It’s no secret demand for data center space is on the rise. The technological capacity to store information has roughly doubled about every three years since the 1980s, to the point that 90% of the data that exists on Earth has been created in the last two years alone, according to IBM. Pretty amazing to think about. Co-founder and CEO Hossein Fateh of Dupont Fabros Technology, one of the wholesale data center sector’s largest players said, “We believe that cloud computing, gaming, data retention and processing will continue to grow significantly year over year.” Mr. Fateh, I couldn’t agree more. I’ve written about the demands of big data before and can attest first hand to the influx of gaming clients and cloud computing requests here at Internap. The need for additional data center space isn’t something we see slowing down anytime soon.

In fact, we’re getting closer and closer to the launch of our 10^th data center, and the excitement is building — literally. Construction is well under way as we prepare to set up shop in Los Angeles — Hollywood baby! The addition of this facility located in the Redondo Beach area will give us 55,000 more square feet of highly-scalable and highly-efficient raised floor space, expanding our growing family of premier Internap data centers located in New York, Boston, Atlanta, Dallas, Seattle and Silicon Valley.

The skinny on our newest addition? The L.A. data center is tracking LEED Platinum certification, the highest level of LEED certification available. With the ability to support 12kW at the rack level, the advanced infrastructure design boasts concurrent maintainability, which takes reliability to a whole new level. Plus it will come already fit for hybrid hosting — giving clients the ability to connect colocation, managed hosting and cloud environments into one secure, locked-down Layer 2 Virtual LAN (VLAN) connection. L.A. will also feature some of the most posh amenities I’ve heard of in a data center including an espresso bar, Xbox lounge and multiple customer work areas.

I recently had a chance to get the scoop on this new facility from some of the key players involved in its design and construction. Check out what they had to say in this video.

Yesterday, I watched a friend of mine compete in the U.S. Olympic Trials for swimming. I streamed the live webcast and sat through race after race waiting for those 4 minutes and 11 seconds of glory when she would swim the 400 IM. Through countless heats, eight swimmers at a time dove into the pool and upon completion of their race, the results and times were instantly available on the screen. This got me thinking about the technology behind sporting events like these; imagining how complex one swim meet must be, I could hardly fathom the idiosyncrasies surrounding something like the Olympic Games!

A quick Google search tells me I’m right about the Olympics: they are one hefty IT operation. The Technology Operation Centre (TOC) for the Games opened last October, and ever since have been testing for every possible scenario. They held full technical rehearsals in March and May and have faked everything from computer and server failures, to employees calling in sick, to cyber attacks and beyond. The Olympics are known for being a worldwide showcase of the latest innovations and technology, and it looks like London has taken many precautions to make sure their IT Infrastructure can handle the weight. This video gives a brief overview of the TOC in action, so cool!

Is your IT Infrastructure ready for whatever hurdle comes its way? Internap’s Network Operations Center (NOC) provides 24/7 proactive customer support with a team of highly-certified engineers at your disposal. The NOC is just part of the reason why we can boast 100% network availability. Learn more about our extraordinary IT support from exceptional IT people.

Let the games begin! Yes, the Olympic Games in London are just around the corner, and I’m eagerly looking forward to them. But that’s not what I was referring to. Rather, what I’m talking about are games of another kind.

According to a recent CIO.com article, companies are starting to use the motivational techniques of video games — such as points, leaderboards and levels — to create more engaging business applications. It’s called “gamification.” Gamification first took off in 2007, and has proved to be recession-proof. Research firm Gartner predicts 70 percent of leading global companies will have at least one gamified app by 2014. In fact Brian Burke, Gartner’s Vice President of Research, says, “Gamification could become as important as Facebook, eBay or Amazon.” Gartner forecasts, “The opportunities for businesses are great — from having more engaged customers, to crowdsourcing innovation or improving employee performance.”

Wikipedia lists a number of uses of gamification applications including:

• Financial services websites
• Online shopping
• Employee training, performance and HR programs
• Enhancing loyalty programs
• Social networks
• Surveys
• Sustainability
• Call centers
• Market research

So, if you are wondering what all the fuss is about, here are some articles on the subject and a couple about how gaming companies themselves are dealing with the explosion of gaming applications.

• Gamification: Drugmakers And Health Campaigners Turn To Games To Promote Health
• Games drive virtual event engagement
• Carbonite, Rhapsody, Activision choose data center colocation
• For CIOs, the Games Are Just Beginning
• Gamification: Insights And Emerging Trends

If you are looking for gaming solutions from an IT provider, check out the challenges associated with managing your IT Infrastructure and how to optimize the performance and availability of applications over the Internet.

