’m also offering to help by providing the winning application with a true enterprise, scalable platform to grow on, with the Hosting365.com Cloud solution – and stump up €3,000 worth of hosting to power the App for the first year of it’s life!

See more at http://www.contrast.ie/blog/app-school-2008/

www.tv3.ie, Ireland’s second Television Network, went live today on the Hosting365.com Cloud computing and storage platform.

Featuring video streaming and lots of new content, as well as a snazzy new style, the site was launched this morning and is performing extremely well !

I know it takes time to alter customer perception, and for many of our former shared hosting customers, they had been with hosting365 a very long time, but it’s amazing how many people still confuse hosting365 and register365.

As per the post back in May, Register365 was bought by www.names.co.uk back on the 27th of May 2008, and Hosting365 is a different company, that does not provide domain registration, email services or web hosting, and we have no control over or involvement with those services any longer!

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.

Recent news here in Ireland announced that IBM was launching their first European Cloud Platform in their first ‘Cloud Computing Centre‘ in Dublin. Subsequent coverage revealed a 100 CPU compute grid which IBM are using to test and develop their cloud offering.

In the last few days, Google have ‘entered the cloud scape’ with their new Application Engine, joining the likes of Salesforce.com who offer application hosting clouds, and competing (a little indirectly) with Amazon and their EC2/S3 Cloud services.

What does it all mean?

In simple terms, ‘clouds‘ are the new ‘grids‘ But fundamentally it’s all built on virtualisation.

- Cloud Grid Platfoms in a few simple steps:

1. Build a big pile of servers, with lots of CPU’s and RAM
2. Hang a big heap of storage off the back and hook everything up
3. Put a network connection in front of the whole thing (maybe some load balancing or firewalls)
4. Run a virtualisation platform (like VMware) on top
5. (Optional) Replicate all of the above in multiple physical locations

You now have a ‘virtual’ datacentre full of servers and storage that, with the virtualisation, can be chopped into pieces appropriate for the users requirement.

So, you need 4x 2.33Ghz Xeon processors, 8GB of ram and 100GB of fast storage – no problem – click- there you go.

You need 16x 2.33Ghz Xeon processors, 32GM of RAM and only 10GB of storage for a super database – click – no problem.

Virtualisation means you can treat the cloud/grid/blob of resources like an empty framework, and run your services on top, with full flexibility in terms of all the key metrics (cpu power, ram and storage). You can move all the metrics around in near real time, without having to stop the ’server’ running (try adding a CPU to a traditional running server with the power still on and the server running? Ouch!)

Here at Hosting365, I’m happy to report our Cloud is even bigger than IBM’s!

Here’s the spec:

• 128 HP BL460C Blade Servers
• 256 Physical Intel Xeon Processors
• 1024 CPU Cores (2.33Ghz, 1666Mhz FSB, 4MB cache per core) (Or roughly 2,385.92Ghz!!)
• 4TB RAM Capacity
• EVA 8100 Redundant SAN Cluster
• 20TB Fitted Capacity (in 146GB 15k FC drives)

You can see a photo here (apologies for the otherwise lovely shot being ruined by Ed Byrne, our General Manager)

Our cloud lives within a network architecture which includes HP Virtual Connect Modules (switches) for SAN and Ethernet, meaning all WWID’s, MAC addresses, etc, are all virtualised and portable within the cloud (providing immunity from hardware failure of individual nodes). These switches are uplinked to two Cisco 6509 switches, providing full redundancy, and are in turn uplinked to our Network Core. There are also Cisco boxes performing Firewalling and VPN Termination and F5 boxes for Layer-7 Load Balancing.

The real magic though, is in the VMware layer. Running VMware as our virtualisation platform of choice was the logical option for such a high performance, highly resilient grid / cloud platform.

Vmware’s maturity and robustness, allows us to provide real-time node High Availability (no impact to users if there are hardware failures or issues), dynamically move resources around the grid, again in real time and without downtime, to ensure there are always maximum resources available for all users. In addition, the snap shotting and management features of VMware Infrastructure tools mean we can deliver a truley enterprise experience.

