In 2012, Internap embraced social media as a way to engage with the community of customers and buyers of IT Infrastructure. As part of the next step in our evolution, Internap is working to be more engaged with the local user groups and development communities. As part of my new role as Internap’s Hosting Evangelist, I’ll be attending events to talk with the people who are using the types of infrastructure we provide to build awesome applications and generally do cool stuff.

While our Enterprise Sales teams are selling to CIOs, VPs, Directors and other “business” titles, it’s usually the IT Manager, the Developer, or the Operations teams that are actually using our services, whether it’s Colocation, IP, Content Delivery Network (CDN), and especially Hosting.

To this end, I’ll be writing up a periodic highlight of some local communities and events. I’ll start with the various user groups in the greater Atlanta area and highlight some of their activities and interests. If you are a customer of Internap and use any of the software or programming languages highlighted here, I encourage you to visit these groups or similar groups in your local area.

Python User Group – Jan 10, 2013
During a previous job, I worked as a sysadmin supporting Python developers. So I picked up just enough Python to install and validate the functionality of Python and various requested modules.

The PyATL User Group is a group of developers (and enthusiasts) who use the Python programming language, so the presentations are focused around developer themes. During this month’s meetup, presenters talked about Tox, which is a tool to help create and manage virtualenv environments to isolate code for testing, and Sphinx, which is a documentation engine using reStructuredText (a simple markup language).

There is also a PyLadies group that is open to women-only and a Jam Session meetup where coders can get together more informally and work on projects, ask questions, and share tips and tricks.

MongoDB User Group – Jan 11, 2013
10Gen, the company that develops and supports MongoDB, held its monthly “office hours” meeting at the Roam Atlanta coworking space. Since I don’t have much hands-on experience with MongoDB (yet), I attended to ask questions about the type of hosting infrastructure typically used in a MongoDB cluster, and what kind of hardware resources – or lackthereof – usually present bottlenecks and scaling challenges. Other attendees were developers who had specific questions around some of their projects, as well as socializing with a little bit of shop talk.

OpenStack User Group – Jan 17, 2013
Internap deployed an OpenStack-based cloud in 2011, so this was definitely one group I wanted to attend. The Atlanta OpenStack user group has a smaller attendance than some groups, so they conduct it a little more informally than larger user groups. The organizer, Doug Hellman, gave a presentation on Ceilometer, which is a usage collection service that presents usage data into a centralized data store for billing systems to retrieve and use for invoicing. This represents one of the challenges companies face when deploying public clouds. Collecting usage data for on-demand services that are calculated in hours (rather than flat monthly fees) requires considerable development work. This project aims to reduce that level of effort and present the usage data in a way that can be integrated with a billing and invoicing system.

Drupal Coffee Club – Jan 22, 2013
This is probably one of my personal favorites. I’ve been using Drupal for various small projects for a while, and while I rarely make it to the monthly Atlanta Drupal User Group meetups, I try to attend the Drupal Coffee Club as much as possible. Like the PyATL Jam Sessions, this is where Drupal users (novices and experts and anywhere in between) can get together and talk about their projects, ask for assistance, and socialize over some yummy coffee and baked goods.

WordPress User Group – Jan 23, 2013
Finally, Russell Fair presented at the WordPress User Group on the topic of Photoblogging. For those running WordPress as a website/content management system and are looking to post galleries of photos online (but without using third-party photo-hosting services), this was a great introduction to the various plugins and themes that support this activity.

If you currently work with, or are interested in any of these (or similar) technologies, Atlanta has a large number of user groups that are wonderful opportunities to learn new software, techniques, and to meet other people in the community. Next month, I plan to visit these groups and a few new ones, such as the Web Performance Meetup Group.

Do you have a user group that you recommend I visit? Let me know in the comments below, or tweet your recommendation to @andrewboring.

