SolidNode

What would it mean if Apple wanted to take all the songs in all the iTunes libraries sitting on all the hard drives of its users and host them in the cloud? It would probably require Apple to build an enormous data center to house the operation. There are widespread reports that Apple is contemplating such a shift.

As it happens, Apple is also building a major new data center in Maiden, North Carolina that will span 500,000 square feet. The enormity of the new facility - which will be nearly five times the size of the company’s 109,000 square foot Newark, Calif. data center – has raised questions about Apple’s ambitions. Why would it need all that data center space?

A Shift to the Cloud?
I discussed this question in an August interview with Leander Kahney at the Cult of Mac blog. A recap: The most interesting question is whether Apple needs a much larger facility to support growth in its existing services, or is scaling up capacity for future offerings.  One of the leading theories about the size of the NC project is that Apple is planning future cloud computing services that will require lots of data center storage.

This fits neatly with Apple’s purchase last week of the streaming music service LaLa. The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple is planning to “reboot” its iTunes service as a browser-based service that would allow users to stream their music from anywhere.

“The shift to cloud-based music won’t be instant, and may never be total,” notes an analysis at GigaOm. “But a smartly integrated way of giving consumers access to their existing MP3 libraries side-by-side with a new streaming option is very attractive. Lala knew this, and Apple can deliver it.”

Is Video Part of the Story? 
Wired believes video looms large in Apple’s ambitions. “All these recent developments point to a significant new strategic market for Apple: personal broadcasting, or sharing personal experiences,” writes Brian Chen. “YouTube and Flip are already big players in this young space, and the logical competitive move for Apple is to make personal media deliverable and accessible anytime, anywhere.”

This shift in the iTunes model would mean a change in Apple’s data storage requirements – hence the huge scaling up of its data center platform. A de-duplicated iTunes storage hub serving music from a central repository might not require much additional space.

Apple Set to Scale Up
But video is a different matter. Users of YouTube upload 20 hours of video content every minute. That may be why Apple hired Olivier Sanche to run its data center operations. Olivier previously ran the data center infrastructure at eBay, one of the leading examples of massive scalability.

If Apple is really planning a push into online video, we’ll hear about more huge data center projects soon. Here’s why: A centrally hosted iTunes would create the potential for the Mother of All Downtime Events - a data center outage that leaves the world’s iTunes users unable to access their music.

In terms of actual impact, an online music outage would rank low on most industry lists of worst-case data center failure scenarios. But an iTunes data center crash would be a huge public relations nightmare, generating a tidal wave of digital complaining via blogs and tweets.

A single point of failure will not suffice. If the speculation about Apple’s cloud ambitions are correct, there are more huge data centers to come.

Original post:
Is iTunes ‘Reboot’ Driving iDataCenter Project?

Popularity: 13% [?]

There are an impressive number of website analytics packages out there, with a wide range in price and features. But many of those analytics tools are only available online: you have to log in to a website to get at your data. The options for a desktop-based tool are fewer and farther between, but there are a few useful tools out there.

Check out these four options to see if a desktop application will fit the way you handle your website analytics.

TrakkBoard

Available for free, TrakkBoard is intended for heavy Google Analytics users. You do need to be using Google Analytics already, so that Trakkboard can pull down information for you, but you get the added benefit of being able to add multiple Google Analytics accounts to your display. You can compare data between accounts, generate reports and summarize all the details of your different websites in one spot.

TrakkBoard’s dashboard makes it easy to manage the wide variety of analytics data you have in one spot. Future developments for the tool include making it possible to bring analytics information from other providers in, as well.

Woopra

Get real-time analytics through Woopra’s analytics dashboard. It works on Windows, Mac and Linux, allowing you to get rich data faster than most web-based tools can offer. You can manage multiple sites through the tool, with a home dashboard providing metrics at a glance. You can also customize everything down to how Woopra connects to your sites: with a manual connection, you can reduce the bandwidth requirement for your internet connection. (See Woopra vs. Google Analytics for more info about Woopra.)

