The last 24 hours have been challenging for everyone affected by Hurricane Sandy. Our thoughts and support go to those impacted in life changing ways. We have been working around the clock since the storm hit to restore connectivity for our customers.

Currently, power and connectivity have been restored at our 75 Broad facility. All customers should be up and operational at this time, working as expected on generator power. We have over 40 hours of fuel onsite with a second truck waiting to refuel the current tank as necessary.

At our 111 8th data center, we experienced an outage last night due to building-fed fuel system malfunctioning. When the issue occurred, the fuel pumps could not provide diesel to the rooftop generators, causing them to stop supplying power to our UPS system. Once battery backup was exhausted, our infrastructure lost power.

The incident caused a loss of IP connectivity for several service points until power to our P-NAP® was restored. At this point, we have connectivity restored for all customers and power restored to the majority of our data center customers. We continue to work with vendors to bring the entire site back online.

Thank you to everyone involved in this effort from customers to vendors to employees to the ever-resilient New York community. We will continue to keep you updated with details and status as the situation evolves.

As many of you are aware, over the past 18 hours there has been an unprecedented amount of flooding and damage to the NYC and surrounding areas. The flooding has had a major impact on the city’s infrastructure including the electrical grid, public transportation and accessibility to portions of Manhattan.

At approximately 7 PM ET last night, ConEd began proactively turning down portions of the power grid in preparation for the expected flood of saltwater from Sandy’s storm surge. As they did so, many facilities, including Internap’s data centers at 111 8th Ave. and 75 Broad, transferred to back-up generator power as designed.

Around 9 PM the storm surge, combined with high tide, caused flooding to many portions of lower Manhattan, including in and around our data center at 75 Broad. At the peak there was three feet of flood water in the lobby at the site, causing both basement floors to be inaccessible. As a result of the flooding, both our redundant fuel pumps and our generator fuel tank were compromised and shut down. The system continued to run until all fuel within the secondary feeder tanks were exhausted and our facility lost power.

We are working as quickly as possible to implement a workaround for the fuel system that will allow us to bring the generator farm back into operation. It is unclear how long it will take ConEd to restore utility power to the site, but we are preparing for the possibility of remaining on generator power for many days.

Our 111 8th Ave. data center continues to run on generator power successfully. We have enough fuel to last several days and expect fuel delivery to the site will be possible prior to depleting on-site reserves. We continue to see many network issues throughout the region, with many vendors losing either power or facilities due to flooding or the like. All of our network points are currently working as expected and have ample capacity to deal with the other provider outages.

If you are having trouble or have questions regarding any of your Internap services please contact our NOC and/or support teams as follows:

Network Operations Center

• noc@internap.com
• 877.843.4662

Agile Hosting

• agile-support@internap.com
• 877.843.4662, ext. 3

Managed Hosting

• ms-support@internap.com
• 877.843.4662

Lastly, I want to thank so many of our customers for being understanding of these very difficult circumstances. Our support teams are working around the clock and sparing no efforts to resolve any outstanding issues and we will continue to update you as information is available.

All of you, your families, your friends and the people of the impacted regions are in our thoughts.

The age of business planning is finished? What? That’s what Forbes’s contributing author Dov Seidman recently suggested, stating that “What business needs now is to journey, to embark on a curvilinear path that eschews quarterly reports and gives room to explore new initiatives… Companies need to compete against former partners, partner with former competitors and thrive amid rapidly changing conditions and intense uncertainty… Business leaders must actively care for a broader set of priorities, understanding that we are creating our own ecosystems of suppliers, consumers, employees and so many other stakeholders.” It is a fascinating read.

Speaking of creating an ecosystem of suppliers, if you are already deep into planning for 2013, one thing you may be considering is who will provide your mission-critical IT Infrastructure. Now, I could tell you how Internap is one of the leading IT Infrastructure providers and espouse on our award-winning support, patented route optimization technology, etc., but wouldn’t you rather hear it from the customer’s point of view? I think our customers tell how we helped them better than we ever could. So, for this week’s mashup, I am sharing with you some customer success stories in video format across various industries – gaming, F1, media & entertainment, e-commerce, technology and more.