It’s well-known that the online gaming industry is evolving quickly, and is poised for exponential growth within the next few years. For online game publishers, the key
to success involves more than just brilliant new ideas for games, characters or superpowers. It’s also essential for online gaming companies to establish the IT Infrastructure required to deliver the optimal user experience, and to have a clear understanding of the constantly-changing market demographics. Overlooking either one of these can spell doom for your competitive advantage.

The evolution of the online gaming industry goes hand in hand with the evolution of technology. Online gaming infrastructure must be able to support the demands of mobile gaming, and meet the expectations of gamers’ “anytime, anywhere” mentality. With the right gaming infrastructure in place, online video game providers can create more than games – they can also create an exceptional user experience and strategic competitive advantage.

Know your audience
What do these gamers look like? Just as the gaming industry is advancing, the characteristics of online gamers are changing rapidly as well. It’s important to stay current on the demographic trends of players within the massively multiplayer online RPG (MMORPG) genre, so that new games and products can be designed for the right audience. Game developers who understand the preferences of their players will have the best chance of success and sustainability for their business.

The characteristics of online gamers may not be what you think. To learn more about their attributes, check out our infographic on the Changing Face of Online Gaming.

The first time I heard the term bare metal cloud, I visualized a race car. Sure, we all know I have F1 on the brain with our sponsorship of the Sahara Force India Formula One Team, but it’s actually a great comparison if you stop and think about it. A race car is designed for pure performance, stripped of luxuries, bursting (pun intended) with raw power and unmatched agility.  But as it turns out, I only had it half right.  While bare metal cloud is in fact about high-performance, it metaphorically also has a high-end surround system, supple leather seats (heated and cooled of course) and a tricked-out navigation system. Bare metal cloud is a fast AND sweet ride.  It’s a way to cost-effectively gain the business agility of the cloud combined with the high performance, predictability, security and control associated with dedicated physical servers. All provisioned within minutes, not hours or days.  Sounds pretty agile to me.

Next week, cloud and F1 will collide at Cloud Expo Europe in London.  This event is a great opportunity to learn more about strategic cloud infrastructure and how it can benefit your business. To demonstrate Internap’s commitment to performance, we’re also giving away a one-of-a-kind, F1 prize – our partner, Sahara Force India, has graciously donated an actual racing suit worn and signed by Paul Di Resta. It is framed and ready to be hung – talk about a conversation starter!   It could be yours if you drop by our booth and take our cloud for a test drive.

In case you are like me and counting down the days until the 2013 F1 season begins, have no fear. Sahara Force India will be unveiling their new car on Friday, February 1 at Silverstone in England, just as the Cloud Expo is coming to a close.  Look for information soon about how to watch the live event.  Hint: The event will be streamed live on their website and powered by Internap.

Planning to be in London next week? Visit Internap at booth 857 at Cloud Expo Europe January 29 – 30 to take a spin in our cloud. Also, learn more about evaluating cloud solutions in our Cloud Hosting Buyer’s Guide.

The Consumer Electronics show has passed and left plenty of us salivating over new gadgets that could be coming soon. Of course, this year’s CES made one thing clear – gadgets aren’t what we always thought they were. Where we once looked at gadgets as handy little technological items, we now can call a refrigerator a gadget because intelligent appliances have gained so much prominence.

This trend was especially clear at the CES, where appliance manufacturers showed off a variety of intelligent appliances that can do everything from provide better control over how much energy they use to integrate with your smartphone. All of this is made possible, of course, by pervasive web connectivity that can turn almost anything into an intelligent device.

However, this trend also presents businesses with a unique problem – supporting these devices. Suddenly, an appliance company that had to host a basic website, perhaps with retail functionality, has to also host applications and web systems within their consumer devices. This represents a major hurdle that needs to be jumped, and soon.

