The Green Grid Forum 2012 is next week and this year marks its 5th anniversary. The conference theme is “Achieving Greater Productivity and Environmental Sustainability,” and experts will come together to discuss IT and resource efficiencies trends that will affect business computing environments now and in the future.

In keeping with the topic, this week my mashup focus is on news sources and blogs of late touting green initiatives in the data center biz. From Apple to Facebook to Internap, and everything in between, business is keen on green. Whether it is reducing their carbon footprint, boosting efficiencies for power usage and cooling, or improving customer service, more and more companies are seeing the benefits of green energy-efficient colocation facilities.

Some recent coverage includes:

• The Green Data Center Opportunity
• Internap Gets Green Data Center Awards for Two US Sites
• AC Versus DC in the Data Center: Redux
• Going Green with NAND Flash
• Data Center Power: Good Versus Bad

As business continues to find ways to be green, we here at Internap are also creating a more eco-friendly colocation environment. And, if you are interested, feel free to tour any of our premium data centers.

Stay tuned for the next mashup, next Wednesday. Let me know if you want me to cover a particular topic. Happy to oblige.

Applications can grow at exponential speeds and sometimes your IT Infrastructure just isn’t up to the task. But deciding which platform can manage your growing computing needs best isn’t always an easy pick either. Our webinar last week, “Is Your IT Infrastructure Future-Proof?” gave attendees use cases for multiple IT platforms, including colocation, hosting, cloud and hybrid.  During the webinar, attendees were asked about where their current workloads reside today, as well as where they plan to deploy them in 2012. Check out the poll results below:

Where do most of your workloads reside today?

• Colocation: 22%
• Dedicated Hosting: 19%
• Managed Hosting: 8%
• Cloud: 14%
• Mostly still in-house: 38%

Where do you plan to move your workloads to in 2012?

• Colocation: 15%
• Dedicated Hosting: 5%
• Managed Hosting: 15%
• Cloud: 33%
• Keeping things where they are or in-house: 33%

What about you? Where do your workloads reside and what are your plans for 2012?

Does your IT roadmap feel more like a jigsaw puzzle than a strategic plan? View the webinar instant replay now to learn which IT Infrastructure solutions are right for you.

The battle for many CIOs and CTOs has often been striking a balance between outsourcing and taking your services in house. If you are considering managed hosting, you may be asking yourself, “How much will this cost me?” or “Are there any real savings for my business?” The below presents a two-year cost comparison in dollars and cents for managing your own in-house IT versus going with a managed hosting provider. The bottom line? Managed hosting cost savings equal $770,420 over two years. 

Download our Managed Hosting Buyer’s Guide for more on choosing the right managed hosting provider.

One of the coolest things about start-up and entrepreneurial events is the amazing ideas people come up with. Internap and Voxel sponsored one of these events here in Atlanta called Startup Riot, organized by Sanjay Parekh. Part of this year’s event was a 48-hour “hackathon” called the Startup Riot Make. In the Make event, 11 “make-shift” teams participated by conceptualizing an idea, planning and implementing it over a 48-hour period. I specifically say “48 hours,” since many of the team members worked until the wee hours of the morning, slept at their workspace in a conference room at the ATDC (Advanced Technology Development Center) and then picked right back up where they left off when they awoke a few hours later.

In some cases, the teams didn’t even have a working idea to start with. Some people had registered as individuals and formed a team on Friday evening. These teams had never worked together before, so seeing what they were able to develop with their new “co-workers” was impressive.

Among the amazing ideas and projects were:

• A “document policy management” site where companies can manage documents and request others to indicate their approval
• A ticket app where people can directly buy or sell tickets last minute
• A 2D gaming physics engine with a sample game demonstrating the engine
• A travel application that includes up-to-the-minute travel information with articles, news and common foreign language phrases
• A data visualization site where one can upload a set of data and have it graphed
• A group travel organization site where you can organize a trip, invite friends, organize the activities and track each person’s payments toward the cost of travel, hotel, airfare, events, etc.
• A site for maintaining “virtual” office hours, complete with video and audio chat
• A system for restaurant managers to manage shift openings, notify staff who want extra shifts and make it easier for employees to trade shifts
• And lots more…

The grand-prize winner was ticketstreetapp.com, which is a clever way to enable last-minute ticket sales directly between buyers and sellers. The winning team put in a lot of work and integrated location tracking as well as Twillio’s API to enable direct communication between the buyers and sellers. If you’ve ever tried to sell last-minute tickets on Craigslist or eBay, you’ll appreciate the simplicity of this app. The hard-working guys who created this application will go on to present their project to the Startup Riot Show, where hundreds of start-ups and entrepreneurs will present their ideas for a chance to win funding and other prizes to help incubate their start-up.