• Hi-Rez Studios (Gaming): Managed Hosting, Dedicated Hosting, Cloud Hosting, Performance IP™ service and Content Delivery Network (CDN)
• Sahara Force India (Formula One): Managed Hosting, Performance IP and Content Delivery Network (CDN)
• Vermont Teddy Bear (e-Commerce): Content Delivery Network (CDN), Performance IP and Colocation
• YouSendIt (Cloud-based collaboration services): Managed Hosting, Storage and Performance IP

If you are interested in learning more about how Internap can help with your IT Infrastructure plan, there are other customer success stories in our eBook. Good luck with your 2013 planning!

Appterra is a SaaS global B2B solutions company.  We focus on enabling inter-company transactions between commercial trading partners. Our solutions are cloud based and enable mission-critical multi-company business processes for enterprises in the global supply chain for the manufacturing, distribution and energy industries. As a managed service SaaS solution, uptime is critical for our customers. Simply put, if we are down, they are down and we are out of business.

Over the past several years we have seen substantial growth of our company’s user base within the Asian marketplace; specifically in China. Our global trading hub allows businesses to interconnect with one another and share documents such as purchase orders, shipping details and invoices.

We are committed to a 100% uptime standard as our customers rely on our systems to keep their factories and supply chains smoothly moving forward. With a few rare exceptions, we have achieved an average of more than 99.999% availability. We are also continually monitoring connectivity from locations all over the world including North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia and the Middle East.

Earlier this month, we had a number of Chinese trading partners that were unable to access our system.  At the time, we were 100% up and all data reflected that we had an excellent response time with connectivity in all locations throughout the world with the exception of some users in China and, specifically, on one particular telecom provider. What this meant was that these companies, because they had chosen an internet provider that was not reliable, ended up being unable to conduct business. They could not retrieve purchase orders, create invoices nor could they receive any other information that related to their services. This truly highlights the importance of not being reliant upon one telecom service provider for your business. All of those businesses had only one provider and when it went down, they were down.  As a result, commerce with our primary customer, a global enterprise relying on the timely placement of these orders, suffered critical delays in their supply chain.

This is exactly why Appterra chose Internap for our IP services, with its Managed Internet Route Optimizer™ (MIRO) technology, because if one provider has a problem then we are able to seamlessly transition to another provider and our customers never experience an issue.

As we all become more dependent on reliable and 100% available Internet connectivity for our businesses, I recommend that anyone in business today demand a 100% uptime commitment from their Internet connections. Your customers won’t care if your internet provider was down, as far as they are concerned, you are down.

Because everything that Appterra does is mission-critical to their customers, Internap’s 100% uptime guarantee is a massive risk-reducer. This case study further illustrates the challenge and solution.

Guest blogger: Charlie Alsmiller, CEO of Summa Technology Group | Appterra

Last week I mentioned the vice-presidential debate in my mashup, so in fairness I feel it necessary to mention this past Tuesday night’s debate with our presidential candidates. But not for the reason you think. Rather than debate their answers to the questions or who won, I want to mention the social media surrounding it – which to me is quite telling. (Check out some of the funniest tweets.) I am fascinated by the thought that what you read or see on all the social media platforms might very well compel you to vote differently than you thought. Even more interesting is that social communication often leads to potential misunderstandings. In some cases, individuals’ expressing their political views are finding themselves “unliked” on Facebook.

Speaking of potential misunderstandings — you definitely want to avoid these at all costs when choosing your IT Infrastructure provider. Whether looking for a third party for Cloud, Colocation, Managed Hosting, CDN or enterprise IP, our collection of buyer’s guides might provide some helpful insight to making the right decision and avoiding the awkwardness of having to “unlike” one of your vendors down the road. Check out the following:

• Cloud Hosting Buyer’s Guide
• Colocation Buyer’s Guide
• Choosing a Green Colocation Provider
• Content Delivery Network Buyer’s Guide
• IP Buyer’s Guide
• Managed Hosting Buyer’s Guide

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Traditionally the healthcare industry was classified as conservative when it came to IT strategy and spending, however, with the ongoing government reforms the need for innovative healthcare IT solutions is on the rise. As more hospitals and healthcare facilities become more dependent on IT, data center services are becoming a key solution to complying with government reform efforts, and also to ensuring patient privacy.