The hosting challenge for appliance manufacturers
With so many appliances depending on web platforms, manufacturers have to consider their hosting capabilities as a key element of their customer service platform. If a server goes down and an application isn’t available for an hour, how will that impact an intelligent oven’s functionality? Generally speaking, there are plenty of controls and embedded software systems in place to prevent disasters from happening, but the exciting thing about intelligent appliances is not always their ability to provide their core function better, it is often the capacity to offer added benefits. For example, an intelligent refrigerator that can automatically adjust the internal temperature based on the density of items inside is nice, but a smart fridge that surfs the web to find recipes can make people giddy.

If the web hosting capabilities that support these advanced functions go down, an appliance manufacturer needs to brace for some customer backlash.

Solving the hosting problem
Cloud hosting solutions can be a major asset in this area because they offer resiliency that can be difficult to match. By attaching a powerful web hosting plan to a cloud cluster, a system can automatically abstract the virtual server from the hardware and move it to new physical machines in the event of an outage. As a result, cloud hosting provides invaluable reliability that can support intelligent appliance functionality.

To learn more about how hosting services can benefit your business, read our Managed Hosting Buyer’s Guide.

By Charlie Alsmiller, CEO, Appterra

I recently spoke with an enterprise software company that had launched a “Cloud” initiative. Like so many others, ourselves included, they had flocked to the variety of services available from Amazon, Azure, Softlayer, Rackspace and others to “scale” their business using the latest cloud technology.

I have examined all these services in some level of detail, and have found them all to be very good when paired with the right job. In our business, we rely on our technology partnerships to help ensure 100% uptime for our customers. In turn, our customers rely on us for dependable service that allows their business to run smoothly. Downtime is a really big problem. As such, they expect us to write a fairly intense SLA (Service Level Agreement) into our contracts, because if we are down, they are down. There are usually substantial financial implications of downtime, and it’s important to ensure that all parties are fully “incented” to react quickly if a downtime situation arises.

As we all know, downtime has been a problem with many of the larger providers recently. I understand that downtime happens, but where this gets to be a challenge is in the SLAs of these firms. Are you willing to bet your business on this? Below is an excerpt from a leading firm’s Service Level Agreement, which is typical.

“XXXXXX will use commercially reasonable efforts to make XXXXXX available with an Annual Uptime Percentage (defined below) of at least 99.95% during the Service Year. In the event XXXXXX does not meet the Annual Uptime Percentage commitment, you will be eligible to receive a Service Credit.”

This firm goes on to note that the service credit will equal 10% of your bill for the affected period. Thanks.

I have a former customer that once calculated downtime costs for his business at $1000/minute. I also have a current customer that received EU 500/minute penalties for downtime in their ability to communicate and take orders from their customers. So, let’s run some quick math. 99.5% uptime translates into approximately four hours and 23 minutes of downtime per year, or around 22 minutes per month. In the case of my former customer, 22 minutes of downtime per month equals $22,000 of lost revenue. If a business pays $10,000/month for cloud services, they would only receive a $1000 credit for their loss. That’s not acceptable, and I can assure you, they won’t wait around for it to happen again – they WILL look elsewhere.

The bottom line is that while the outage will have financial impact, both in terms of lost revenue and SLA payouts, the major hit will be that of customer confidence. Any credits offered will be insignificant in replacing either revenue or customer perception.

As a SaaS company, we have a lot of moving parts — our network, hardware, operating systems, database systems, our code base, etc. All must work flawlessly together to ensure a great end customer experience. As enterprises seriously consider cloud services, take a cold, hard look at the Service Level Agreements and the real commitment to uptime that the supplier can provide. I think you will be surprised and choose your partner very carefully — which is why we chose Internap as our cloud hosting provider.

For more information about evaluating cloud providers, read the Cloud Hosting Buyer’s Guide.

For most of last Sunday’s NFL playoff game, the Atlanta Falcons rose above the Seahawks in the Georgia Dome. But with a 20-point lead and minutes remaining in the 4th quarter, disaster struck. The feisty Seahawks went on a surprise attack that sent the soaring Falcons into a speeding nosedive, threatening a disastrous end to an otherwise great season. With 31 seconds left to play, disaster (call him Marshawn Lynch) scored a touchdown. Seattle was up 28-27. And just like that, a once boisterous, confident stadium suddenly transformed into a quiet, doubtful dome. There I stood, among a stunned crowd looking at defeat, thinking to myself, “They better have a plan.”

