E3-1240 Xeon
We are pleased to announce that clients are able to order the Intel E3-1240 Xeon platform in either 8GB or 16GB of RAM! We're very excited about the performance capabilities that Intel has put together.
Supply chain issues of 8GB memory modules have prevented us from offering 32GB E3 Xeons. Hopefully that will change soon, however our vendors maintain that we won't be seeing a better supply chain for some time. Mother nature hasn't been very good to parts suppliers for both hard drives and memory recently.
You can order the platform with the links below:
Expansion & Updates
Hi Everyone,
It's been a very busy June here at ColoCrossing, and we're very excited to report on what's been going on.
1. Bigger footprint: We've just completed a capital expansion project in Chicago, which will support our accelerating growth through the next 12 months. On top of our new Chicago build-out we're in the final stages of doubling the size of our presence in San Jose California. Demand has been consistently strong for colocation and dedicated servers in both San Jose and Chicago, so we're thrilled that we have ample capacity to keep pace.
2. New Toys: Our engineering department has been thoroughly testing some of the recent access layer and distribution solutions released from Cisco, Juniper and Brocade. Thus far the tests have included the 4200EX series from Juniper, the 4900M and 3750X from Cisco and a number of Brocade devices. ColoCrossing has always made the investments necessary to ensure that our network infrastructure is built on the highest quality equipment available; so these tests are important as they help us decide what we'll use for future deployments and upgrades. I suspect Alex, Jeremiah or Gary will chime in at a later date with a blog post regarding our impressions of each platform/device.
3. More NYC Capacity: Over the past few weeks we've been planning the phased migration of our remaining 1Gbit uplinks over to 10Gbit. Because our NYC network, like all other ColoCrossing locations, is fully redundant no customer impact is expected when the actual switch-overs occur this coming week. The added capacity will ensure that our NYC network is capable of absorbing massive swings in traffic levels without any performance degradation or increased latency. Similar upgrades have already taken place at our other facilities, so once NYC is complete this wave of enhancements will be finished company wide.
4. New Staff: We’ve recently added a number of new faces; including Frank Shafer, Chuck Andre and Jared Santos to name a few. Their roles are mixed, with Chuck and Jared joining our systems administration team and Frank wearing a few hats between development, project lead and technical supervisor. Frank and Jeremiah Shinkle (one of our highly skilled operations managers) will be taking point on a new and very exciting upcoming cloud project. I can’t share much (ok, nothing) on that project right now, but you can bet that we’ll be talking about it a lot quite soon.
Comments? Thoughts? Email me at jbiloh*at*colocrossing.com!
- Jon Biloh
Twitter and Facebook
I wanted to let everyone know that we're on twitter at http://twitter.com/colocrossing and Facebook at http://tinyurl.com/ColoCrossingFB . You can send us any questions or comments you have about our products and services, or just follow us to see whats going on at ColoCrossing. Special offers will be posted on both sites a few times per month.
-Alex
Datacenter Facilities
Since we're apart of the industry, I frequent the blog Datacenter Knowledge. I've found it to be a great resource, in seeing what is going on in the industry with articles that are well written and maintained.
One thing that I've noticed over the last couple years as a trend in the industry is that they are starting to build them (datacenters) bigger. How big? Microsoft has recently finished several facilities for their cloud platform, some of which top out at 500,000 square feet.
How big is 500,000 square feet? Pretty big. According to Sports Know How, an NFL regulation football field is 360 feet by 160 feet, or 57,600 square feet. The MS facility is then to be considered almost 9 football fields. It's approximately 200 average sized American homes (at 2500 square feet average).
-Alex
Your portal, our portal
Blog time! It's been a really hectic week and I've had more work to do than usual. That being said, I'm taking a break to write about another important part of our company, and that is our customer portal. The really exciting part is we've made some internal adjustments with scheduling / staffing which has enabled us to bring on a full time developer for portal! We previously had a team of individuals who would work on it throughout the week, but nobody was a dedicated full time dev. As of a few weeks ago that changed, and man have there been some improvements already. The combination of a full time dev + contributions from the other folks has really shown a major change in the development life cycle.