Internap and Voxel are proud to be a sponsor of the Startup Riot this year, and we appreciate the hard work Sanjay and his team have put into making this a quality event.

What great start-up or entrepreneurial event have you been to recently?

For more information on Internap and Voxel joining together to offer high performance and flexible IT Infrastructure solutions, visit our page “We Add. You Multiply.”

Yesterday, the Apache Foundation let loose it’s first major release of the apache web server since 2.2 was put out in 2005. I think it’s pretty fair to say that the Internet has changed a bit since 2005 — and it was time for a major refresh of the world’s most popular http server. You can see Apache’s announcement here.

At Voxel, we support, tune and scale some of the web’s largest Internet sites.  In doing so, we’ve found an increasing need to replace or augment Apache’s HTTP with a web or proxy server more purpose-built for speed of delivery of simple HTTP connections.  We’ve often implemented NGINX or Varnish to service end-user HTTP connections and relegated Apache to backend functions or more generic workloads.  These alternative HTTP servers bring with them a host of features around caching and proxy management that Apache hasn’t, until now, been able to support.

Apache has been known as the “gold standard” in stability and compatability in web servers since I started in the web hosting world in 2001 — but the demands of increased traffic, faster end user experience and more complex web pages have pushed the envelope of what Apache could do compared to newer entrants in the market.  In fact, as of January 2012, NGINX overtook IIS as the #2 web server for active sites on the Internet – clocking in at about 10% of active websites.  With that said, Apache is still king, commanding an impressive 65% of all active sites and looking through the new feature list, I’m pretty excited to see Apache gain ground on some of the most wanted additional bells and whistles for performance.

We’ll be testing out this latest build of Apache in our lab and looking for inclusion in the Voxel Server Environment (VSE) OS build.  We’ll keep you posted.

Another week and a lot of topics have been trending in the IT industry. This week I am going to focus our mashup of industry news on the future of IT departments. Last week my mashup included the fear, uncertainty and doubt surrounding cloud security. Much the same has been said about the future need of an in-house IT staff.

Fear not. With the ever-increasing mass of cloud and managed hosting solutions, many have weighed in on the fact that there is still a need for staff, even if maintaining company IT systems is drastically reduced.

Recent articles about this subject include:

• Managed Hosting Can Ease Cloud Sprawl Concerns
• Is Technology Leadership Training Lacking?
• Strategies for Success in Managed Hosting
• Big Changes From IT Outsourcing Shouldn’t Be Resisted
• Role of Enterprise IT is Changing

Bottom line: most agree cloud and managed hosting solutions will free up IT staff. But the good news is “executives are increasingly seeing IT as a potential way to address problems across all parts of the company” and “staff can now work on projects that more directly drive profitability” for their companies.

Have ideas for a future weekly mashup? Please let me know. I’ll be back next week with another compilation of the latest trending news in our industry.

IT leadership is facing a simple fact: the days of on-premise applications are quickly fading into the past. Think about the last time you installed software. The need for client-based applications will always be present, but for the most part, installing software on a server physically located where your business resides seems obsolete. Where did this software go?

At first, we came up with the generic term of “outsourcing.” If it wasn’t your organization’s core competency, then that meant somebody else could do it bigger, better and faster. Outsourcing quickly morphed into the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) revolution. Businesses quickly realized that owning a software license and paying for annual maintenance wasn’t cost effective, especially when you had to hire a system administrator to run the application on expensive hardware that you also had to own and maintain. Software providers began hosting their applications on the Internet, providing access to businesses via a web browser. Where did these applications go?

For those organizations providing outsourced technology-based services, the costs of owning and maintaining IT Infrastructure for their on-demand businesses didn’t make a lot of financial sense. From this need in the market grew the popular IT Infrastructure outsourcing options that exist today:  hosting and cloud. Whether it is shared, dedicated or managed hosting, businesses could now outsource the IT platform component of their service and instead focus on the application they were providing to the market. Eventually sharing computing power and storage resources spawned cloud offerings, where businesses could spin up environments on demand. Again though, where did all of this hardware go?

The answer is really quite simple. All of these assets are physically located at various colocation facilities. A recent Computerworld white paper talked about how advantageous it was for cloud providers to set up shop at colocation facilities. Whether it is for power availability, network connectivity, security or one of the several other advantages colocation provides, cloud, hosting and SaaS providers all gain the same benefit − it “enables them to focus on their customers, instead of infrastructure.”

Looking for a colocation provider for your on-demand service? Check out how Carbonite leverages colocation to deliver on-demand storage to its users.

“Video is changing everything,” according to a recent white paper written by Thomason Reuters, one of the world’s leading sources of intelligent information for businesses and professionals. In fact, in the time it takes you to read the eight-page white paper, Thomason Reuters says that roughly 240 hours of video will be uploaded to the Internet and approximately 11 million videos will be watched − unless of course you are a speed-reader.