Thankfully, the Falcons did have a plan. The game was a great example of how disaster preparedness can help overcome setbacks. Here at Internap, this reminded us that preparing for disaster is also critical for your IT Infrastructure.

As the Falcons get ready for another tough playoff challenge, let’s take a look at six ways your data center provider can prevent disruptions to your critical business operations when disaster strikes.

1. Disaster-resistant design & infrastructure
First and foremost, make sure your data center provider’s facilities are designed to N+1 redundancy standards for both power and cooling. The Atlanta Falcons are a well-built team, designed to find ways to win using an infrastructure based around speed, power and the ability to maintain coolness under pressure, a.k.a. “Matty Ice”.

2. Documented emergency response plan
It is critical that your provider has well-documented emergency preparedness and disaster response plans. Coach Mike Smith and his staff have a sophisticated and explosive playbook that guarantees success if implemented correctly when disaster strikes.

3. Mock drills
Only through testing and conducting drills will a data center provider truly be prepared for an event. The infamous two-minute drill is practiced multiple times in any offense, and results in perfectly designed plays that give the Falcons a chance to win by a touchdown or field goal.

4. Preventative maintenance
A highly structured and robust maintenance program is crucial in preventing a disaster from impacting your business. Your provider should have a Computer Maintenance Management System (CMMS) to keep track of when maintenance is due, as well as repairs that have already been done. After failing to score during most of the 4th quarter, the Falcons decided to perform some maintenance on their offense with seconds to go in the game. Julio Jones, Roddy White and Tony Gonzalez had been top threats all game, so the Falcons decided to change their plan and target receiver Harry Douglass – open for a 29-yard gain. Life breathed into the Georgia Dome once again.

5. Communication best practices
Expect your data center provider to notify you of any potential business-impacting events, as well as send timely, detailed updates throughout. Matt Ryan gives phenomenal instructions in no huddle situations. By effectively communicating plays at the line and directing players in poetic cadence, he sets up Tony Gonzalez to sprint off the line, find a hole in the defense and run for a 19-yard gain. With 14 seconds to go, fans rise to their feet. Falcons have a chance!

6. The right people!
Does your data center provider have the highly trained and skilled people needed to operate its complex equipment? With all of the Falcons offensive weapons, Seattle struggled to defend Atlanta in the waning seconds of the game. And with one of the top ranked kickers in the league, Matt Ryan and the Falcons set up Matt Bryant for a 49-yard field goal with 8 seconds to go.

Now that the Falcons have digested last Sunday’s Seahawks meal, they are preparing for another glorious battle. Sharpening their talons. Polishing their beaks. On Sunday afternoon, two teams will duel in front of millions, but only one will survive. It’s time to Rise Up, Atlanta. Claim what is rightfully yours – Victory.

Learn more about the importance of data centers and disaster recovery in Internap’s ebook, Data Center Disaster Preparedness: Six Assurances You Should Look for in a Data Center Provider.

The massively multiplayer online RPG (MMORPG) genre has thrived in two different payment models — subscription and free to play. If you look at the industry as a whole, it appears as if the subscription model laid the groundwork for the MMORPG, while the free-to-play style has helped the genre expand. However, there is a bit of subtlety to the interplay between subscription and free-to-play models. These nuances provide vital insight into the state of the video game industry and emphasize the importance of colocation and data center services in the sector.

Looking at MMORPG models
If you make a dedicated effort to seek out MMORPGs, you will not find too many games that still use the subscription model. Two leaders in the sector are “World of Warcraft” and “Star Wars: The Old Republic.” WoW has lasted an extended period of time as a leader in the genre and carved a major niche for itself. “The Old Republic,” on the other hand, has struggled to maintain an audience using the subscription model and transitioned to a free-to-play system on November 15, 2012.