Deep Log Analyzer

If you routinely need to create custom reports, Deep Log Analyzer is particularly useful tool. It does require a little extra server-side setup, but you get the benefit of being able to store past statistics for long-term comparisons easily. Business owners can take it a step beyond by pulling in CRM or sales data to turn website analytics into in-depth sales information. Deep Log Analyzer is available for Windows, in both a free edition and in a professional edition. The professional version is priced at $199.95, and can be used with an unlimited number of domains.

Snoop

You’ll barely notice Snoop running on your desktop. In Windows, it runs in the System Tray. On a Mac, it runs in the System Status Bar. Whenever something happens on your website, Snoop will notify you with an unique sound. Those events can include details like a comment or a purchase: Snoop is integrated with Reinvigorate for more comprehensive analytics as well. That includes heat maps, live visitor tracking and a wealth of statistics, all available in real-time.

Why desktop applications?

The choice to use a desktop application, rather than an online tool, is a matter of what’s easiest for your workflow. There are some key benefits, like the fact that you don’t need to worry about your analytics provider’s website going down just when you need to print a report. Depending on the software you choose, you can also work with some features not available anywhere else, like TrakkBoard’s ability to combine reports from different Google Analytics accounts. In the end, though, the decision to use a piece of software running on your desktop, rather than online, is a question of what’s convenient for you.

If you want to avoid logging into your account every time you want to check on your website’s performance, a desktop application is going to be easier to use. If you spend a lot of time on different computers, a web application may be a better fit.

About the author:
Thursday Bram writes about technology and small business. You can find Thursday on Twitter and on her own blog at ThursdayBram.com.

Original post:
Website analytics: 4 handy desktop tools

Popularity: 6% [?]

In the past few weeks, there have been some major shifts in the BitTorrent community which have had a resounding impact on the larger world of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing. They’ve led to some of the largest BitTorrent sites completely changing focus, or figuring out smarter ways to continue sharing files illegally.

Meanwhile, Adobe announced a massively interesting inclusion in their upcoming Flash player 10.1 update – a seemingly innocuous version number that is adding some world-changing P2P technology to Flash video streaming.

I’d like to discuss these opposing trends of illegal versus more legitimate uses of P2P technology, and what they ultimately mean for how we use the Web.

The times are a-changin’ for The Pirate Bay, Mininova, and BitTorrent

First, The Pirate Bay shut down their tracker for good. The site used to boast having “the world’s largest Bittorrent tracker,” but is now opting for a different approach.

The Pirate Bay is using a combination of DHT (a de-centralized P2P network) and PEX (peer exchange, a method for gathering peers) to share files directly between peers without the use of a traditional tracker. They’re also doing away with torrent files by offering “magnet links”, which send torrent data directly to BitTorrent clients.

Mininova, another popular BitTorrent site, recently announced that they’re going completely legit by removing all of their copyright-violating torrents. Mininova has historically been more cooperative with authorities when it came to cracking down on copyright infringement, but such a drastic move from them is still surprising.

The fate of these two BitTorrent mainstays is a direct response to recent legal pressure, and it’s also telling for the future of the protocol. One gives up illicit activities completely, and the other finds a way to further remove themselves from blame. Honestly, I’m not sure how long The Pirate Bay can keep up their efforts without going completely private, especially if smaller BitTorrent sites are forced to go legitimate like Mininova.

Overall, legitimacy seems to be the wisest course of action for BitTorrent sites that don’t want to be as confrontational as The Pirate Bay. It also falls in line with the changing tide we’ve been seeing with commercial use of P2P techniques for the past few years. Gone are the days when P2P just referred to illicit file sharing. Now, many companies are relying on P2P networking as a key component of their products.

Adobe adds P2P multicasting to Flash player 10.1

In short, multicasting is the notion of distributing one piece of content from one source to many destinations – all without the load of delivering it to everyone requesting it. On large local networks – streaming a corporate event, for example – this often occurs right at the routers. With Flash player 10.1, Adobe is making it possible for content distributors to multicast content by having viewers transparently share the stream.