In short, we spent a lot of money on a platform, so our customers don’t have to compromise.

For the same price as a basic dedicated server, you get access to everything above in terms of reliability, scalability, flexibility and security. To achieve an ‘apples with apples’ comparison, you would need to buy two, highly spec’d dedicated servers, a layer 7 load balancer (HA Pair) to ensure a server failure wont take you down (or a load balancer failure) a HA Pair of Firewalls to ensure security, and a small SAN. Traditionally, we’ve built many such platforms at costs into the tens of thousands of euros per month – now you can achieve the same business objectives from €99.95 per month!

Welcome to the world of tomorrow! (for hosting anyway )

I gave an interview for the Irish Independant last week, which was covered in the Irish Independant newspaper on Wednesday and by SiliconRepublic.com today as the ‘Friday Interview‘.

You can read the paper version by clicking the thumbnail;

14.03.2008 – Home-grown data centre firm Hosting 365 is to create 20 new jobs as part of a €2m expansion. Stephen McCarron is the company’s chief executive.

One data centre alone uses as much electricity as a small Irish town. Aren’t data centres having a negative impact on the environment?
Very much so. I think it’s only a matter of time before something statutory is put in place around the carbon footprint of IT.

Data centres are huge consumers of power. Some are heading into the territory of 10Mw or 20Mw. Microsoft’s next-generation data centre at Grange Castle would consume 35Mw of power. We would be small by comparison, using only 2Mw of power.

You’re investing millions in a new infrastructure. Is this risky given the current economic climate?
A year ago we took a risky outlook on what is required and we decided to build a cloud platform that uses HP blade servers and VMware virtualisation technology. We had the idea that hosted services can be delivered entirely across a virtualised environment, but bespoke for each customer.

It cost us €2m to build the high-end, carrier-grade infrastructure because it required increased processing power and data storage.

Is it true that virtualisation – spreading business processes across a number of servers – can help data centre businesses reduce their carbon footprint?
Virtualisation allows us to spread business applications across a number of servers rather than the old-fashioned way of one server for HR and another for accounts or email. It effectively allows us to put server technology into 60sq ft of space that traditionally would have demanded 6,000sq ft.

As a result of the virtualisation software we can get an 85pc utilisation of available servers at any one time, whereas in the past it was a 10pc utilisation.

Do eco-aware, Irish-based firms know of the technology and the benefits of hosting mission-critical data externally?
It’s not just the environment but getting better use of your infrastructure. There is increasing awareness and also local organisations.

For example, the Department of Social Welfare may see a 10pc utilisation of its web servers during the year but right after Budget Day it could jump to 100pc.

The department can upscale their server requirements in line with demand without having to panic.

What trends are driving the future of hosting and data centre services?
There is already a massive move in the direction of software as a service (SaaS) where firms like Microsoft, Salesforce.com and SAP are providing business software over the internet to firms who would rather pay a subscription than spend thousands on licences.

An emerging trend we’re keen to capitalise on is the growing market for hardware as a service (HaaS) which allows customers like Carphone Warehouse and CityJet to subscribe for the use of servers externally rather than try to manage them in-house themselves.

By John Kennedy

This recent article by Pingdom, got me thinking about the changes in the Irish hosting business, specifically in the shared hosting business here over the last 10 years.

10 years ago, the hosting landscape in Ireland was dramatically different. The only providers of hosting back then were Eircom (the incumbent telco) and small independents like Webworld and Digiweb. (My own first Irish hosting account was with Webworld )

In 1997, the Wayback Machine shows Digiweb were selling hosting for roughly €40 per month, which bought you 25Mb of disk space and 1 pop3 email box and 200Mb of bandwidth per day (roughly 5GB per month) [ http://url.ie/9rm ] It’s worth noting that at this time, Digiweb was a hosting company, not a broadband telco as they are now.

At around the same time, Webworld was offering plans from just under €20 per month, offering 30Mb of disk space, 1 pop3 mailbox and ‘unlimited’ traffic (albeit with a once off set-up charge of nearly €65[ http://url.ie/9rn ]

Eircom were the largest host in the land, with pretty much all of the market that wasn’t already hosting offshore, although finding out exactly what they were offering or for how much is rather difficult!