Looking back over my emails, I see at least 5 instances of new features in the past few weeks. There have also been a massive amount of changes and improvements to existing features on the admin side of things. As far as customer facing changes go, the major one we implemented was PTR control. As a client you can now modify your IPs PTR records without having to contact us before changing them. This is the first of many changes we expect to roll out of the next 3-6 months to make your life easier. A few other things we have on the roadmap:
1) OS reloads - We are researching and working on implementing a system which will allow automated OS reloads directly through your client panel.
2) IP provisioning - This would allow you to request, pay for and have allocated an IP range automatically through our backend
3) Customer support - While a major undertaking, we have the framework in place for an integrated customer support system. This would replace our existing support channel.
4) Uptime monitoring - A feature that will check that your device(s) are online, and send a notification (email and/or SMS) if the device is seen as down.
5) A new look - We're in talks with some graphic designers and artsy types (of which we're certainly not) to get a nice skin put on portal. It should look as beautiful it feels, ya know?
As far as the admin side changes go they've been some serious productivity enhancers. We've optimized the way tasks and jobs are assigned to employees and tracked, implemented a brand new system for internal collaboration and issue tracking, and have also added some fancy features which improve the overall navigation and ease of use on the backend.
Short post this time around, just a once over on the latest happenings over here. If you guys have any features you want to see added or any feedback about the existing system, we'd absolutely love to hear it. A lot of the features we've added and improved have been a direct result of user feedback so we really enjoy communicating on this. Just email feedback@ourdomain.com (replace ourdomain.com with the website you're on) and we'll get right back to you.
-Brian
Everyday Computing
It should come as no surprise that everyone here on the CC staff would consider themselves a bit of a geek. Perhaps 'a bit' is too light of a term. Some more than others, but from our techs all the way up to our execs everybody has their roots in the world of nerdom. When we hang out socially, we discuss the latest innovations in technology. When we're at the office, we're usually debating the common things nerds debate (Windows vs Linux, Cisco vs Juniper, etc). We also manage to get some work done too. Well, sometimes.
With that in mind, it's easy for us all to forget that we're considered power users. A quick glance at any of our desktops will show things that to the computer illiterate look straight out of The Matrix (remember that green vertical scrolling screen?). Early last week my Dad had some computer issues, and I took the time to check them out and get the issues resolved. I didn't act alone, as Jon gave me a lot of help. Throughout getting the issue fixed and the ensuing restoration process, I realized just how useful some of the things I use daily could be for someone like my Dad. One thing to understand is that while not completely incompetent, my old man does represent what I would consider a large percentage of the every day user. The type that still uses IE, listens to music on CDs and writes their passwords down on pieces of paper. After watching him do this for about 5 minutes, I decided to change the way he uses computers. I also decided it'd be a good idea to share what, in my opinion, are 5 of the most useful free utilities any person can figure out and use to their benefit. These are in no particular order of practicality or usefulness:
1) Grooveshark - Similar to Pandora, Grooveshark is an online music streaming service where users upload and contribute music which is shared with other users. They offer a free service which does have ads, but they are not obtrusive and they do not in anyway get in the way of the listening experience. You can create an account for free, which then allows you to create playlists for your favorite music and share those playlists with anyone else. There is also the option to pay for an account. The cost is less than $10/mo and provides you unlimited access to their entire music library without any ads. You can also access it using your mobile phone so long as you use a Blackberry, iPhone, Palm, Nokia, or Android, which makes listening to music on the go a breeze. Say goodbye to the days of struggling to find new music to listen to. Check it out at http://listen.grooveshark.com
2) Pidgin - Pidgin is a multi-platform, multi protocol messenger which allows you to configure multiple messengers into one. Remember the time when you had to have a separate client open for AIM, Skype, IRC, MSN, and Yahoo!? The days of the cluttered desktop are long gone. Along with it's multi protocol support, Pidgin also provides an abundance of official and third party plugins. This all in one messenger does wonders to free up desktop space and communicate with all of your friends, family, and colleagues through one simple and easy to use interface. Download it from http://pidgin.im
