As states on the US East Coast are struggling with the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, so are multiple data center operators in the affected areas. We have tried to gather an overview of some of the data centers that are affected by the power outages and flooding below.

• Equinix experienced generator failures multiple times, at their NY9 data center on 111 8th Avenue. Apart from that they have experienced water leaks in New York and Washington data centers, which affected a customer in one of their NY data centers.
• XO Communications also suffered power loss at 111 8th Avenue according to media.
• Cogent had a generator failure at their 33 Whitehall St data center in New York.
• Datagram has a data center in the same building at 33 Whitehall St, that was also knocked offline due to the fuel tanks and electric systems in the basement being under water.
• Atlantic Metro experienced power outages in multiple of their data centers in the area. Including their LGA4 data center on 121 Varick St. in NY and LGA1 data center on 325 Hudson St. in NY.
• Internap lost power to their data center at 75 Broad St. (NY), as a result of the fuel tank and pumps being flooded and causing their generators to run out of fuel.
• Peer 1 also encountered problems at their 75 Broad St. (NY) data center, forcing them to perform controlled shutdown on some of their customers due to temperature problems. Lack of fuel almost forced them to do a complete shutdown, but 30+ customers helping Peer 1 staff haul fuel up to 17th floor in buckets saved them. What a story!
• Zayo Group (zColo) experienced a temperature rise to 100 degrees fahrenheit in their data center at 111 8th Avenue, after being forced to shut down their cooling due to generator problems.
• Telx asked their customers at their 111 8th Avenue data center (NYC2) to shut down equipment that was not essential to conserve fuel for the generators.
• Probably many more, got any info to share? Feel free to drop a comment or write us an e-mail.

Facing natural hazards like Hurricane Sandy, data center operators are normally very well prepared by going through their emergency procedures, making sure their diesel tanks are filled up and by having staff available onsite or nearby. As you can see from the above, not all providers were well enough prepared or were affected by failing equipmentthat did not perform as intended.

While some of these were just hit by bad luck, there are also some serious issues to consider once the dust settles. Fuel tanks and electrical equipment in basement level, that cannot be utilized upon flooding? That seems like a no-go in data center design. Likewise not having diesel enough onsite prior to an expected hurricane of this magnitude? That is just bad preparation.

We wish the best of luck to data center operators and customers, as well as all the other people affected by this tragedy.

In October 2007 we launched Data Center Map, which means that this month it is our five year birthday!
A lot have happened since, so today we are taking a quick trip down memory lane with some statistics.

Back when we started out, we covered about 500 colocation and wholesale data centers from around 30 countries.
Today we cover 2700+ facilities from around 90 countries, growing with new locations every week. Apart from that we have also expanded our scope of services, by covering the industry with detailed profiles and pop lists of 900+ carriers, 150+ internet exchange points and 150+ cloud service providers. On a good month we handle about 200,000 page views and get 20+ new providers sign up to promote their services via our site. On top of that we get 400+ leads via our quote service, that help clients receive quotes from potential providers from all over the world.

Five years ago it could be a challenge finding a suitable data center, especially in a foreign market with no local insight, which we believe we have changed. We hope that you at some point during the last five years, have found our services helpful in your daily work – whether you were looking for services, looking to promote your company or looking to get insight in to the industry.

We would like to thank you all for five years with great support, feedback and a lot of great suggestions. Feel free to get in touch, if you have any ideas that could improve our service, your daily tasks and make the next five years even better!
Either way, we look forward to another 5!

Traditionally the CDN (Content Delivery Network) market has been dominated by a few key players, such as Akamai, Limelight, Level 3, EdgeCast and Highwinds, and likewise the number of companies using CDN’s has been pretty limited as well. The reason for this is that the barriers of entry have been very high, as providers wanting to get their share of the $2.6 billion CDN market would have to establish many pops worldwide as well as develop their own software to support the CDN.

However in recent years the adoption of CDN has gone up, due to cost going down and more and more companies reselling services from the large CDN networks. This has led to a lot of growth in the CDN market, which has spawned some very interesting startups that are trying to evolve and commodify the CDN industry. By removing the large barriers of entry that have traditionally been in this part of our industry, they are opening up the game to even small providers. In this post, I will be looking at some of these and the options available for providers to get involved and get their share of the CDN market:

• OnApp CDN
  OnApp is traditionally known for its cloud platform, but in 2011 they acquired the CDN startup Aflexi. They have since used Aflexis platform as a base for creating the OnApp CDN Federation, which combined with OnApp CDN Stack and OnApp CDNaaS makes up their CDN solution for hosting providers.
  