Healthcare decision makers are not in the business of building data centers, as their focus and primary concerns are quality of care issues. Yet, the selection of a colocation provider directly affects their ability to be successful in achieving cost savings and operational gains. When it comes to multi-tenant data centers (MTDCs) for colocation, hosting and cloud services, it is essential to understand how the vendor approaches HIPAA compliance. Regardless of how the IT landscape continues to change over the next few years, when it comes to reform in the US, we know that HIPAA compliance will never be an option; since the passage of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act in 2009 it is a mandate.

Focusing on regulatory compliance allows healthcare entities to future-proof their IT landscape as it continues to change; this translates to avoiding the substantial penalties set for those failing to comply. It is important to note that compliance cannot be outsourced. The CXO remains responsible for how the healthcare entity will meet regulations, and the decisions to choose vendors that will satisfy requirements is part of how compliance is measured. To get a more accurate picture of HIPAA compliance and how it applies in multi-tenant data center environments, here is a summary of terms:

Compliance: HIPAA defines compliance related to rules that support the legislation, including privacy, security and elements related to the administrative safeguards.

Protected Health Information (PHI): Information related to an individual patient and his/her medical status. It includes medical records and any associated information that can link medical status to a particular patient, social security numbers, home addresses, e-mails or associated billing information such as account numbers, license numbers or identifying photographs. Such PHI may exist in physical or electronic form, both of which are required to be kept secure, private and confidential.

Covered Entity (CE): Covered entities include any person or organization that collects, transmits or stores PHI information regulated by the HIPAA legislation; examples of CE would be insurance companies, hospitals, healthcare providers and community health information systems.

Business Associates (BA): BAs include organizations that may process health claims, provide utilization review services or provide insurance claim reviews. This includes IT outsourcing services being performed on behalf of the CEs.

As the market for healthcare data center services continues to expand, companies such as Internap help your business meet regulatory and best practice requirements. The task of finding HIPAA compliant hosting plans while securely handling massive amounts of data is no longer a challenge. Learn why Internap understands compliance and security as requirements for success.

We were at Game Developers Conference Online in Austin last week to catch up on the latest trends in one of our key customer verticals. The time we spent deciphering T-shirts with arcane game references and investigating the ubiquitous affinity for 8-bit game art notwithstanding, this was a really informative and useful conference. We had the opportunity to meet more than a few talented game developers, project managers, writers, and artists, all ready to discuss their craft. I’ve summarized some takeaways we thought were worth passing along below.

Free-to-play game monetization

Different platforms generate vastly different in-game monetization yields. Tommy Palm at King.com mentioned that their mobile users were much more valuable than web users (3x higher). Why? Mobile gamers are willing to pay more because micro transactions happen more smoothly on mobile devices than on a website. Also there is an “everything is free” mentality on web which isn’t the case for mobile.

Teut Weidemann at Ubisoft offered up industry monetization conversion rates (paying active players/total active players) by distribution method: for social network based games (1-3%), browser based games (5-15%), and client-based games (20-30%).

Multi-platform game production

Unity’s Adam Gutterman discussed the challenge of multi-platform game production amidst fragmenting game markets, authoring tools/game engines, devices (particularly Android but also Apple), distribution platforms (Game Center, Facebook, Gree, etc.), and third-party technologies (e.g., Tapjoy, Flurry, Playnomics). He also contended that HTML 5 isn’t a great option for multiplatform yet because: (1) it lacks digital rights management standards and code is often completely exposed; (2) discovery/rediscovery methods for game aren’t fully baked; (3) it’s very difficult to optimize for different browsers. Interesting to note however that there is some big investment going into HTML 5 gaming companies and some of the largest games in the world have already ported their games to an HTML 5 platform including Bejeweled and Angry Birds. HTML 5 isn’t currently supported by Unity so perhaps that explains some of the near-term skepticism.