According to Adobe, this will allow Flash video streams for huge events with millions of viewers – even for something as large as the US presidential inauguration. Flash player 10.1 will also allow developers to build more traditional P2P applications within the browser, or as a standalone application via Adobe Air.

Spotify shares the music love

One of the most hotly anticipated services for many music lovers is Spotify, a currently Europe-only service that utilizes P2P to allow users to instantly stream music. The Spotify application looks like a cousin to iTunes with Napster as another close relative, as it should – the service marries the desire for free tunes with the legitimacy of iTunes.

The best explanation I’ve found for Spotify’s P2P tech comes courtesy of Wikipedia:

The contents of each client’s cache is summarized in an index which is sent to the Spotify stream hub upon connecting to the service. This index is then used to inform other clients about additional peers they can connect to for fetching streamed data for individual tracks being played. This is accommodated by each client, upon startup, acting as a server listening for incoming connections from other Spotify users, as well as intuitively connecting to other users to exchange cached data as appropriate.

Other P2P uses, past and present

For years now, Blizzard has been using BitTorrent to distribute updates for World of Warcraft, and let’s not forget how useful it is for downloading large files like Linux disk images. The struggling video service Joost also relied on P2P to distribute its content with its initial desktop application, though they have since done away with P2P to focus on streaming Flash directly from their site. (The Flash player 10.1 update should be a huge boon to them.)

P2P has a legitimate place in the future

While broadband speeds are increasing worldwide, there will still be many reasons to adopt P2P methods for distributing content in the future. Primarily, it severely reduces the bandwidth load for content distributors, and it prevents the danger of overloaded servers for important events. For users, it means more reliable content delivery overall (since there may be no single point of failure), and reduced costs since content providers are saving money as well.

There’s no denying that illegal uses of BitTorrent and other P2P technologies will continue, but on the other hand P2P technology will also help legitimate efforts to offer free and inexpensive ways to legally access content. Spotify, for example, could make many users give up illegal music downloading due to its convenience and ease of use.

As legitimate means of accessing content become more widely available, many users will find less reason to pirate. How ironic it is that P2P, once seen merely as the source of content providers’ woes, could potentially be their savior.

About the author:
Devindra Hardawar is a tech/film blogger and podcast host. You can find him writing at the Far Side of Tech and Slashfilm.

Original post:
How P2P is finding legitimacy as BitTorrent sites struggle to change

Popularity: 18% [?]

I’m hosting another Chiller Side Chat with Michael Manos of Digital Realty Trust on Monday, Dec. 7 from 12 noon to 1 p.m. Central time. Mike is the Senior Vice President of Technical Services for Digital Realty and one of the leading voices in the data center industry. His previous Chiller Side Chats on his Loose Bolts blog have shared his insights on issues ranging from data center design to impending regulation that will affect the data center.

The webinar format of the Chiller Side Chat offers you the opportunity to ask questions and share your thoughts and opinions on key data center issues with Mike, who in his previous post was responsible for the construction and operations of Microsoft’s data center facilities. To get a feel for the format, you can listen to a podcast of the first event on Sept. 14.

Be sure to register for this event to learn more about the changes facing the data center industry and share information and perspectives from Mike and your fellow data center professionals.

Original post:
Reminder: Chiller Side Chat on Dec. 7

Popularity: 48% [?]

The motto for retail bargain-tracker site Dealnews.com says it all: “Where every day is Black Friday.” As a specialist in sales and discounts, Dealnews manages enormous traffic spikes every Christmas season, which scales up in earnest on Black Friday and Cyber Monday (the Friday and Monday after Thanksgiving, respectively). In this presentation from O’Reilly’s Velocity 09 conference, Brian Moon of DealNews discusses ways to manage both seasonal traffic peaks and spikes from unexpected events. Moon discusses “planned degradation” in which non-essential features can be turned off to reduce server load, as well as caching strategies for peak loads. He also discusses how to adapt to the loss of a data center (21 minute mark) and content delivery network, and the performance impact of content from third-party servers. This video runs about 27 minutes. Brian’s presentation is also available from the Velocity 09 web site.