  The CDN Federation is basically a marketplace, where providers can sell excess capacity at whatever GB price they wish to charge, and likewise they can buy capacity from other providers without any commitment – and thereby build up a CDN with a large amount of pops, without having to invest in infrastructure or expensive software. The CDN Stack is the edge server software, that needs to be set up on the locations you would like to establish your own pop, and the CDNaaS (CDN as a Service) is an anycast dns service used to distribute the traffic between the pops.
   
• XDN, Xchange Delivery Network
  XDN was originally known as 3Crowd, and is an offering based on their two components CrowdDirector and CrowdCache. CrowdDirector is XDN’s intelligent anycast DNS load balancing service that is used to distribute traffic among the edge nodes, which are running the CrowdCache software. CrowdDirector has some very advanced filtering capabilities, enabling you to set up advanced rule sets based on criteria such as IP, AS number, time of day, geographic location the request was from etc. to get the most optimal out of your pops.
  
  Like OnApps CDN Federation, XDN is also based on the federation concept and thereby enable you to sell your excess capacity – either by gb accounting or 95-percentile mbps accounting.
   
• EdgeCast Licensed Carrier CDN
  As one of the old and dominant CDN providers, EdgeCast started offering a licensed version of their CDN software some time ago. The licensed version is aimed at carriers and other telco providers with a large network presence, and hence is targeted at larger enterprises rather than small and medium sized hosting providers. The licensed version is offered both as a managed service and as a licensed version where the customer manages the software.
  
  The introduction of the term “federation” has not gone by EdgeCast either, who recently announced that they have also established a federation where their carriers can buy and sell capacity from each other.
   
• Limelight Deploy
  Limelight is another traditional CDN provider, that has realized the potential in supporting other providers who wish to enter the growing CDN market.  Therefore they recently launched Limelight Deploy, a managed CDN solution. There is limited information available on Limelights website, but based on what I could find it seems like the solution can utilize the carriers own network as well as Limelights existing. Limelight have chosen not to go the federation way though, but apparently it is still possible for customers to exchange capacity if they wish to.
   
• Highwinds Licensed/Federated CDN
  Much like for example EdgeCast, Highwinds are offering their software as a licensed CDN solution, complimented by the ability to exchange traffic with Highwinds own CDN network and other members of their federation. Likewise the software is also offered both as a managed and a licensed model.

There are of course other solutions out there, as well as the Do It Your Self approach with for example BIND DNS, GeoIP and Ngihnx, but the purpose of this post is just to give some insight to some of the most common options available. Which model is the right obviously depend on a number of factors, including what kind of content you are looking to deliver (http push/pull, video streaming etc.).

In addition to the CDN software solutions available, there is of course also the option to resell capacity from an existing CDN vendor without utilizing your own infrastructure. However, the federation approach that in addition to selling CDN, also gives you the option to monetize spare network capacity is really appealing.

Choosing a data center to host your critical services and data in is a matter of trust, which is why the choice often relies on the providers references and recommendations from other customers. To make the decision process easier, we have now added a new feature to the site, allowing users to read and post data center reviews.

Users are now able to give a rating of 1-5 stars, depending on how positive/negative their experience is, along with some comments about the data center. The review, rating and name of the author will afterwards be publicly available together with a calculated average of all the reviews the data center has received, which will help new potential customers get a sense of what experience other customers have with the data center.

In addition to being a great asset for customers looking for a data center, it is also a valuable tool for the providers. Having a lot of positive independent reviews will build trust around their brand and support the providers online reputation, by using the existing customers as ambassadors.

For now the reviews are listed as a new tab under the data center profiles (example), but if the feature becomes popular we intend on integrating the ratings from the reviews other places on the site as well. So if you are a data center provider and believe that you have satisfied customers, then hurry up and get them to post a review about you on Data Center Map.

Following the launch of our cloud server map two months ago, covering IaaS offerings from service providers, it has been interesting to track which software the various providers are using for managing their clouds, what hypervisors they are running, what kind of storage they use, which features they support etc.

While many are using custom platforms, where they have written their own code to manage their virtual servers, a lot are using already available frameworks or turnkey solutions to power their cloud offerings. If you are looking to start offering cloud services there is a jungle of different platforms available, both commercial and open source, that can either help you get started or deliver you a complete solution tailored to fit your exact needs.

The platforms available are developed with different feature sets and with different target groups in mind, so finding the right one for your needs can be a challenging task. Due to the many providers who are using our service, and the fact that many of them are realizing the need to get started with cloud services, we have compiled a list of some of the various platforms below with a few notes about each of them:

• Abiquo
  Supporting VMware ESX, ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer / Xen, Virtual Box and KVM, Abiquo supports all the common virtualization engines. Designed for multi-tenancy and available in both a free community edition and an enterprise edition with different features.
   
