That's right, it's almost conference season again, and I'm gearing up for quite a bit of activity.
I'll be attending a few conferences in the next few moths, as well as doing quite a bit of personal & business travel. I am especially interested in interviewing Cloud Hosting start-ups this year.
If you're in any of these cities and would like me to write about your datacenter, or interview me about your operations send an email to michael@halligan.org
May 21-26, Detroit, MI Read more
June 25 - Structure 2009 in San Francisco, CA
June 22-24 - Velocity Conference in San Jose, CA
In the past three months, our world has fallen apart. Banks have crumbled, VC has dried up, and the Fed has thrown about hundreds of billions of dollars willy-nilly, hoping we wouldn't notice. These are tough times for most industries, and it appears that ours is not immune. Read more
After a long week of Macworld, I've come to the (non)startling re-realization: Apple is still irrelevant in the datacenter world, but it spawns some fabulous after-parties. Speaking of which ...
Greetings readers, I'm in-between contracts right now and am available for some short-term infrastructure consulting (telecommute, San Francisco or Seattle) between now and March 15th.
You can view my credentials on LinkedIN and on my resume.
Read more
I'm trying to find quantity 200 Proliant HP DL145 G2 servers, no disks, any memory configuration, and at least 1 Opteron 246 processor per unit. Must all be in working condition. Email hpservers@datacenterjunkie.com.
Shawna Furr over @ SoftLayer told me today that SL just undertook quite a network upgrade this past month.
For Seattle they've added 10G connections to Comcast, SIX, Level3, and NTT adding to their existing 2x 10G connections to Internap for a total of 60Gbps of network capacity. In their Dallas datacenter they've brought on 10Gbps to Level3, 20Gbps to NTT, and 10Gbps to Equinix's IBX peering cloud. Dallas now has 80Gbps of capacity, up from 60Gbps the last time I checked. Read more
I'm working on a photo-essay book of datacenters, and I want to include your datacenter in it. This is the chance you've always dreamed of for fame, fortune, and great prizes! Well, at the least some attractive shots of your facilities will be seen by the world.
What I need from you:
- Sign a photography release allowing me to take these photos Read more
- A tour of your facility
- Clearance with your security to let them know when, what, and where I'll be allowed to shoot.
It's been quiet here for the winter, but that's all going to change in the New Year. We'll be coming back with more interviews, new photos, and video tours of datacenters. Keep up to date by following me on twitter at twitter.com/dcjunkie!
I've found myself working on a fun project. I'm helping a customer figure out what to do with their datacenter. It's a pre-built environment for a service that's being shuttered. There are options for us to sell off the equipment, or to find somebody else to take over the environment.
Servers:
- Qty 80 (approximately) IBM x3655 servers each with 1 dual-core Opteraon 2218, and 2x 73GB 10K SCSI drives with hardware raid1 (Memory configs currently unknown) Read more
- Qty 02 F5 BigIP 6400 configured for HA
- Qty 02 Cisco 6509-E with Sup720s, 3x 100MBps 48-port blades each
Unfortunately a cage build-out is taking priority over my trip, so I have to cancel.
I'll be in Las Vegas next week from the 2nd until the 4th to attend most of Gartner's Datacenter conference at the MGM Grand. My dinners are already booked up, but if anybody would like to grab coffee, or drinks afterward to tell me about your facilities send me an email; michael@halligan.org.
This past month I've been building a new infrastructure for iSkoot, a great mobile start-up. We've been tasked with re-building and migrating an existing infrastructure from an east coast datacenter to Santa Clara in 25 days. Read more
A friend of mine just called me to tell me that QTS's Sunnyvale had a major power event today. Details are slim, but apparently it was an entire site outage. He told me that he's about 50th in line to get access to the facility right now. Due to this outage, Friendster is offline right now.
Joan Levy over at Oracle was awesome enough to put me on the press list for OpenWorld this week. I'm not sure how much time I'm going to have to attend the sessions, but will try to walk the expo floor once or twice, and hit as many of the 7 after parties I've been told about so far.