These decisions make sense if you look closely at the MMORPG’s emergence. Initially, the MMORPG made sense as a subscription-based model because developers would release high-quality content and update it frequently. Over time, however, more developers realized they could release generally lower-quality games as MMORPGs, and make money by selling in-game items.

As this trend progressed, the subscription model became the choice for high-end MMORPGs, while free-to-play was used primarily for low- and medium-range titles that have a strong place in the market or high-end games that were losing players. “World of Warcraft” was initially released in the heyday of this industry climate. “The Old Republic,” on the other hand, came out toward the end of this cycle.

Considering the economics of free-to-play
In the free-to-play MMORPG model, you make your money by getting users to buy in-game items, such as hairstyles for their characters, special outfits or gameplay-related items, such as weapons or special tools. This provides consistent income for developers and publishers, allowing them to support operations. However, you can’t predict revenue as easily with a free-to-play game as you can with a subscription solution because you never really know how many people will buy items in the game.

As a result, developers and publishers hosting free-to-play content often have to find the least expensive method possible to maintain services. By turning to a colocation provider, organizations gain access to a number of systems that enable better services while providing access to more cost-efficient technologies. Therefore, third-party data center solutions can serve as a strategic asset for online video game providers seeking a competitive advantage over their peers.

To learn more about how data center and colocation services can contribute to the success of your online game, read our white paper, Five Consideration for Building Online Gaming Infrastructure.

Sitting in my office on a dreary British January day (a Monday to add further insult to injury), I have just come off the telephone to our good friends at Internap HQ, based in Atlanta, Georgia. The weather may not be much better on the other side of the pond at this time of the year, but it is certainly a tonic to think so!

Following our call, I cannot help but reflect that at this juncture in 2012, we were in the midst of partnership negotiations and had yet to put any faces to names or fully explore all the opportunities open to us as partners. Some twelve months on and we are entering the second year of our association, both sides bringing with them a collection of great memories and achievements from 2012. I now know what high-speed internet hosting is all about and my colleagues at Internap understand a little more about Formula One tyre strategy. I should say that not only do I know what high-speed internet hosting actually means, but I have actually seen the effects of it first hand, with the Sahara Force India website benefitting from decreased load times and a greater ability to deal with the spikes in traffic that Formula One race weekends bring. In fact, I am now evangelical about the benefits of HSIH (as I like to call it) to my ever-suffering and IT-literate husband. But of far greater importance than improving my (decidedly weak) IT vocabulary has been the opportunity for key Internap customers and specialist IT media to meet our 2012 driver line-up: Paul Di Resta, Nico Hulkenberg and Jules Bianchi.

Starting with a dinner in New York in June after the Montreal Grand Prix, taking in an IT media briefing in the UK at Silverstone around the British Grand Prix and climaxing in a meet and greet event in Austin, Texas during the inaugural Austin Grand Prix, there have been plenty of opportunities for the friends and customers of Internap to get up close and personal with the senior team personnel and drivers. During these events, the synergies between the two organisations have become increasingly obvious. Both parties apply advanced technology to save time, both are performing in a crowded market place (or grid in Sahara Force India’s case) and both are striving to be the very best in their particular field.

2013 is set to be another exciting year in Formula One’s history, and at Sahara Force India we plan to continue to score strong points and challenge our competitors throughout the season. We have some further activity planned with Internap at key rounds, and some expansion phases planned for our website, www.forceindiaf1.com. One thing is sure, we are in safe hands with Internap as our hosting partner, leaving us time to concentrate on what we do best — racing cars. As for me, well, I hope my IT education will continue. I believe there is an IT cloud as well as our January rain clouds, so that is my next lesson to be learnt. Wonders will never cease…

For more information about Sahara Force India and Internap, read the case study.