Online gaming infrastructure (a topic near and dear to our hearts)

CDN/IP

We heard more than a few developers and tech ops speakers advocate for the use of a CDN to reduce bandwidth costs, improve performance, and distribute load (both friendly and malicious). Of course we would argue that IP route optimization can benefit dynamic elements of any online game – avoiding trouble spots to specific geos that arise across the Internet every day.

Jesse Willett and Hao Chen with Zynga talked about the need to verify your CDN cache policies to make sure users are getting the right file. (Quick Tutorial: CDNs store static files at edge servers around the world so users far away from the origin server can quickly retrieve files, thereby making an object/page load faster.  When the source files are updated at the origin, you need to make sure that those users served by the edge don’t continue to get the old file because it has the same name/URL). Unlike some CDNs (e.g., Amazon’s CloudFront), Internap provides a “wildcard purge” feature that eliminates all old copies of files stored in edge caches to ensure files pointing to a URL are the latest. Even with this feature, the Zynga guys advocated for changing the URL itself every time a file is changed. This ensures that old copies don’t slip through the cracks via 3^rd party reverse proxies or files cached in the browser itself (which can’t be addressed by a wildcard purge).

BioWare’s Dave Moore talked about how the tech ops team for Star Wars the Old Republic (STWOR) used their CDN to direct a portion of gamers (~10% at peak concurrence) to a waiting room to ensure the game servers weren’t overloaded on the go-live day (exhaustive load testing couldn’t predict the huge demand they saw day 1).

Servers/Storage/Cloud

STWOR, as well as several other MMOs that we spoke with hadn’t yet started to use public cloud for their production environments. Many well established social games (often cross platform) were also using custom infrastructure environments rather than IaaS. Public cloud with Hadoop and other MapReduce implementations plus My/NoSQL, however seemed to be widely used by many of the mobile, asynchronous game publishers we talked with. Some of Internap’s gaming customers are also using the fungible capacity of our AgileCLOUD to dynamically increase the load they can take at launch.

Some of the many recommendations we heard for lowering latency and improving game performance included: aggressive minimization of disk i/o (via replication and caching), iterative fixes of design bugs, effective load balancing across servers, racks, data centers and geos, separation of production environments (e.g., forums and authentication servers independent of game servers) and old-fashioned equipment scaling.

Gangnam Style. You’ve probably seen the video, heard the song, watched the interviews and are aware of its extremely viral nature. (If you’ve been living in a cave — which apparently I was because I only learned of it late last week – check it out on YouTube. Nearly 440 million others have.) Another example of something going viral is within two hours of the start of last night’s VP debates, CNN made available split screen animations comparing both candidates facial expressions of seriousness, bewilderment, laughter and “lots of toothy grinning.” In fact, you can see all types of debate roundups including the top 25 funniest tweets. One of my favorites:

Chad Schomber

Of course, none of this would be possible without technology, which is constantly evolving. But even with all the different forms of instant communication available today, it is often possible you aren’t always “in the know.” So, my mashup this week is intended to provide you with a sampling of the many predictions for technology trends in 2013.

• What Will The Top Tech Trends Be In 2013?
• Evolving Technology trends influencing enterprise IT
• Business leaders should keep abreast of tech trends
• Seven Key Tech Trends for Businesses in 2013

As you are making strategic business plans for 2013, you can always contact or chat up one of our Internap experts to help solve your IT and operational problems.

This is our conference room in the NYC office.

You’re late to join a meeting in progress. As you approach, your brain hunts for context clues on how to open the door. The handles are identical on both sides; it’s not immediately clear whether you push or pull. You take a chance and pull, only to have the door clang loudly — someone walks over and slides the door horizontally as everyone in the room laughs.

I’ve personally watched that happen more times than I can count and every time the person thinks it’s their fault. That’s untrue — they didn’t blow it, the designers did.