There have been a few occasions in my life where I have been truly and unexpectedly inspired. The other night during the annual Women In Technology (WIT) Connect event held at the Georgia Aquarium was one of them. Hundreds of Georgia’s leading technology executives and up-and-coming professionals gathered in the ballroom to network and participate in the live auction for their chance to win some one-on-one time with select top execs at the country’s leading companies.

Company after company came up and presented their auction packages…thus the bidding frenzy began. Halfway through the show they paused the program and four teenagers approached the platform. These four girls make up the F1-Shift Team, who competed and placed first in the United States National F1 in Schools Competition at the Michigan International Speedway this past May. They are now going on to compete in the World Championships in Abu Dhabi this October.

Now let me set the stage for you — we are in the Ocean’s Ballroom at the Georgia Aquarium. Among the audience are CEOs, CIOs, CTOs and several executives; in total the room is filled with at least 1,000 professionals. Their team manager approaches the podium and proceeds to charm us with her well-spoken, well-rehearsed speech, which garners a standing ovation from the aforementioned audience. I must admit, I was pretty impressed at how well the team, rising high school sophomores, presented themselves in a room full of such powerful people. This is certainly not something I could have done at their age!

This really got me thinking — F1 really is becoming much more popular stateside, starting with today’s youth. The F1 in Schools Ltd, a not-for-profit organization, was established to provide an educational experience throughout the F1 audience. F1 in Schools is the only global educational program raising awareness of F1 among students and school children.

Students aged 9-19 form teams to deploy CAD/CAM software to design, analyze, manufacture, produce then race gas-powered miniature balsa wood F1 cars. F1 in Schools is located in 34 countries, has 12 million student participants and organizes several worldwide competitions. Their main goal is to help change the perceptions of engineering, science and technology by creating a fun and exciting learning environment for students.

I hope that one day these girls follow their passion for technology into a company like Internap IT Infrastructure services or Sahara Force India where their drive for success and skills in technology can be used to power great companies into the future.

If you want to learn more about F1 or the Sahara Force India F1 Team check out their video at internap.josh.ux.voxel.net/driveit

Fans everywhere take to Twitter as their common place to look at the latest trends, topics and see what’s going on with their favorite twitterers. So this afternoon when Twitter went down for over an hour it left users without a stream of trending information.

The twitter outage reportedly lasted from 11:59 a.m. EST Thursday and did not resume service until 1 p.m. Not even an hour later, Twitter had a secondary crash. This was the longest service interruption since October 7^th, 2011.  Twitter has had several problems in the past, but had been on a good streak lately. The company used to display its famous “fail whale” error message, but today twitter users everywhere were disappointed to only receive a time out error – I’m guessing they were caught off guard and needed all hands on deck. Quite the outage.

Social media outlets have become a standard in today’s business world. Companies worldwide use it to prospect, promote, monitor and even answer customer support questions.  That is why when a site like this goes down…it’s an alert-the-media kind of deal.  A strong IP network is so important today.  Here at Internap offer several Website Performance Optimization technologies, allowing you to boost performance and increase revenue. In today’s economy, WPO solutions such as Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), are a must-have for any website or online application serving geographically dispersed end users.  Something I would surely want in my back pocket.

So next time Twitter’s down – be sure to check us out on Facebook, LinkedIn or Pinterest to engage with us. Oh and if you want some tips to keep your network up and running check out our CDN Buyers Guide.

During this Q&A Vice President of Hosting and Operations Support for Internap, Zachary Smith, talks about the technological impact of Internap’s recent acquisition of Voxel and why the marriage is a fortuitous one for both companies’ customers – and for the team at Voxel. (For one, the newlyweds got to experience the geek equivalent of registering for fancy china – they went shopping for the next generation of servers.)

Q: The Managed Internet Route Optimizer™ (MIRO) platform is a product that sets Internap, and now Voxel, apart from its competitors. Can you tell us why it’s so special?

A: The MIRO platform is one of Internap’s secret sauces. It constantly monitors the entire Internet for the best route between any and all locations. And then it adjusts dynamically using some pretty advanced code so that the end user gets the absolute best delivery experience.

We’re really excited to see how Voxel’s approach to network services, which has been about building web scale and large pipes for delivery can be improved by leveraging the MIRO platform.

Q: The combination with Internap means Voxel’s customers now have access to six data centers around the world. Why is that significant?

A: One of the things Voxel was never able to do was to provide all the data center services or acquire all the data center assets we wanted to. For any hosting company, data centers are your lifeblood. They need to be strategically located at core Internet points, and they have to stay online all the time – twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. Internap is an expert at building Internet infrastructure all the way down to its data centers, and we now have premier sites in Santa Clara, Dallas, New York, Atlanta, Singapore, and Amsterdam, where we’re able to leverage our platform.