It’s always interesting to be asked why a product is called what it is called, but I’ve come to expect it when travelling and meeting new people. However, I didn’t expect to hear it in the office the other day, and that has led me to write this post.

“What’s in a name? that which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet” Romeo and Juliet, 2.2.47-48

We don’t sell roses, but we do sell AgileSERVERS.

So what is an AgileSERVER? What makes our servers so agile? What makes our servers so grandiose that we feel the need to overcapitalize them? All good questions…

What is an AgileSERVER?

An AgileSERVER is a dedicated server that resides in the Internap datacenter and is available on an hourly, monthly, or annual basis. This is a good option for Internap customers who use our world-class datacenters for Colocation, but also need a solution for flexible infrastructure on potentially a short-term basis. While many service providers offer hosted servers on a monthly basis, offering them on an hourly basis provides our clients with increased business agility to align their IT costs and capacity needs in near real-time.

What makes our servers so agile?

Providing flexibility to pay for dedicated servers on a granular level is just one piece of the puzzle. The servers have to provision quickly so that the infrastructure is available when needed, so we offer some “instant config” servers that can be online in less than ten minutes. If your application requires a different configuration, this can be ready in a matter of hours. This rapid provisioning creates IT agility to provide infrastructure to your end-users and brings cloud-like instant gratification to dedicated servers.

What makes our servers so grandiose that we feel the need to overcapitalize them?

The server hardware is another piece of the puzzle, but the network speed and quality are as important as the hardware. AgileSERVER is paired with three unique network agility benefits.

1. Managed Internet Route Optimizer™ (MIRO) technology – Built on Internap’s patented route-optimization technology, each AgileSERVER will automatically deliver traffic over the lowest latency path available and avoid carriers with bottlenecks or disruptions.
2. Global Content Delivery Network (CDN) – Internap also includes a transparent caching CDN that can be used to reduce the amount of infrastructure required to deliver web content to remote end-users while simultaneously reducing loading times.
3. Cloud Hybridization – Since not every workload requires a full server, Internap enables bare-metal and cloud instances to coexist in the same logical network. This allows for optimizing costs by not over-provisioning resources, and enables creative solutions for burst capacity.

So why do we overcapitalize our AgileSERVERS? Because they are so much more than just servers. They bring billing flexibility, instant provisioning, and include performance-enhancing network technologies while offering the isolation of a dedicated server and the full performance of hardware without any hypervisor penalty. So while AgileSERVERS could be effectively used for agile development sprints, agility is not limited to developers (or acrobats).

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but an AgileSERVER is so much sweeter than just any old server.

To learn more, please read our AgileSERVERS data sheet.

Ideally, your IT Infrastructure service provider is an extension of your company, reflecting the high quality and focus that you expect from your own organization and employees.  These types of relationships require a concerted effort by all parties and tend to evolve over time.

To be sure, it is time well spent because key benefits include better alignment between your organization’s needs and the service it receives. It allows your service provider to identify the best options for supporting your corporate goals, evaluating trade-offs, and making solid recommendations.

Begin with these 5 tips to establish and maintain a rewarding strategic relationship with your provider.

1. Share your corporate vision and objectives with your provider representative.  Identify any critical measures or business fundamental metrics related to infrastructure such as percent up-time, latency limits, response time, etc.
2. Determine funding availability and budgetary constraints.  Identify any data or financial analysis that is required to justify expenditure.
3. Document and communicate your requirements in a clear and specific manner.  Be sure to include all requirements:  tangible and intangible, technical and business.
4. Identify any concerns or risk factors that are unacceptable.  This may include physical location concerns based on geographical conditions, or security arrangements.
5. Read and understand the Service Level Agreement (SLA) and supporting documentation.  Pay attention to what is required of you as well as what is required of the service provider.

Clearly, whether your needs include colocation,  managed hosting, cloud or a hybrid mix of services, these tips for managing your relationship will steer you in the right direction.

For more information, check out our ebook, The Colocation Buyer’s Guide.