I focus on content marketing and am constantly looking for the best way to get my message into the hands of my target audience and make sure it is a message that resonates. Forrester Research says, “Videos are definitely one of the strongest forms of media in our society today,” while Forbes Insights reports that two-thirds of executives would rather view a video than read a text document. So naturally video is definitely a medium I plan to utilize, and I imagine your marketing department is hot on the pulse of this rising trend.

The real news for IT executives, however, is that video is just getting started. Cisco predicts more than 90% of Internet traffic will be video-based by 2013. The challenge for IT professionals and marketers alike becomes how to support massive amounts of online video content while still maintaining an optimal website experience. Enter CDN.

With a CDN, or Content Delivery Network, your content is distributed across a network of servers that are placed in geographic proximity to users so content is delivered faster. Without a CDN, content resides on one main origin server and may travel long distances to get to the end user, ultimately delaying delivery and diminishing user experience.

One of the core functions of a CDN is to optimize media delivery, which involves the streaming of live events and pre-recorded video and audio content. A CDN provides content creators with a robust infrastructure solution for online media distribution, so even colossal amounts of content can be supported and viewed seamlessly.

How many videos is your marketing department planning on launching this year?

Download our CDN Buyer’s Guide for more information on how to choose a CDN for your business needs.

Several years ago the word “cloud” entered into popular use around the time of Amazon’s AWS service launch. In that era, many hosting providers were offering virtualization of some sort, but a lot of us were scratching our heads on this whole “cloud” thing. “A server available on an hourly basis? Why would anyone want that?” was the collective cry.

It didn’t take long to find out why. The ability to ramp up servers to handle a spike in traffic was a huge win for businesses trying to adjust their hardware to handle demand. No longer did they have to keep extra equipment around, lying dormant in the hopes that a burst of visitors will awaken them. Soon after, commercial software vendors were selling cloud infrastructure software. Every hosting company was either trying to build its own cloud or rebranding its virtualization offerings to get in on this new cash cow.

Now that cloud services are maturing, self-proclaimed pundits are arguing about whether 2012 will be “the year of the cloud.”  They are asking whether the cloud was an “idea whose time had come” and usually share some data on the number of users moving to mainstream cloud computing.

According to this infographic shared from CloudTweaks, the cloud (as a concept) has been with us for quite a long time. Even the original ARPAnet was oriented around distributed computing to make best use of scarce computing resources. For example, the rlogin(1) program was developed to access remote Unix resources and use them for your processing jobs. Later the client-server model divided the workloads automatically using a client application on the local machine and communicated with a remote server that performed a lot of the actual work. The distribution of such an application was frequently referred to as “network computing.” Next, projects such as Seti@Home brought “on-demand” cloud-like workloads to the masses while BitTorrent implemented cloud-like storage for large file downloads. And that new cloud thing we were all wondering about? Well it has morphed into what we now call cloud computing, which adds “on-demand” functionality and sounds way cooler than network computing.

So in short, no, I don’t see the cloud as simply an “idea whose time has come.” The idea has been with us all along.

When did you first hear about cloud?

Download our Cloud Hosting Buyer’s guide for more information on which cloud computing solution might be right for you.

As evidenced by the large number of articles of late about the fear, uncertainty and doubt surrounding the cloud, and of course, the hype, I am providing our blog readers with a mashup of IT industry news on a variety of topics pertaining to cloud computing, data center facilities and other areas of the “biz.” Starting today and every Wednesday hereafter, check out our blog for a compilation of the latest trending topics being covered by online media, other bloggers, etc.

So, what’s on tap this week? Well, there was, and continues to be, a lot expressed about cloud security. Read what some of the experts, leaders and others (Computer World, eWeek, Techworld, etc.) are saying about security when it comes to the cloud.

Here are some recent articles about cloud security:

• What’s Your Cloud’s Business Model?
• Best Practices for Scaling up SaaS in the Cloud
• Multiple Cloud Formations Require New Security Approaches
• Cloud May Mean Different Security for Different Organizations
• Too Much FUD Surrounding Cloud Computing

Just want the bottom line? Some state that the cloud security concerns are “overblown and nebulous.” One blogger said they are “nothing more than age-old IT issues in a new form.” Still others say “this trend is simply toward a change in the way IT works,” and “providers are coming up with new ways to keep everything tight.”

So is it all much ado about nothing? You decide. And, if you have a different point of view, feel free to comment.

Check back next week for another mashup – same time, same place – on the latest buzz in the IT industry. Want me to “mashup” a particular topic of interest to you? Happy to oblige, just let me know.