• CA 3Tera AppLogic
  Commercial platform from 3Tera based on Xen, designed for commodity hardware without the need for a SAN due to its integrated distributed storage solution. Web interface, API and resource metering is included in the AppLogic turnkey solution.
   
• Cloud.com CloudStack
  Designed for multi-tenant solutions with support for Xenserver, VM and VMware vSphere. Cloud.com’s CloudStack supports billing/metering, web interface, APIs based on existing standards and virtual networking with segmentation of network traffic into VLANs.
   
• Convirture ConVirt
  Available in an open source and commercial version, both with support for thin provisioning, template library, live migration while only the commercial version support high availability, backup functionality, VLAN integration and resource limiting.
   
• ElasticStack
  The ElasticStack platform is offered by cloud provider ElasticHosts, designed specially for service providers with billing, web administration and API. Removes the need for a SAN, but utilizing storage on the local hypervisor nodes.
   
• Enomaly Elastic Computing Platform (ECP)
  Designed for service providers with automation in mind, with the ability to integrate with existing billing systems via Enomalys API. Includes self-service web interface and support for the most common hypervisors, as well as a special feature that enables Enomaly providers to sell spare capacity via their SpotCloud platform.
   
• Eucalyptus
  Eucalyptus is an open source cloud platform, available with commercial support, that was originally started as a university project but since commercialized. Designed to be hypervisor agnostic and compatible with the widely used EC2 API.
   
• Flexiant Extility
  Extility was created by cloud provider Flexiant to manage entire virtual data centers, and provides a turnkey cloud solution aimed at service providers with full API as well as an extensive web based control panel with integrated billing. In addition a commodity based SAN solution called Flexisan can also be provided to remove the need for enterprise storage.
   
• HP CloudSystem
  An enterprise oriented commercial solution from HP, designed for both private, public and hybrid clouds. Designed with automation in mind and includes a self-service portal with built in service catalog with support for predefined templates.
   
• IBM CloudBurst
  IBM CloudBurst is an enterprise targeted product providing resource monitoring and cost management through a self service portal with built in service catalog and prepackaged templates.
   
• Incontinuum CloudController
  Commercial solution from the Dutch company InContinuum Software, that automates and simplifies the management of a virtual data center.
   
• Nimbula Director
  Nimbula Director was created by some of the people behind Amazons EC2 technology, and aim to provide both enterprises and service proviers with a simple software solution to build private, public or hybrid clod infrastructure. Includes both web administration plus API, and available in a free edition for smaller deployments.
   
• Novell Cloud Manager
  The Novell Cloud Manager is a commercial solution aimed at enterprise usage, with utilization tracking, template based provisioning, VLAN management and built in pricing plus approval process for provisioning.
   
• OnApp
  OnApp is a turnkey solution aimed specially at hosting providers, integrating with existing billing solutions widely used by service providers and providing end user API and control panel. Originates from the service provider VPS.NET, but today OnApp is an independent company.
   
• OpenNebula
  Fully open source solution that provides a set of management tools with full API and a simple web interface, enabling organizations to build their own cloud platform around it to fit their own needs. Commercial solutions with support also available.
   
• OpenQRM
  Open source solution with commercial support, aiming to provide a complete data center management platform with focus on automation, rapid deployment, monitoring and high availability cloud computing. Support the most common hypervisors as well as OpenVZ, Virtualbox and LXC.
   
• OpenStack
  OpenStack is an open source project originating from Rackspace and NASA, aiming to provide more open standards within the industry. OpenStack includes both a compute and a storage project.
   
• Parallels Automation for Cloud Infrastructure (CI)
  Cloud Infrastructure from Parallels is part of their Automation product, intended to automate the provisioning and management of virtual servers for service providers. Designed for multi-tenancy and integrated with their billing, management is available either via control panel or API.
   
• VMware vCloud
  VMware vCloud solutions are commercial solutions based on VMwares own hypervisor, making it possible to provide on-demand, pay-as-you-go infrastructure as a service.
   
• Xen Cloud Platform (XCP)
  XCP is an open source solution based on the Xen Hypervisor, aimed to cover the isolation and security needs of a multi-tenant deployment. API support as well as some community driven graphical user interfaces.

Now putting platform one versus platform two up for comparison obviuosly would have been handy, but to be honest there is so much difference between these various platforms that it would simply be impossible to compare them in a fair manor – some of them do completely different things. My best advice would therefore be to compare them on your own, based on the needs your organization have.

Things to consider are storage type (for example NFS or iSCSI SAN, local storage, distributed storage), hypervisor support, multi-tenancy, high availability, API, self-service control panel, billing integration, resource metering, automation, network isolation, licensing, openness to customization, commercial support, integration assistance etc.