Design matters. Usability matters.

Seemingly small interactions constantly impact our productivity and our mood, they impact your impression of a company. Design and usability are meaningful concepts, and with the addition of a newly formed team, it’s becoming a meaningful part of Internap.

In May of this year, the User Experience team was created here with the sole edict of improving the look, feel and experience of our customer-facing tools and interactions. We went on a hiring spree to bring in some of the best design & developer talent we could find and started thinking hard about what exactly user experience meant in our industry.

For a long time, it was acceptable that business software was complicated. Generally speaking, it was sold on raw functionality and the learning curve was expected to be high. Enterprise training agreements and healthy annual support contracts were the norm and all was right with the world.

Then people started using software in their everyday lives. All kinds of people. Your grandmother is on Facebook, my father has an android phone. Table stakes have been raised.

Nobody should have to use business software that is bad. The expectations of software have elevated dramatically over the last couple years and there are no more valid excuses to not have a functional, usable, beautiful application.

The hit list

First, we’ve set our sights on a ground up redesign of the customer portal. This is where you’ll go to manage your infrastructure, pay your invoices and open support tickets.

Initially, we will be supporting our Agile Hosting infrastructure and account management, and then expand functionality across the entire product set of Managed Hosting, Colocation, CDN and IP over the next several months. Our first public release is being built to function seamlessly across desktop, tablet and mobile platforms, using responsive design best practices to step down gracefully.

Along the way, we’ll be publishing a short series of posts to give you an idea of how we have approached the new portal. We’ll be talking about our foundational ideas, user personas, mistakes we made and share some screenshots that didn’t make the cut.

What is success?

Ultimately, the industry and our customers will collectively decide if we hit the mark. If it’s really great, you’ll hear about it. If you don’t, it’s because we missed the mark and produced something average.

Our goal is both external and internal. We want our staff to be impressed with our tools and excitedly show their friends. We want to attract the best employees to come work for us. We want the best customers to seek us out because they feel we’re a technology partner, not just their infrastructure provider.

A tall order? Probably. But when you feel like what you do really matters, you do your best.

2012 has been delightful for speed lovers of every kind. With the U.S. once again hosting the United States Grand Prix, the first since 2007, many can’t stop the excitement and noise about the races, the teams, the speed and the skills behind each win. Internap is very much part of all the excitement through the sponsorship of Sahara Force India, but today the levels of exhilaration have reached extraordinary peaks.

Internap is proud to announce that it is the newest sponsor of F1 Team Shift, a student-based team that will be representing the United States in the F1 in Schools World Championship this month in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

F1 Team Shift members Kelly Fitzgerald, Anna Awald, Claire McCoy and Sabine Saldanha designed and built a CO2-powered, balsa-wood model of a Formula One racecar that will compete in a 65-foot track against student teams from 34 countries. During the championship, the team will also be judged on a verbal presentation, engineering interview, and the design and construction of a large team display.

The F1 in Schools program inspires students to study math, science and engineering concepts, and demonstrate leadership and the ability to work as a team. Some schools build the engineering program into their curriculum and students receive significant support. The members of Team Shift were not among them, as they did not receive special considerations from their school or from the state of Georgia. They managed the entire scope of the project outside of the classroom, at their homes and in a former teacher’s garage. Funding for the trip, materials and expenses are not easy on the families, however Team Shift realized that they are not alone in their endeavor, as some Atlanta-based companies quickly decided to jump in to support them.

For Internap, it was a natural fit given the nature of the project and because Team Shift’s commitment to innovation, performance and dedication mirror their own approach to technology. They have had the opportunity to not only apply their engineering, technology and design skills but also learn the power of teamwork. These are lessons that inspire and are worth nurturing and shaping so that others overcome challenges to keep their goals continuously present.

You can follow the team’s progress at https://f1-shift.com/ a website that was created and managed by the girls themselves, while being hosted and Powered by Internap.

Internap is rooting for the girls as they take on competitors from all parts of the world!