For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

Original post:
DealNews: Handling Black Friday Traffic Spikes

Popularity: 12% [?]

The 3rd International Finance and Investment Forum for data centres will take place in London on Dec. 3 at King’s Place, and will focus on the emergence of data centres as a new asset class. Panels at the event will examine the financing options for data centres, investment performance and the focus of future investment, a review of market demand and drivers, financing expansion and M&A, the importance of internationalisation in data centre expansion and a special review of Data Centres in Emerging Markets.

Researched and produced by BroadGroup Consulting, the forum brings together data centre owners with investors, financiers, analysts, private equity and law firms. Although Data Centres are holding up relatively well in the slowdown and investment appears to continue from existing players. Speakers at the event will include Harry Beusker (Equinix Europe), Anthony Foy (Interxion), Guy Willner (Teraco South Africa), Steve Wallage (BroadGroup Consulting), Peter Hopper (DH Capital), Mark Lambourne (TREGlobal) and Chris Crosby (Digital Realty Trust).

Original post:
Finance & Investment Forum for Data Centres

Popularity: 60% [?]

[WPMID=1]

iPage web hosting has been in business for over ten years providing customers with hosting accounts full of options and features.  The company knows there is no such thing as a typical web hosting client and offers as much flexibility as possible without making things over complicated.  iPage does all this on top of being a “green” web hosting company – something that sets them apart from its peers.

The facts

iPage web hosting currently manages and hosts over 1.5 million domains and serves over 1 million web sites.  The company has customers in 150 countries around the world and 6 worldwide locations.  With over 800 total employees ready to serve customers at any time, iPage web hosting is a company that stands ready to assist hosting clients where ever and whenever needed.

The plan

Instead of offering a half a dozen or more plans making things a bit confusing for prospective and new web hosting clients, iPage web hosting offers one simple plan – the iPage Essential Plan.  For $3.50 per month, hosting clients have access to a wealth of features that include unlimited hosting space, data transfer and much more.  Each account is designed to work with the complete novice or the experienced web hosting user.

The features

The unlimited features do not stop with mere web space and bandwidth.  iPage also gives its customers unlimited domains allowed with each account and unlimited MySQL databases.  Building and designing a web site with this company is a breeze with a choice of either a drag and drop site builder or a template-based site builder.  Each account is set with e-commerce solutions, marketing tools and a nice assortment of tools for sending and receiving e-mail.  One click installations of the more popular web host programs are also included with each account.

The secure

Each account with iPage is equipped with a free malware and spam scanning program protecting and securing web site data.  The team at iPage works hard to ensure firewalls are in place, databases are locked down and proper encryption tools are up to date and running smoothly.  At the first hint of any security hole, everything is locked down and dealt with immediately to prevent sensitive data from being unwillingly released to nefarious hackers.

The support

When it comes to help, iPage has it covered.  The web hosting company’s help center sports a knowledge base, FAQs, tutorials and a support ticket system.  Toll-free telephone support is offered 24

Popularity: 6% [?]

An April 2009 interactive poll by Gartner on ther usage of emergy metrics found a surprising number of IT professionals that had not yet considered the issue.

The energy, space and technology problems currently facing data center managers are set to worsen in 2010, according to Gartner, Inc. These issues will continue to plague users in 2010, said Gartner, which has framed some of these issues in a new Q&A, Critical Issues Facing Data Center Managers.

“Energy costs are the fastest-rising cost element in the data center portfolio, and yet data center managers are still not paying sufficient attention to the process of measuring, monitoring and modeling energy use in data centers,” said Rakesh Kumar, research vice president at Gartner. “They need to realize that removing a single x86 server from a data center will result in savings of more than $400 a year in energy costs alone.”

These issues will be a focus of the Gartner Data Center Conference scheduled for Dec. 1-4 at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. Data Center Knowledge readers can save $400 on their registration by using the priority code DCK when you sign up.

Original post:
Gartner: Energy Woes to Worsen in 2010

Popularity: 6% [?]

