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Online auction site eBay has chosen a suburb of Salt Lake City as the site for a $334 million data center project. The company said yesterday that it has purchased land in South Jordan, Utah in the Daybreak Commerce Park, not far from where Oracle Corp. (ORCL) is building a huge data center.

The state Office of Economic Development offered eBay $27.3 million in tax incentives over 10 years to build the facility in Utah, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. The data center is expected to create about 50 jobs with wages averaging $49,200 a year, about 50 percent above the Salt Lake County annual median wage.

The facility, which could be as large as 250,000 square feet, would continue a regional expansion that has seen eBay acquire a large data center in Phoenix and expand its facility in Denver.

Utah is not known for housing huge data centers, but has become home to a growing number of web hosts and enterprise data centers, including facilities for Center 7, ViaWest, WestHost and TierFour (UVNet) are among the companies that have built or acquired data centers in Utah in the past several years.   The company cited the location’s low exposure to natural disasters as an important factor in its selection of the 135,000 square foot building.

A 2007 study by the Kauffman Foundation found that Utah led the nation in “economic dynamism” based on a strong concentration of fast-growing technology startups.

What region do you feel is the new Silicon Valley?

     In 1990, the debate among business leaders, academics, economists, and others, was greatly enhanced by the publication of an article entitled, “The Core Competence of the Corporation,” by C.K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel. They coined the term “core competency” to describe competitive advantage of leveraging the collective knowledge, experience, and skills of a firm’s product lines.
     So why are Solution Providers not feeling the crunch as bad? One word… Outsourcing.
     Technology is not the core focus of every business, but every business needs technology. Most of the time it takes more than one person to manage a company’s technology infrastructure. Who manages Exchange? Which person makes sure that backups are done correctly? And if you get the dreaded blue screen, who will fix it?
     With Outsourcing you hire a company to handle these business needs. This cuts overhead and allows your staff to focus on what is important - Your business.
     Has your company considered outsourcing your technology needs? If so, what decision did you make and how did you arrive at your conclusion?

Data Centers are a hot topic these days.  No matter where you look, this once obscure aspect of infrastructure is getting a lot of attention.  For years, there have been cost pressures on IT operations and this, when the need for modern capacity is greater than ever, has thrust data centers into the spotlight.

Server and rack density continues to rise, placing DC professionals and businesses in tighter and tougher situations while they struggle to manage their IT environments.  And now hyper-scale cloud infrastructure is taking traditional technologies to limits never explored before and focusing the imagination of the IT industry on new possibilities.

Microsoft, has focused a lot of thought and research around how to best operate and maintain their global infrastructure.  They believe it is one of the most revolutionary changes to happen to data centers in the last 30 years.

Generation 4 modular data centers will take the flexibility of containerized servers—like those in Microsoft’s Chicago data center—and apply it across the entire facility.

So what is modular?  Think of it like “building blocks”, where the data center will be composed of modular units of prefabricated mechanical, electrical, security components, etc., in addition to containerized servers. 

Was there a key driver for the Generation 4 Data Center?  If you were to summarize the Gen 4 design into a single sentence it would be something like this: “A highly modular, scalable, efficient, just-in-time data center capacity program that can be delivered anywhere in the world very quickly and cheaply, while allowing for continued growth as required.”

Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it?  Well, keep in mind that these concepts have been in initial development and prototyping for over a year and are based on cumulative knowledge of previous facility generations and the advances we have made since we began our investments in earnest on this new design.

One of the biggest challenges at Microsoft is the ‘Goldilock’s Problem’.  The worst thing you can do in delivering facilities for the business is not have enough capacity online, thus limiting the growth of products and services.  The second worst thing you can do in delivering facilities for the business is to have too much capacity online.  This has led to a focus on smart, intelligent growth for the business — refining our overall demand picture.  The capital dollars of investment are too large to make without long term planning.

As Microsoft struggled to master these interesting challenges, they had to ensure that their technological plan also included solutions for the business and operational challenges we faced as well.

From a configuration, construct-ability and time to market perspective, the primary goals and objectives are to modularize the whole data center.  This means using the same kind of parts in pre-manufactured modules, the ability to use containers, skids, or rack-based deployments and the ability to tailor the Redundancy and Reliability requirements to the application at a very specific level.

Some applications can run with N-level redundancy in the infrastructure, others require a little more infrastructure for support.  Understanding this concept will allow datacenters to reduce capital costs by 20%-40% or greater depending upon class.

For example, non-critical or geo redundant applications have low hardware reliability requirements on a location basis.  Applications that demand higher level of redundancy or temperature control will use configurations of Gen 4 to meet those needs, however, they will also cost more (but still less than traditional data centers).