Q: Why does it matter where a server is located? Why Amsterdam, Singapore, Santa Clara, New York, Atlanta, and Dallas?

A: There are key points throughout the Internet where people exchange traffic. These points are critical. They’re where all the networks meet. They’re where everyone wants to put their data centers and wants to put their servers. And the great thing about Voxel and Internap’s new combination is that we’re really covering all the hot spots. We’re pretty excited to be offering our entire platform from cloud servers on demand to our dedicated servers, managed hosting and content delivery around the world. You’ve got the West Coast, center, and East Coast of the U.S., plus Europe and Asia, pretty much covered.

Q: Have you visited any of the data centers? What are they like?

A: The great thing about these data centers is they look really cool. When you go and visit an Internap data center, you’re immediately impressed by the security services around it. You’ve got to go through the many gates, the sign-in sheets, the whole shebang — but once you get inside, you see what’s being guarded. You see the P-NAP, and you see where all these networks are connecting and delivering tens of gigabytes of traffic across the Internet, as well as just the overall quality and build of the Internap facility. There’s a huge amount of pride in these places.

Q: How has the combination with Internap given you free reign to indulge your inner geek?

A: Here at Voxel, we really like servers. We play with them every day. We read everything from Slashdot to Tom’s Hardware to try and suss out the next generation model to get to our customers. Essentially, we’re a little bit nerdy about servers.

One of the great things about being acquired by Internap is it gave us a mandate to go out and build a large amount of infrastructure for the increased demand. The cool thing about that is we get to buy a lot of servers. So we were able to pick and choose the absolute latest platforms, new chipsets from the different providers, memory configurations, and the latest in hard drive technology whether that was SSDs or flash memory. It’s going to be very cool to bring these cutting-edge platforms to our customers at a really incredible price point.

Take an up-close tour of one of our colocation data center facilities. Schedule a private tour today.

Trends are popping up everywhere. In fact there is even a crowd-sourcing website that tracks them whether tech, culture, design, lifestyle or pretty much anything else you can imagine. Just the nail, hair, color and fashion trends for Spring 2012 are overwhelming – one could go broke trying to keep up. One of 2011’s crazes in small business trends was blow-dry bars…yes…blow-dry bars, as in a trained professional who “wets and dries” your hair for $35 a pop. And, it’s a trend that’s sticking around due to success, which according to BusinessWeek “has led to a veritable blowout war on the streets of Los Angeles.” In fact, shops now have opened in Dallas, Scottsdale, AZ, New York, San Francisco and Atlanta, in addition to the several that started it all in Brentwood, West Hollywood and, of course, Beverly Hills.

Then there are housing market trends and financial trends resulting in a plethora of websites such as LearnVest — featured in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and CNBC, and named by Time Magazine as one of The 50 Best Websites of 2011 — which targets women and assists with personal finances, budgeting and more.

This all leads me to my mash up for the week: According to a recent article citing an IT-Director.com report, “virtualization, cloud computing and other solutions are creating an environment in which companies have to rethink their disaster and data recovery strategies in light of new IT trends. More and more companies are rethinking their business continuity plans given the current rise of cloud computing, virtualization and big data, which have created a situation where organizations are handling much larger quantities of data than ever before.”

• Crunch time for big data
• ‘Big data’ a new commercial trend
• Server consolidation tempered by tech trends, uptime goals
• Data explosion and big data demand new strategies for data management, backup and recovery

If you happen to be one of those who is sorting through the IT trends and solutions to help manage it all, you may want to check out another recent blog post: Build, buy, colocation or cloud.

You might not know it unless you have worked in a data center on a daily basis, but a lot goes in to the day-to-day maintenance of these places. I recently got a chance to visit our Santa Clara and Dallas data center facilities and let me tell you… there are checklists for checklists, 24/7 staff, alerts and security  — it’s an intense regiment to keep up. But what’s more is the design and planning that went in to making sure everything works together in perfect unison — for example, keeping the environment at just the right temperature to house equipment, ensuring the humidity level is correct for optimal performance and making certain the right power infrastructure is in place so there is no downtime. Not to mention adding the complexity of sustainability requirements on top!! Whew! Some masterful engineering is definitely taking place here, which is why I have to give a huge shout out to all those involved in helping us earn Silicon Valley Power’s 2012 Energy Innovator Award.

Our Silicon Valley data center earned this year’s award, which recognizes one organization annually that exhibits superior efforts in supporting energy efficiency and renewable energy. Santa Clara Mayor Jaime Matthews presented our team with the award at the 12^th Annual Energy Summit, organized by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group and held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.

