Blogs Reflection on 2009
What is it they say about time flying when your having fun? I was just reminded that it’s been 3 months since my last blog post. Feels like a New Years’ resolution coming my way!!
Looking back on 2009, it’s hard to believe all that we were able to achieve with our service, and more importantly, what we have been able to deliver to our customers.
Some of the high points for me include:
The reception of our eBook, “Datacenter of the Future ”.
Although we took a couple of months’ break from publishing the rest of the book, we plan to kick this back up in 2010. The "Datacenter of the Future " eBook reached thousands of readers — many of whom provided feedback on both the content and future chapters. We were fortunate to be joined by several industry luminaries including Ron Gula, CEO of Tenable Network Security and one of the industry leaders in IT security and compliance; Javier Soltero, CEO of Hyperic who really revolutionized Open Source Monitoring and Management solutions - now becoming even more important in the cloud era.
Launch of several tools to help customers select hosting services. The Carpathia ColoConfigurator™ – “C3” was a great example of offering customers the opportunity to select what they needed. C3 quickly captures info from customers looking to colocate infrastructure into our datacenters. Moreover, it’s really a methodology aligned to ITIL V3 that enables a smooth transition from an existing hosting or corporate IT infrastructure to Carpathia. We have a similar internal tool we use to help customers with cloud computing scenarios that we will also be web enabling in 2010.
Carpathia InstantOn™ cloud computing platform . Close to six months of beta testing and open collaboration with our customers allowed us to launch the Carpathia InstantOn cloud computing platform in June. Seems like an eternity now. InstantOn pioneered two key concepts in cloud technology/service. Enterprise/Federal customers are looking for cloud to be a first class citizen when it comes to management, security and compliance, and cloud can not be mutually exclusive with traditional IT. Mixing and matching cloud and dedicated infrastructure — be it storage, network or servers — provides customers with the solutions they need. To date, a majority of our cloud customers are meshed with other Carpathia infrastructure services such as colocation and managed. Our cloud is also deployed in multiple “cells” in our datacenters with key hubs in northern Virginia and Arizona.
Industry events and interviews. This year has been our busiest ever with industry events. I’ve spoken or been on panels at a number of events during the year on all aspects of the datacenter industry. I’ve also spent some quality time discussing and debating emerging technologies with various analysts. Carpathia Hosting has received a significant amount of coverage from all the major analysts covering the hosting space. We look forward to continuing theses discussions in 2010 and being open to question some of the group think around cloud and emerging technologies.
Building relationships with our partners. It certainly takes a village to deliver IT services, and Carpathia has worked hard during the past year to extend relationships with our infrastructure partners. Working closely with Citrix in the cloud computing space, we have extended our Xen-based cloud platform to meet the demands of enterprise customers, added Netscaler products to our portfolio of both cloud and dedicated solutions, and are very proud to be an active part of the Xen community. In the cloud storage space, we successfully deployed the ParaScale platform, extending it to multiple datacenters and enabling standards based cloud storage to many enterprise and federal customers. Most recently, we announced the integration of HighWinds CDN services into our portfolio (both cloud and dedicated). Now customers can directly deliver content from our cloud storage and retire the concept of CDNs requiring “origin servers”.
Acquisition of ServerVault . One of the most exciting announcements of the year was the coming together of Carpathia Hosting and ServerVault – both industry veteran companies. This is one of those acquisitions where I can honestly say that 1 + 1 = 3. We already have seen much success with our portfolio-based approach to services, allowing Carpathia the flexibility to meet the needs of any customer, even those with the most stringent security, privacy and compliance requirements in both the enterprise and federal sectors.
1% of the internet. Back in October, Arbor Networks released a groundbreaking report, examining 256 exabytes of Internet traffic to produce a report - a “state of the union” - for the Internet. What I found most interesting is the contrast from the Internet of just 5 years ago. Carpathia was highlighted in that report as approaching 0.8% of the Internet’s weighted traffic. To put in context, Google is 5%. We are looking forward to seeing the next report, as we have continued to add more capacity to deliver massive amounts of high quality bandwidth to an ever-growing list of content providers, backup providers and other high bandwidth customers.
We all caught our breath over the holiday season and already executing our plans for 2010. We have a lot of very exciting things to share. Watch this space…
Tags: carpathia hosting, Cloud Computing, Colocation tool, Datacenter of the future, highwinds, parascale