NYSE Euronext says it has already pre-sold more than 20,000 square feet of colocation space in its new data center in northern New Jersey, reflecting strong interest in the exchange’s expansion into the data center services arena. The new facility, which opens next year, is the engine driving NYSE Euronext’s transformation into a technology platform for high-speed trading.

“We really see our data centers as the future of our market,” said Stanley Young, CEO of NYSE Technologies and co-global CIO of NYSE Euronext (NYX). “To show how vital this is, we have pre-sold space in that data center a year before our matching engines come online.”

Young discussed the NYSE’s new data centers and the role they play in its business during a panel as it hosted a recent energy efficiency summit with The Green Grid. Young said the 400,000 square foot data center in Mahwah will include 170,000 square feet of raised-floor data center space.

Large Footprint for Colocation
But NYSE Euronext will require just 20 percent of that space for its own infrastructure, Young said. The rest will be available for lease to trading firms seeking high-speed access to the servers – known as “matching engines” – that execute electronic trades.

In the increasingly data-driven environment on Wall Street, access to those servers has enormous value. “For our data center space I can get a multiple of three times what normal data center vendors can get for that space due to the proximity to the matching engines,” said Young. “You can see how valuable that real estate becomes.”

The Data Center as ‘Virtual Marketplace’
That has changed NYSE Euronext’s approach to its business. “We think of our data centers as the exchanges used to think of our trading floors years ago,” said Young. “What we’re seeing with our data centers is that we’re creating that virtual marketplace.

“We’ve actually changed our model,” he continued. “We’re moving from being a place where transactions occur to being what we call a fabric player. We allow industry participants to meet virtually and we get paid for that. That model is now driving all of our thinking.”

This evolution follows decades of market changes that have altered the primacy of the NYSE’s trading floor, once the iconic image of stock trading in the U.S. The emergence of computer-driven trading venues like the NASDAQ market has created a more diverse and competitive trading ecosystem.

Building A Platform Through Acquisitions
These forces have shaped NYSE Euronext’s adoption of technology to extend its reach as the rise of electronic trading shifted a growing percentage of financial trades to loe-latency platforms. In early 2006 the NYSE acquired electronic trading platform Archipelago Holdings to become a public company, and then expanded globally with a deal to buy EuroNext in 2007. 

The NYSE built its technology warchest with acquisitions of trading platform management specialists TransactTools (2006) and Wombat Financial (2008). It is currently in the process of consolidating these tools into a single Universal Trading Platform for the exchange and its partners.

NYSE Euronext sees this infrastructure – including the data center, network fabric and trading platform -as  its competitive edge in the new Wall Street. 

“In our business model we get paid by the transaction,” Young said. “(The number of) trades executed is a big revenue driver. If our market share is under pressure, being able to extend our platform becomes an important part of replacing our revenue from lost transactions.”

The Primacy of Power
As the activity shifts from the exchange post to the matching engine, those transactions are viewed in terms that matter most in the data center – the amount of power consumed.

“Our real business is power consumption and capacity of compute,” said Young. “That is our bread and butter. We sell space in our data centers by the kilowatt. We meter people’s cabinets. The more (trading) they do in those cabinets and the hotter they run, the more we earn. The cost of power is getting down to where people are making trading decisions based on it.”

That trend drove NYSE Euronext’s decision to get into the data center business, building its own facilities in northern New Jersey and London to anchor a next-generation trading operation. “We were running out of power, and had to look at our data centers, our trading floors for the future,” said Young. “We had to make some strategic decisions to build new data centers. It was critically important.”

Building From Scratch
At the time, NYSE Euronext operated out of data centers it leased from third parties. “When we looked around, there was nothing available that met the needs of our markets and business at all, so we decided to build from scratch,” said Young. “That gave us the opportunity to look at every single piece of green technology that was available in order to build these data centers as efficiently as we could.”

Young says billions of transactions every day will flow through the New Jersey facility, known internally as a “liquidity hub” rather than a data center. “You can understand why we build these data centers to 2N+1,” he said. “Everything is double backed up, at least.”