3) KeePass - KeePass is a free, open source password manager which, like Pidgin, is multi-platform. This means it will work on your Windows desktop, and will also run under Linux, Mac, and BSD under mono (Linux users, also consider using KeePassX). So how does it work? You create a password database which is protected by a master password and if you choose, a master key file. Once you create this initial master authentication, you can then safely add each and every password you have into the database. This allows you to create extremely secure passwords without the need to memorize them, as they're just a copy and paste away. Just don't forget your master password! Most people will store their KeePass database on a pen drive, so where they go their passwords follow. You can create different groups and categories for everything from work to personal passwords, along with banking and other online accounts. This incredibly useful utility can be downloaded at http://keepass.info
4) Dropbox - Dropbox is a file sharing / storage program which is free to use (up to 2GB) and can be installed on any platform. The idea is you install the client, create an account, and begin storing files. It's really that easy. They provide you up to 2GB of space for free, and if you do need more space the pricing is incredibly reasonable for the service and space you receive. You would then share folders or even give access to your account with other trusted users, and anything you place into your local Dropbox folder is then synced to the Dropbox servers and is accessible to any other users. The range of use is vast, and there are no shortage of practical applications. We use it extensively here at ColoCrossing for various reasons and it is easily one of the most handy tools we utilize. They also have a web interface which can be used to access any currently stored files. Dropbox is available at http://dropbox.com
5) Firefox - This one may seem obvious, but it is no secret that Internet Explorer still holds the market share when it comes to browsers. Seeing people still use IE is personally very painful, and I urge anyone I can to move to Firefox or any other competing browser. So what makes Firefox so great? First off, it's compliant with web standards. Secondly, the amount of available skins, themes, addons, and utilities which can be integrated into the browser make it a swiss army knife. It is widely supported, has a huge user community, and active developers who are anxious to investigate and repair any problems. Check it out for yourself and I'm positive you'll never regret switching over. Download it at http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
So there you have it, 5 of the more useful free, cross platform and easy to use daily computing utilities that come to mind. I'm sure this list could be refined, and it almost definitely could be expanded on. But that's not the point. The goal is to move people over shortly, let them experience the joy of becoming more productive, and finding tools for themselves.
-Brian
2011 Roadmap
Another year behind us, another decade behind us, and another opportunity to put that New Years drive into good use. You know what I'm talking about, that beginning of the year motivation to finish those projects, start a new one, or change yourself for the better. Fortunately for all of us, management here really likes to get things done in the beginning of the year. So, here's a few things we're working on:
1. Expansion: We had an incredibly strong 2010, posting record sales numbers each quarter and continuing our expansion in each of our locations. We've filled up nearly all of our space in NYC, Chicago, Dallas, and Atlanta. We're in discussions with the powers that be to expand and we're looking to bring a lot of new offers to the table with our to be acquired space. On top of our existing locations, our execs are in discussions with some local Buffalo providers to purchase an entire facility here in Buffalo and open up a datacenter. This would be our first wholly owned facility and everyone on staff is really excited for the opportunity. We'll be joining the ranks of Yahoo and Microsoft, as both companies have opened up facilities in the area within the last year.
2. Product innovation: In 2010 we rolled out our fully featured, 100% custom in house developed control panel (also known as portal). Our development team is continuing to push out features and by the end of 2011 we hope to have a fully revised product with more client side features, a better overall look, and a ton of improvements on the administrative backend. We're also in the early stages of bringing a cloud platform to front, along with focusing on our enterprise grade backup solutions.
3. New staff: Growth means more work, and luckily for all of us we were already working at 110% effort so we've brought some new faces aboard to compensate. The new hires include team members for both the sales and systems admin staff so we're seeing improvements all around. If you see a new face around say hi, they're still a bit timid adjusting to the work environment 
4. Internal changes: A few of our senior staff have taken some time away from their regular day to day duties and have been commissioned with the task of finding ways to improve everything we do. This includes streamlining frequent processes, optimizing customer interactions and bringing improvements to existing features and tools we all use.