Fast forward 4 years to 2002 and Hosting365 has been launched! [ http://url.ie/9ro ] The basic offering was 100Mb disk space, 100 pop3 email accounts and 2000Mb transfer per month for €12.95 per month. At the same time, Irish Domains were offering 25Mb space, 5 mailboxes and 1GB data transfer for €12.50 [ http://url.ie/9rp ] , Webworld were offering 50Mb and 5 mailboxes for just € 7.50 [ http://url.ie/9rq ] and Digiweb offered 100Mb space and 3 mailboxes for €14.95 per month.

So, skip forward to 2008 – ten years since internet hosting came to Ireland, and how do things look?

Well, for a start, the providers that were here ten years ago are still here, albeit Digiweb now a Telecommunications company (that does some hosting on the side) and Webworld and Irish Domains relatively small providers ( in about 11th and 8th place in the market, according to WebHosting.info ) The current market no. 2 – Blacknight, began in 2002 as a web design and hosting service provider (they dropped the web design soon after), and was for a number of years a customer of Hosting365, striking out on their own around 3 years ago.

In terms of the competitive landscape, Hosting365 rose rapidly to dominance, now with over 35% of the market, and larger than the next 5 or 6 providers combined and continuing to grow more than 4-5 times faster than the next fastest growing competitor. (Following a market evolutionary style common with many EU countries).

So, what do hosting plans look like now? Well, we started offering 5GB space, 50GB transfer and 250 mailboxes for €3.95 per month about a year and a half ago – this is for a fully featured plan with lots of domains, databases, etc. If you take a look around the sites of Digiweb, Webworld, Blacknight you will see a remarkable similarity in specification and pricing.

So what happened in ten years of ‘high tech’ innovation and development? Well, for shared hosting, nothing, nothing at all. It has become the archetypal commodity service. Prices have decreased tenfold in ten years (from nearly 40 euro per month to around 3 euro) while the volumes of space, mailboxes, etc, has increased two hundred times! (from 25MB to 5000MB). It’s worth noting that during those same ten years, one could easily assume a decent rate of inflation, which actually makes the decrease even sharper.

What does this mean? Well, for the consumer, it means you can avail of huge amounts of resources and services for a really tiny cost (less than you’d spend having lunch for two at a coffee shop for a years service). It also means that, to remain competitive and differentiated in a commodity world, customers are now getting 24/7 support, a wide range of supported platforms, tools, free scripts, auto installers and much much more.

For the provider, this relentless shift to commodity means a tightening of margins (in some places a removal of margins, hence you see hosting providers branching into broadband, for example). The cost of buildings, electricity, people and almost all of the things that really contribute to the cost base of a host have increased steadily in the same period and increased dramatically in the case of power. Inflation has been running high but none of these costs have been passed on to hosting customers.

The result is classic commoditisation of a marketplace. Let me give you my ‘5 year prediction’ on the shared hosting business in general.

- The market will consolidate to a relatively small number of companies. A bit like car manufacturing today, there might be a few brands, but behind them will be a small number of companies. The overselling levels and infrastructure requirements will squeeze the market down to a few core providers, with any other providers reselling.

- Also like the car business, there will be a number of successful niche providers, catering to a specific group or demographic (Premium style hosts).

- Services will widen into more ‘application’ style delivery. As all services move to the cloud, the provision of a small businesses website will become more intertwined with the delivery of email, collaboration, online business, crm, intranet, extranet and other tools that will be delivered as a service. All built on the same building blocks of ‘webspace, email accounts and bandwidth’ but sold for specific purposes.

In Summary

* Big hosts will get bigger

* Smaller and undifferentiated hosts will be swallowed by the Big hosts

* The market will continue offering more and more (space as well as features and functionality) for about the same price

* The specialised SAAS providers (Salesforce, Sugar, Zimbra, Basecamp, etc, etc, etc) will continue growing and start also consolidating.

* Few providers will own their own data centres.