Since the entire platform requires pre-manufacture of its core components, on-site construction costs are lowered.  From a total energy perspective not only will we have remarkable PUE values, but the total cost of energy going into the facility will be greatly reduced as well.

More than that, Microsoft is on a mission to reduce the overall amount of copper and water used in these facilities.  They have talked openly and publicly about building chiller-less data centers and running their facilities using aggressive outside economization.

For example, all modules in Gen 4 will have common interfaces clearly defined by our specs and any vendor that meets these specifications will be able to plug into our infrastructure. 

These facilities are considered two leading industry examples, based on their energy efficiency and ability to run and operate at new levels of scale and performance by leveraging clean hydro power (Quincy) and recycled waste water (San Antonio) to cool the facility during peak cooling months.

The key concepts for the Gen 3 design are increased modularity and greater concentration around energy efficiency and scale.  The Gen 3 facility will be best represented by the Chicago, Illinois facility currently under construction.  This facility will seem very foreign compared to the traditional data center concepts most of the industry is comfortable with.  In fact, if you ever sit around in our container hanger in Chicago it will look incredibly different from a traditional raised-floor data center.

Microsoft anticipates this modularization will drive huge efficiencies in terms of cost and operations for our business.  This will also introduce significant changes in the environmental systems used to run their facilities.  These concepts and processes (where applicable) will help gain even greater efficiencies in the existing footprint, allowing us to further maximize infrastructure investments.

This is definitely a journey, not a destination industry.  In fact, the Generation 4 design has been under heavy engineering for viability and cost for over a year.

While the demand of our commercial growth required Microsoft to make investments as we grew, they treated each step in the learning as a process for further innovation in data centers.

According to the online survey, 67% of respondents reported switching companies because of poor customer service, compared with 59% last year.  U.S. respondents were even more service sensitive, with 73% reporting that they switched companies owing to poor customer service, compared with 47% switching over lower prices.

Now, more than ever, is the time to challenge traditional practices.  In particular, organizations need to segment their customers.  That makes segmenting customers and understanding their touch-points with the business particularly important.

More survey results Other interesting results from Accenture’s survey include: U.S. respondents were also the least likely to believe the use of technology has improved customer service significantly in the past five years.  Consumers in the United States were just as likely to consider customer service as price when choosing a new provider, after switching from an established one.

Finally, organizations need to establish their customer service baseline and the diversity of their customer base.

What is the driving factor in how you spend your money, customer service or price?

Facebook Connect went live last Thursday and may usher in a new way to browse and interact with the Web. The program enhances the connectivity among the social network, its users and the Web pages users visit.

In addition, Facebook shrewdly increases ad revenue for itself and partners while cementing its reputation as the social network of choice for a long time. It does all of that seamlessly while appealing to our very basic urge to show and tell. And that is the distilled brilliance of Facebook Connect: It is the show and tell of the Internet age.

The idea behind Facebook Connect is deceptively simple.
Web sites such as Hulu.com, Citysearch, Digg and others that partner with clan Zuckerberg offer Web surfers the ability to log onto their site with existing Facebook information and share interesting tidbits with friends through their news feed. The content on those partner sites-the videos on Hulu or the stories you vote for on Digg-are the arrowheads, found frogs and shiny rocks of the Web.

As things are now, most Web sites are like a traditional small classroom. Readers who land on the site add a thought to the string of comments below an article and, generally, that’s as far as the social interaction reaches. Facebook’s “classroom” has more than 130 million students, enormously expanding the reach of any shared item.

Facebook Connect is a single sign-on service that rolls all that prep time into one service: See something on the Web, log in with Facebook credentials and share with all of your Facebook friends.

Partner sites seem to be excited to join Facebook Connect because it will bring them enhanced visibility and increased page views, resulting in more money.

Facebook isn’t exempt from those same restrictions, but as people share more through Facebook Connect and interact with those items, a ripple effect will take place. When a friend comments on someone else’s tagged photo in Facebook, that information shows up in your news feed. If individuals form single strands of thread in the Web, the addition of Web sites will reinforce those strands in steel.

Connect essentially turns partner Web sites into active participants on the social network.

According to a variety of online sources, unsolicited email - otherwise know as spam, is responsible for up to 90 percent of all email messages sent and received. A pair of high profile spam lawsuits and prosecutions are shining a spotlight on the tactics used by spammers and the efforts of legitimate email providers to thwart them.

In the first case at hand, a Detroit man is accused of fraud and money laundering charges after he admitted to earning over $3 million by sending millions of unsolicited email messages to inflate the price of certain Chinese stocks and then selling the stacks at a profit.

Mr. Ralsky is accused of using not only illegal email spamming means such as botnets, but also many legal means of tricking email recipients such as: placing false and misleading headers in the email messages, using proxy computers to disguise the email’s source, and using falsely registered domain names to send spam - thereby implying that the emails were legitimate.