Short and sweet blog post this time around. 2010 was an astoundingly strong year and I can say I'm personally thrilled at the prospect of what we'll be able to improve throughout 2011. There will be a ton of extra work for everyone but the payoff will be worth it. And with any luck, I'll be writing a similar post mid January of 2012 bragging about our awesome year
-Brian
Customer Migrations
Since I've been working at ColoCrossing, I've been responsible for coordinating, preparing and executing quite a few migrations for new and existing customers. Sometimes it will be something as simple as a single website, all HTML based. Other times, it's one of the busiest sites and/or network of sites in the world. In this post (which I intend to be short, may end up long) I'll cover how we generally approach these types of accounts.
Anyone familiar with being a systems analyst or IT manager may recognize a lot of these steps follow whats known as SDLC. That is, systems development lifestyle. All my college textbooks would tell me that goes as follows: Investigation, Analysis, Logical / Physical design, Implementation, and Maintenance. Imagine my surprise when that came back to help me. So in my own words, here's how it goes:
Step 1: What does this client do? -- First, I start by introducing myself to the client and to their environment. I visit their site(s), learn their software, maybe sometimes learn what the current administrators do for fun. It all helps. I login to their existing machines, control panels and I dig around. Sometimes I'll spend an entire shift (that ranges from 4 hours to 24 hours) just seeing whatever looks interesting. I figure out their minimum system requirements, what server software their running, etc. Basically everything you would expect a sysadmin / project analyst to do. Once I've done this, I then ask the client to tell me about their environment. I compare notes, recheck my work, and then I write my checklist of what I need in order to make this work.
Step 2: Setup -- At this point, I know the client, I know their servers, I know their environment, and I know exactly what I need to do. So me and my team will prep their new servers. Install and configure their webserver. Check. Install any necessary scripting languages, databases, and other system software. Check. Install their control panels. Check. Harden the machine, secure it, and make it as secure. Check. Add in all their special requirements, and we're good to go, for now. Now we test. And we test some more. Once we're done testing, it's time to migrate.
Step 3: Staging! -- Now, we migrate all (or some) of the existing clients environment over to our servers. And then we test some more! We use previews, we create new sites, new software, we deploy projects and programs. Whatever it is this client does, we do it. We find and resolve errors, and we make sure everything is 100% good to go before we schedule the real migration.
Step 4: It's go time -- So we know the environment, we setup the new environment, and we staged it. Now we get a gameplan in place with the client. Window starts at X time, at which point we migrate Y service from Z server into serverA with ColoCrossing. At X time, phase two of migration begins. This seems like a short step, but this can be a 2 hour or 2 week process. Depends if it's a phased or all at once migration. Depends if everything works. Well, it really just depends on a lot.
Step 5: We're done, right? -- Ha, right. So in the best case, steps 1-4 have gone off relatively well. Everything is migrated and the client is happy. But you know what? Something is going to break, or something went wrong and we didn't catch it. So now we maintain. We continue to work with the client until they are 100% happy. And when that time comes, we get ready for the next migration. (It's not called a lifecycle for nothing)
It seems like a simple process, or at least simple enough in a 750 word blog post. In reality though, it's one pain in the rear. There are so many variables, so much to communicate, and so much to learn that even a single site migration can take a week to get right. I've been part of a few migrations for high traffic sites (think top 1,000 Alex big) that have gone on for months. That's not a discredit to our team (who are, in my opinion, absolute professionals at this) or to the people we're working with. That's just what it takes.
-Brian
Server Maintenance Part 1
Disclaimer: When it comes to my interest in *nix based systems, I have (thanks to Gary S., our resident guru) become a BSD guy. I started off with Linux (Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora, Suse, Gentoo, etc. Tried them all) and when I started working here, he was managing our infrastructure and had it all on FreeBSD. Because I had no choice, I learned it and slowly learned to love it. Over the past year we've moved a lot of our company infrastructure systems over to CentOS for compatibility purposes (and that's why I'm writing this) but a few other systems we use for various means (backups, development, my personal stuff) still run on FreeBSD. Now to the real post!
Since we're now, like a lot of you, running CentOS on quite a few of our servers I figured it'd be worthwhile to point out some software which can really ease your mind and keep your systems up to date and online. For this post I'll focus on two which have made me sleep a lot better at night: Ksplice uptrack and Pingdom uptime monitoring.