An independent panel of judges named us the winner of the Energy Innovator Award for successfully implementing a wide range of conservation strategies at our Santa Clara data center. Here are a few of the most notable initiatives our first class team implemented to help us achieve this honor:

• Reduced overall energy use by 49% as compared to similar building types and earned a perfect score of 100 from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Performance Rating System

• Saved 76,300 gallons of water per day and 27,849,500 gallons per year (the equivalent of 46.5 Olympic-sized swimming pools of potable water annually!!)
• Reused more than 99% of the exterior structural components, avoiding the diversion of nearly 85% of its construction waste to landfills
• Utilized high-efficiency lighting, HVAC systems and controls to decrease power consumption by more than 30%

Congrats again to everyone that helped make this award possible! You guys rock!

Interested in Silicon Valley colocation? Learn more by reading the green data center profile on our Santa Clara facility.

Here at Internap, we have been pretty excited about the launch of our Drive IT campaign leveraging our partnership with the Sahara Force India Formula One Team. Our halls are abuzz with talk of F1 drivers, cars and weekend races. There are a lot of pieces of this campaign that you would expect – advertising, social media and customer stories (from some pretty cool companies like YouSendIt, Hi-Rez Studios and Vermont Teddy Bear I might add). But a key component of this campaign is also feeding our company culture with some F1 fun.

First up? A contest to design our official Drive IT T-shirt. Internap employees were given 2 weeks to come up with T-shirt design that embodies the Drive IT theme. I have to say I’m pretty impressed by the creativity of those around me.

We’ve got entries from marketing, engineering, business development, product management and support — quite the cross section of closet designers wanting to put their stamp on our foray into F1.

What does the winner get? An F1 swag bag full of sweet gear. More importantly, in my opinion anyway, are the bragging rights as the official designer of the shirt. Not too shabby for a day’s work.

So hang with me as I turn my colleagues into speed junkies – one by one. When you walk down our halls you will hear our battle cry – speed junkies unite!

Check out the winning T-shirt design above, then head over to see the rest of the submissions.

Where are you in your cloud evolution? With a multitude of disparate applications, use cases and business lifecycles, organizations may be at vastly different points in their cloud adoption and may find it difficult to decide on the right cloud model. But who says you have to choose? As explained in our recent webinar, “Is everything moving to the cloud? How hybrid hosting optimizes IT Infrastructure,” a hybrid cloud hosting solution can deliver the best of both worlds — public and private cloud in one. And in almost any scenario, companies gain significant flexibility by combining the security and control of private clouds with the agility of public clouds. It then stands to reason that more and more companies are leveraging hybrid clouds for a new level of IT flexibility, efficiency and scalability. In fact, according to GigaOm Pro’s April 2012 cloud computing market forecast, the growth rate of hybrid cloud is expected to surpass the growth rate of private deployments sometime in 2014.
While some businesses are using hybrid as an in-road to cloud adoption, it’s not all about the cloud all the time (move over cloud!). Hybrid hosting can also be defined as leveraging the best features of multiple IT services such as colocation, hosting andcloud tiers into a single environment — giving IT professionals the same flexibility, efficiency and scalability mentioned above.

How are businesses using hybrid today? Here are a few examples:

• Online gaming: The cloud provides unmatched flexibility for scaling and bursting in the online gaming world. Combine that flexibility with the performance and security of a managed hosting environment using a single custom layer 2 Virtual LAN and you are in business — so users can slay the dragon, become the fastest shooter or whatever their little avatar heart desires.
• Development and testing: In a traditional environment, equipment isn’t always on-hand and readily available. It’s difficult to recreate a dev environment for QA, and don’t get me started on scalability. A hybrid environment allows test and dev on-demand resources to work in combination with those they already own. So now things like repeatability of stage and production environments are more easily created, plus there’s the ability to quickly clone virtual machines. Not to mention you can pay by the drink.
• Backup and disaster recovery: Another convenient use is the ability to link physical resources in the data center to a backup in the cloud, which is invaluable for many IT professionals. You pay only for what you use, and your data is right at your fingertips in the event of a disaster. Now mission-critical business data is restored in minutes, not lost forever.

At the end of the day hybrid hosting is about balancing your current investment with elastic demand. I’m sure you can come up with many more use cases than this list, but hopefully these are enough to get you started. Listen to more on hybrid hosting from our webcast panel of experts including Michael Carman, manager of business development for VMware, and GigaOm Pro’s research director, Jo Maitland. Plus get expert tips from our own resident cloud guru and director of hosting product management, Adam Weissmuller.