The facility will be able to support power densities of up to 14 kilowatts per cabinet. The company is using a modular design so it can deploy new space as needed.

The NYSE is focused on managing its power, but some popular efficiency measures are non-starters for the NYSE, including virtualization. “We can’t virtualize our trading engines because they’re running full blast all the time,” said Young. “What we’re starting to look into is putting shared memory access onto a matching engine.”

Looking at RDMA as Accelerator
NYSE has also worked with Cisco Systems on an Ethernet-based trading solution using Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) accelerators to reduce latency between compute nodes. RDMA allows data to move directly from the memory of one computer into that of another without involving either one’s operating system. Young says this technology  could result in latency of 10 to 15 microseconds when used over 100 gigabit Ethernet connections.

“Our world is a world where microseconds count,” said Young. “My users measure my abilty to serve them in tens of microseconds, and if they had the technology they would get down to nanoseconds.”

Original post:
NYSE Euronext’s Future: The Data Center

Popularity: 24% [?]

The city of Prineville, Oregon is negotiating with a large, secretive company that wants to build a data center in its enterprise zone.

A “well-funded, well-known company” is negotiating to build a large data center in central Oregon, and the secrecy surrounding the negotiations has folks in the town of Prineville wondering who it might be. Officials in Prineville have been negotiating with Vitesse LLC, a company performing site selection for the unnamed end user that would build operate the data center, according to local media reports.

The site is several hours from an existing Google data center in The Dalles and a Boardman site where Amazon is said to be resuming construction on a major data center project. Like those projects, the process in Prineville has been cloaked in secrecy.

Google-Style Secrecy
“The only thing I could tell you is this is not unlike what the city of The Dalles went through when Google sited their data center in their community,” Prineville City Manager Steve Forester told the Bend Bulletin. “A very similar process. They had a code name for an LLC that did their preliminary work with the city and the county, and it turned out to be Google. And up in Moses Lake, Washington — where they have several of these things — same pattern.” Local economic development officials told the paper that a non-disclosure agreement prevents them from discussing the project.

Oregon business registration records indicate that Vitesse LLC was registered Oct 21 and shares a San Francisco address with the law firm Paul, Hastings, Janofksy & Walker. Attorneys with Paul, Hastings have data center site acquisition experience, including past engagements with large financial companies and Internet companies.

The proposed facility would be located near the Prineville Airport in an enterprise zone, which allows the city to waive property taxes for eligible projects. Tomorrow the Prineville City Council is scheduled to consider selling a 1-acre piece of property to Vitesse for $50,000, annex two adjacent properties to the city and approve a 15-year property tax exemption for the company that would operate the data center.

Oregon’s Lure for Data Centers
The project is the latest indicator of the growing appeal of the northwest as a destination for companies seeking the lowest operating costs for their data centers. The region’s abundant supply of affordable hydro power is a major factor in its appeal, as are tax incentives like the tax exemption being discussed in Prineville.

Who is the mystery user? The existing Google and Amazon projects in Oregon would seem to rule them out. But one possibility is Yahoo, which has publicly discussed the possibility of shifting some of its data center development to Oregon in the wake of a tax dispute with officials in Washington state, where the company built a large data center in Quincy.

Washington Repeals Tax Break
In late 2007 Washington State ruled that data centers aren’t manufacturers and were no longer covered by a state sales tax break for manufacturing enterprises, and thus must pay a 7.9 percent tax on data center construction and equipment. This prompted protests from Microsoft and Yahoo, who said they had relied upon the tax break in their decision to build facilities in Quincy.

In a letter to legislators, Yahoo co-founder David Filo said the withdrawal of the sales tax incentive “swings the decision strongly in favor of freezing construction in Washington, and building instead in Oregon (which has no sales tax), as some of our competitors are already doing.”

Microsoft subsequently migrated its Windows Azure cloud computing infrastructure from its data center in Quincy to another Microsoft facility in San Antonio.

Photo of Prineville, Oregon from wka via Flickr.

Original post:
Company X Plans Oregon Data Center

Popularity: 12% [?]