Jon Greaves’ Blog

Its been a month since my last post, and in all honesty I’m not sure where the time has gone!  Carpathia Hosting has had one of its busiest months ever - both in terms of bringing on board new customers, and sponsoring and  attending several industry events.

On the new customer front, we are having tremendous success with our AlwaysOn/InstantOn platform allowing customers to mix and match cloud and dedicated infrastructure.  Several of our competitors are now also jumping on the bandwagon with their own versions of the story.  What is it they say about “imitation being the sincerest form of flattery?”.  The good news is, I believe customers are now starting to seriously consider the monetary value of cloud solutions and not being blinded by the “10cents a CPU hour” message.  The customers who are embracing these kinds of solutions also tend to be more “enterprise”-centric vs. developer solutions which again, fits very well with the key values Carpathia Hosting offers its customers.

One such customer asked if we would be willing to load test their AlwaysOn/InstantOn infrastructure with our cloud solution.  For this customer, we created a dynamically scalable tool based on jmeter that adds new remote servers based on the number of connections requested.  It’s proven to be a very effective solution that we will productize over the coming weeks to offer to other customers.  In this case, cloud became a traffic generator for managed infrastructure.

I also had the privilege of participating on a panel at Tier1’s  Datacenter Transformation Summit titled “Datacenter Performance: Metrics, Money, and More…”.  I was joined on stage with Norm Laudermilch from Terremark and Rick Tinucci from the Bick Group.  We had a lively discussion on everything from the value of PUE and other datacenter metrics to UPS vs. Fly Wheel.  I held somewhat of a contrarian view in that we believe effective datacenter management is more about the infrastructure in the datacenter vs. the “mud hut”.  So kudos to Tier1 for pulling together such a great event.  We are looking forward to the next event in the fall.

Last Tuesday, Carpathia Hosting sponsored a networking mixer at eCitie Restaurant, followed by an Open House event at the Blue Ridge datacenter in Harrisonburg, VA on Thursday.  This was a great chance to meet several hundred customers, partners and prospects and share the Carpathia Hosting story and strategy.  We have a similar event coming up in Phoenix in a couple of weeks.

The stage is being set for a very interesting summer.