The second case involves an International spamming ring that the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Bureau of Investigation recently announced was considered to be the world’s largest spam operation.

According to published reports, The Federal Trade Commission filed a temporary restraining order and complaint against two defendants in the United States District Court of the Northern District of Illinois for ”deceptively marketing a variety of products through spam messages, including a male-enhancement pill, prescription drugs and a weight-loss pill”.

How can you prevent spam??? Use a good spam filter, either software or hardware based. Protect your e-mail address by not providing an email address on any user forums or other online community sites. Also, make sure your antivirus and antispam software is up to date and kept current. You should also have an email package which includes spam and virus filtering from your provider, so that you never end up getting spam in the first place.

For unwanted e-mails from known contacts, most e-mail clients support blacklisting. This will allow you to add the sender’s address to a list and will stop you receiving any e-mail from them. Configure your mail client and spam service provider with this information so that the message gets deleted in your inbox or before it reaches your inbox.

Over the past year, plenty of signs have emerged that indicate the face of Web hosting is already starting to stretch and shift in new directions. No, the new winds of change include acquisitions of companies that deliver more than just additional hosting customers, a fresh generation of startups that look nothing like your father’s Web hosting company, and experiments with innovative ways to sell hosting to the next wave of customers.

Of course, there’s still plenty of activity in the garden-variety host-to-host acquisition arena, too: 2001 - 2002 saw more M&A headlines than either of the previous two years, and 2003 is showing all signs of that trend continuing. The future of SME hosting gets even more interesting when you factor in the small-business hosting forays of ‘Net service providers like Yahoo!

That explains the growing number of hosting providers that are expanding their services, implementing automation tools, adding site-design tools or wizards, and making e-commerce a standard offering, even with entry-level plans.

If your web site isn’t being served up every single time a visitor requests it why do you have a web site?

     On this Thanksgiving Eve, the Dolphini team would like to wish all of our friends, twitter followers and clients, a very happy Thanksgiving.

   We are thankful for each and every one of you.  Without you, Dolphini would not be what it is today.  We are also thankful for our great, dedicated teammates - who work hard to keep our network up, secure and our clients happy.  Our teammates, make Dolphini who we are - a great datacenter, and a great place to come to work everyday. 

     As you travel this holiday season to see your loved ones, please practice safe driving and we wish blessings on you all.

What are you thankful for???

     When was the last time that, the “Daddy’s” of this world, invited you to tour their datacenter? My guess is probably never. The Dolphini team is always proud to show off our state-of-the-art local datacenter in Cummins Station.

     There is something to be said about a hosting company that has a REAL person answer the phone, again when was the last time you called just about any company and had a LIVE person answer? That is probably few and far between. Hopefully the friendly voice of our Office Goddess, Liz Mackender, makes you smile when she answers the phone. Occasionally you will get our CEO, Michael Krause, answering the phones just the same.

      So if you want to come to Dolphini, see an awesome datacenter, with Dell Poweredge servers, and CISCO routers to get your “Geek-on” – feel free! We would love to have you and you can actually see where your website is hosted and know the people that are behind your business everyday!

Choosing a web host for your business is a very important decision.  Most people take it for granted, but it is much more than uploading some files to the Internet.  What do you really need to know about where your website is hosted?

Part 1:  My Mother Always Told Me to Share

            Are you on a shared server or are you on a dedicated server?  Shared hosting is an affordable way to host your website; you don’t have to worry about maintaining a server, and you have a cPanel interface to make managing your website simple and fast. 

           The downside to shared hosting is sharing resources of a server with other sites.  If one site gets a sudden burst of activity, then the other sites could slow down or even worse, go down altogether.  The great thing about Dolphini Shared Hosting is that we do not over-provision our servers like the “Daddy’s” of the world.  As a result, websites have great speed as well as ample disk space with minimal downtime.



            Dedicated servers are great for locking down a server for security purposes.  If a business requires a secure connection, (i.e. a bank, hospital), then a dedicated server is the only choice.

Dedicated servers are a perfect fit if there will heavy bandwidth usage as well as storage space.  This will ensure there are no limitations with sharing resources found in a shared-hosting environment.  There is also the benefit of the Dolphini team maintaining the server which is a more cost effective solution for most small businesses.

            To share, or not to share?  That is the question.  Take a look at your business and where you want to store your intellectual property.  Do you need the resources of your own server or do you have a small brochure site that doesn’t want the overhead of a dedicated server, but wants reliable hosting?  These are just a few questions that you need to answer when looking for hosting, we will be answering more of your hosting questions in future blog posts - what are your questions that you have always wanted answered????