I made it down to registration today at about 5:40 and was blown away by the enormity of it. Howard St. is shut off between 4th and 5th, covered with tents for parties. It appears bot Moscone East and Moscone West have been rented out solely for OpenWorld this week.
Oracle's press put out a caution that most hotels in downtown are booked up this week with conference attendees. Attendance is expected to peak 43,000 and there are over 1,800 sessions happening. Somebody tweeted earlier that on Thursday there are over 80 concurrent tracks going on at the same time.
Apparently Oracle is big business? I'm mainly interested to hear what Oracle's plans for the cloud are, and if the rumors are true that they're working with somebody to build a massive cloud of Oracle Database servers as a service.
John Pozadzides LayeredTech started in 2003 as a spin-off of Aldor Solutions. Aldor is a software provider to funeral homes and death-care certificates. We provided hosted ASP solutions to funeral homes. Since we were doing a lot of hosting, we receive
d the inevitable requests from friends and family to host a website here, or a server there. Eventually the webhosting side started getting interesting enough that we decided to see where we could take it. We built 20 servers and posted on WebHostingTalk that we'd lease them out for $35/month. We sold out of our inventory within a couple of days and realized that we had something here.
With this encouragement we setup a new brand called LayeredTech and moved our datacenter into ThePlanet. Before the move we had been using Intel processors, but decided to move into low-end AMD processors and were willing to install any Linux distribution or Control Panel that customer went. Within 9 months we had 2,000 servers hosted at ThePlanet. Read more
Day one began with a bad omen. The wireless began failing with only about 100 members of the press in the concourse. Throughout the day, the network team was clearly just under a massive amount of pressure, with about 1,000 laptops constantly trying to get a wireless link they just didn't stand a chance.
Understandably this is a very young conference, and the execution has been fantastic.
My recap is brief, very brief because I had to leave not too long after the opening sessions. Read more
Later on today I'll post my recap from yesterday's conference. I will try to do some regular updates today, but all bets are off. The conference internet access was non-existant yesterday. According to Jason Calcanis they were up all night throwing together a makeshift LAN so perhaps today will be better.
Here's the list of today's participants, I hope they're a bit less frightening than some of yesterday's startups.
TechCrunch50 Begins in San Francisco, Day Two Launch Schedule Released
Session Themes Include Collaboration, Finance and Statistics, Mobile, and Language and Platform Tools
TechCrunch50 Conference 2008--(BUSINESS WIRE)--TechCrunch:
WHO:
Read more
Following the press coordinator's advice for once, I arrived just after the door opened. For the expense of this conference, it has a very deliberate low-budget feel. All of the booths are tiny, each consisting of a couple of 2' diameter round tables with black table cloths, and a modest display.
There are about 50 exhibitors, mostly unknown start-ups, and a couple of larger players.
So far I've run into some fun guys from GoGrid, Zivity, and OtherInbox, and ShopZilla. I've got an interview setup with GoGrid (and I said I wouldn't be covering infrastructure here!) and am trying to set a few other ones up right now. Read more
As you know, this blog is entitled DatacenterJunkie, not StartupJunkie. This week, however, I have the pleasure of having been invited to cover TechCrunch50 for NetworkWorld. So for the next three days, instead of Datacenters and ISPs, it'll be Start-ups and Venture Capitalists.
Look forward to liveblogging, snarky comments about start-ups, and interviews with entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and homeless programmers on the streets of San Francisco who Will Code For Food!
TechCrunch50's early morning press release:
September 08, 2008 09:30 AM Eastern Daylight Time
TechCrunch50 Begins in San Francisco, Day One Launch Schedule ReleasedSession Themes Include Youth and Entertainment, Memes and News, Enterprise, and Advertising and Commerce
Read more
Michael Halligan is a serial entrepreneur with more than 15 years of experience in IT architecture and operations. His primary role is chief technical officer of BitPusher, LLC, a managed application hosting firm based out of San Francisco and Seattle. He is currently starting up a new Web application providing intelligent services to the convention industry. He previously held architectural and management positions at start-ups MyPoints, Kontiki and Napster.
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