Ksplice uptrack (http://www.ksplice.com/) is a service which allows you to keep your kernel 100% up to date on the latest patches without having to reboot the system. Typically on any server (Windows Linux or FreeBSD alike) in order to apply system updates, you have to reboot. This effects your overall uptime, causes downtime, and will cost you more money. Some of you are asking "Why would it cost me money to reboot my server?". Answer: us sysadmins do not like burning the midnight oil for free. Reboots means scheduled maintenance, which 9/10 times means you're doing it at a time which is convenient for your users and 100% inconvenient for your sysadmins. Get ready to pay them for their extra hours.
In a short, non technical sense, their developers rewrite the updates so they can be applied on the fly. They have extensive documentation on how this works and it's outside the scope of this post, but if you're bored one day and feel like reading a long wall of text, enjoy: http://www.ksplice.com/doc/ksplice.pdf
So whats the end result? A fully up to date system, patched from the latest known vulnerabilities, and the peace of mind knowing you've got a team of full time developers looking out for you. At this point I'm sure some of you are interested but worried that "well this software is really useful and complex, it must be hard to use!", right? Wrong. You create an account, install (via your distros package manager) a few programs, add your access key (provided by them) into your Ksplice configuration file, and run two commands and you're done. You can then login to your Ksplice uptrack account and view all your configured machines, which ones are up to date, which ones need to apply updates, a history of applied updates, and much more.
So what does this all cost? About 2 gallons of gas, or a sandwich at your local deli, or anything that costs close to $4. Ksplice is $3.95 per machine per month, and after 20 machines the pricing gets even better. Even the most financially strapped company should be able to find that in their IT budget
Secondly, there's Pingdom uptime monitoring (http://pingdom.com/). Pingdom is a worldwide monitoring service which allows you to "check" your server at regular intervals for uptime from multiple locations all over the globe. If any of the locations see the machine as down, Pingdom will automatically send a notification (via email, SMS, Twitter, or iPhone) notifying you that it's down.
They offer three plans: free, basic, and business. You can check them all out on their website, but the pricing is very reasonable for what you get. Once you've signed into your account, you then create your contacts, which are people you want to be notified when the check is seen as down.
Once your contacts are configured, you then create a check which is essentially a device, a website, etc. You're given multiple options to monitor, which are HTTP, HTTP Custom, TCP, DNS, Ping, UDP, SMTP, POP3, and IMAP. You then input the IP, URL, or service you wish to monitor, decide who you want to receive the notification, and how frequently you want the "check", checked. There is an additional options field which provides a more custom approach as well.
Any sysadmin knows getting that dreaded notification that a server has failed brings a gut wrenching feeling to the pit of your stomach. It's even worse when it comes at 6PM right after you got home from an already exhausting day. Even worse is when it comes at 3AM and wakes you up from your nice dreams of beaches in Belize. You know what the absolute worst is, though? When you don't get notified at all. Pingdom ensures your sleeping will be disturbed if one of your servers decides it wants some attention.
We've implemented both of these technologies in the past year, and I must say it's been a great experience. We're utilizing both to their full extent and they've really made life a whole lot easier for me. I've been woken up a few times now at the wee hours of the morning when we've had a system fail, and each time I am I feel good knowing everything is working as expected (once I get over the immediate frustration of something breaking).
Both Pingdom and Ksplice offer 30 day free trials so give it a shot. You can stop both at any time but I have a feeling once you implement them, you'll never look back. I'll write a new post in a few weeks with some other software or habits to get into to keep your server online and running in optimal shape!
- Brian
Portal Changes & Upgrades
We have been working hard over the past couple weeks improving the layout and functionality of our customer management portal, through which you manage your assets here at ColoCrossing.
Recent additions include:
-Automated SWIP reporting
-ARIN object tracking
-Service requests from portal
-Subusers with unbranded feature for resellers
Those improvements are in addition to the existing feature set, which include remote reboot, device lists, blog rss, real-time bandwidth monitoring, shipping notifications and much more! We look forward to your comments and further suggestions on how we can continue to improve the system.