The Cloud CTO Blog

VISI Eden Prairie DC animation

cloudcto — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 22:16:18 +0000

Here’s a cool new animation of VISI’s new Eden Prairie data center facility.

Certified Tier III Data centers are rare

cloudcto — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 00:14:26 +0000

I attended the annual CIO Panel organized by the Minnesota High Tech Association this morning. The CIO Panel attracts CIO’s and technical leaders from a broad array of industries around the Twin Cities area. I had the opportunity to welcome the participants at the event because VISI was the official sponsor. During my speech we played a new 3-D animated video showing the key design elements of our new Tier III Eden Prairie, MN data center facility.

Later in the day I participated in a webinar sponsored by VISI and the Uptime Institute titled “Why Data Center Tiers Matter”. I learned some interesting facts about the Uptime Institute’s data center certification process that I hadn’t heard before. Did you know that there are currently less than 50 Tier III certified data centers in the world? And less than 6 Tier IV data centers?

VISI is the first service provider to build a certified Tier III data center in the state of Minnesota. We are not the first company to build a Tier III data center in the state. A few companies (Target, United Health Group) have built Tier III data centers for their own private use. But VISI’s data center was built for “public” consumption. If you are willing to pay the price you can now lease a slice of a Tier III data center in Minnesota.

Tier III data centers matter to businesses that have to be running 24×7 with almost zero downtime. These businesses can’t afford to shutdown their services for maintenance or facility upgrades. Tier III data centers are 2-3 times more expensive to build than Tier II facilities due to all the redundant infrastructure involved.

Minnov8 podcast tomorrow

cloudcto — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 23:47:53 +0000

I’m participating on a podcast with the Minnov8 guys tomorrow morning… talking about our new Tier3 data center and possibly cloudy stuff.

Update: Here’s the podcast link

Fun with QR Codes

cloudcto — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 02:17:35 +0000

I was playing around with QR codes a bit and managed to create this code with the word “cloud” embedded into it. Apparently these codes have strong enough error-correction to counteract minor image manipulation.

I had never even heard of these codes until a few months ago when I read an article about them in one of the local newspapers. Apparently they are huge in Japan but really haven’t caught on in a big way in other parts of the world. Personally I can’t even take advantage of this technology yet since my phone (Blackberry 8830) doesn’t sport a camera.

Here’s another QR code I created with a scuba diving flag in the middle. I’m tempted to make some stickers out of this and hand them out at the upcoming scuba show in the Twin Cities. Again note how the introduction of the logo does not impact the readability of the QR code due to the error correction algorithm.

I used software from QuickMark to validate these codes using the embedded video camera on my Dell laptop.

Cloud breakfast presentation

cloudcto — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 23:21:16 +0000

I teamed up with Paul Selway from Redpath Consulting Group recently to co-present a session on cloud computing to several dozen eager participants in Bloomington. Loaded up on eggs, bacon, and coffee we covered a wide variety of IT strategy related to cloud computing. I started with the now-ubiquitous explanation of cloud computing, its characteristics, business models, and deployment models. Paul talked about how to perform an IT assessment and identify which applications and services an enterprise can move to the cloud. I appreciate the positive feedback from all the participants at the event!

My, that’s a big generator you have

cloudcto — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 00:18:55 +0000

I thought this was a cool video of the new 3 MW Caterpillar C175 generators being installed at our new Eden Prairie data center. These units are absolutely massive and it is hard to appreciate their scale until you are standing next to them. I was told that these are some of the biggest CAT generators installed in Minnesota. We currently have two of these gensets installed and will add a couple more in the future.

New VISI Data Center awarded Tier III

cloudcto — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 18:07:16 +0000

I was pretty excited to learn that the new VISI data center we are building in Eden Prairie, MN recently received Tier-3 Design Certification from the Uptime Institute. That’s a really big deal because to my knowledge no other commercial data center facility in this region has received a Tier-3 certification. Sure, there are a couple other data center providers who say their facilities meet Tier-3 requirements. But the fact is that none of their data centers have been independently audited. We spent a lot of time and effort to ensure our new facility would meet Tier-3 requirements. And we had the luxury (and capital) to build toward these requirements from day one.

Congrats Ralph!

cloudcto — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 15:25:06 +0000

I just learned this morning that my good friend, and co-worker, Ralph Awad was awarded a Tekne Award for “Next Generation Technology Leader” by the Minnesota High Tech Association. Congratulations Ralph! The awards committee certainly rewarded an outstanding candidate. Ralph was the first employee I hired many years ago after starting Digital North. I’ve had the privilege of watching his technology and leadership skills grow over the years. I know he is a strong contributor to non-profit organizations in his community. He also recently guided me safely in-and-out of Egypt — for which my family is forever thankful.

Finance & Commerce Interview

cloudcto — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 01:14:21 +0000

I was recently interviewed by Elizabeth Millard from Finance & Commerce magazine regarding VISI’s ReliaCloud platform. You can find a copy of the interview at this link. I had a really good conversation with Elizabeth and I’m glad the article was eventually published!

Mezeo storage in the house

cloudcto — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 21:44:12 +0000

After Parascale blew up this past Summer we had to scramble to find a new cloud storage vendor. What we really liked about Parascale was that they combined both the front-end storage access and the back-end storage management — and they provided both at a very inexpensive price. Maybe that was their undoing.

We quickly surveyed the landscape of cloud storage vendors and settled on Mezeo. I think Mezeo is an easy choice given their adoption within the service provider market place, their technology maturity, and the 3rd-party ecosystem forming around their technology.

Our development team was able to quickly modify our ReliaCloud customer portal to support the Mezeo storage API. And our operations team was able to transition existing customer data from Parascale to Mezeo. So all-in-all it was a pretty seamless transition for our customers.