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Twitter is Misbehaving and I Blame Joyent! (Or, Hosting Providers as Venture Capitalists)

Wed, 14 Mar 2007 20:25:00 -0400

Dave Young from Joyent recently blogged about Twitter's use of Joyent Accelerators. Accelerators are Solaris Containers on Sun Fire X4100s with Sun Fire X4500s (also known as "Thumpers") for storage. Joyent promises on-demand, no-leash computing and offers virtual servers for as little as $45/month (includes 256 MB RAM, 5 GB storage, 15 GB bandwidth). It sounds pretty cool - and check out the video of Dave and Jason on Sun's website!

The problem is, after reading Dave's post, I think of him every time Twitter is down. Which, as many of his readers pointed out, happens often. Dave says us complainers are missing the point. Twitter is growing like crazy! It serves 4,000+ requests per second! That's a lot - and Joyent helped get them there! Unfortunately (or fortunately?), Twitter users' demand seems to exceed its already-substantial capacity.

If I were Dave, I'd move Twitter to as many XXL Accelerator Sparcs as it takes. Having come a long way just doesn't make good enough PR fodder when you've got John Edwards live blogging from the campaign trail ("About to make remarks at the Int'l Assoc. of Firefighters. Then remarks at the Boilermakers conference.").

A few months ago, I was telling Steve Kahan over at The Planet that he ought to turn a couple of his sales reps into venture capitalists, of sorts. These folks would scan the customer database for major brand names as well as up and coming influencers. They'd proactively monitor these VIPs' infrastructure and offer free scalability advice and migration assistance. They'd set up an invitation-only beta program and strong arm Dell into providing test units of its latest gear. They'd research these customers' industries and make introductions if they come across people in similar markets...

More recently, RedMonk analyst James Governor suggested something much more radical. Forget that beta program; how about long-term loans for future movers and shakers? And instead of my idea of creating case studies out of The Planet's great working relationships with today's news-makers, take a great leap forward to the open source hardware business model. Put your tools in the hands of tomorrow's innovators. You need to do this quickly, because you're competing with Jeff Barr. In Joyent's case, I have no doubt that last part is true...

PS - It just occurred to me that SoftLayer, in particular, might have much to gain from being a patron to soon-to-be influencers. Softlayer announced a private meet me room a few weeks ago, where developers of different SoftLayer-hosted applications can interconnect without incurring bandwidth charges. So if someone's created a community that many others are eager to extend and/or leverage, wouldn't it be worthwhile for SoftLayer to make itself that community's home base?

PPS - Hosted Solutions, too! It's cool that they're spearheading the Carolina SaaS User Group, but I think what would really enhance their appeal is if they hosted the most-mash-upped apps.

Go to Hostican.com

The technology company has achieved 10 straight years of sustained profitability generating $100s of millions in revenue and creating a profound influence in its surrounding community by creating more than 236 IT jobs. AIT has also been named 2 times to The Inc. 500 list of fast growing firms, 3 times to the Deloitte and Touche Fast 500 list, and has been named as the NC Entrepreneur Firm of the Year.

Customization vs Standardization, or What Amazon and Rackshack Have in Common

Tue, 27 Feb 2007 23:27:00 -0400

In early 2001, just a few months before Exodus filed for bankruptcy, Robert Marsh launched Rackshack. Unlike his struggling competitors, who typically built servers to spec, Robert sold $99 Cobalt RaQs. Only one configuration was available, and orders were provisioned instantly and automatically. And instead of demanding multi-year commitments, Rackshack offered month to month service. By the time I joined the company in early 2003, Rackshack (which later changed its name to EV1Servers) had become the world's largest dedicated server provider.

A year or so later, Robert unveiled EV1's private racks program during a customer gathering; two attendees signed up on the spot. Soon other orders starting pouring in, along with complicated network diagrams and super detailed server specs from customers who wanted their systems built just so. We did our best to accommodate any and all requests, which were a huge challenge to keep track of. Only much later did I learn about ITIL from Rich Bader over at EasyStreet. By that time, Amazon had already launched S3 and would soon introduce EC2.

Unlike EV1's Custom Order team, who gladly built whatever customers asked, EC2 sells only $0.10 virtual server instances. There's just one configuration available, and orders are provisioned instantly and automatically. Instead of demanding month-long commitments, Amazon offers pay-as-you-go service in 1 hour units.

According to Vinne Marchanadi from Deal Architect, pay-as-you-go is what large customers nowadays are looking for. (A former Gartner analyst, Vinnie now advises enterprise IT buyers on vendor selection.) He offers the analogy of plugging into an efficient power source versus buying fancy generators. On behalf of his clients, he says:

"Message to vendors - so long as you meet our security, privacy and compliance standards, we want as vanilla, standardized a service as possible. Sell us capacity by unit of consumption. We want to leverage all your economies - in financing, procurement, operations, everything. In return, we want to fit as much as possible in to your standards."

Another couple of years from now, will standardization again give way to customization? I think the answer is yes. And no. Amazon recently started offering Machine Image sharing. And VMWare's virtual appliance marketplace features about 400 listings. And SalesForce.com offers over 500 partner apps on AppExchange. And earlier this month Netvibes unveiled its universal widget API... It seems service delivery platforms will become more - not less - standardized, while each user will have increasing freedom to mix and match a wide range of interoperable applications into highly customized solutions. Doesn't that sound like the best of both worlds?

Go to Hostican.com

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