Why, did you know Dell was a big supporter of OpenStack? Yep, and they have open source backing to show. Dell shows how they can put a team into looking like a scrappy startup.

Have no fear though, they also have a vCloud offering.  Who wouldn’t want to miss out on the enterprise space?

But wait, they also preship servers with Eucalyptus on them.

And HP, with their private beta Openstack based cloud. But don’t worry, they also offer at least 8 other cloud branded solutions.

I think it’s clear that..it’s not clear. The cloud concept has muddied the water so much, and created a cone of confusion for so many people. All of these vendors want to be everything to everybody, so they’re betting across the board in hopes one pays off.

I don’t necessarily chastise this approach, but I think it doesn’t help customers when a vendor offers so many solutions and says that all of them are the right approach. Sometimes you have to pick a side; sadly, the cloud space seems riddled with those who don’t.

I’m interested to see how this plays out over the next year; the cloud camp seems to be dividing between two sides: the enterprise high end space, and the commodity low end space.

Personally I think the commodity space is the better play. Let’s see if I’m right.

My external hard drive crashed. And apparently not a minor crash, but a-motor-head-came-loose-and-destroyed-my-platter crash. At least this is what a recovery company told me after examining the disk for a few days. Why, oh WHY, did I wait? I knew the external drives were getting old, and I knew I had sensitive data on them. But there is no vision like hindsight I guess.

So what do I do now? I back up. And I don’t just copy things from here to there. I made things a bit more robust. I now have two external drives that are mirrored, but they are attached with USB to my computer. I use Time Machine to backup all of my computers individually to these drives. But this only mitigates a drive failure. It obviously won’t protect against a fire or even a rambunctious three-year-old that has a high probability of knocking over one or both of these drives while they are writing, or some other home travesty. So to protect against onsite hazards I use Data Cave’s backup service to make sure my data is offsite. This also provides me with the capability to restore anything I want at any time I want.

I can restore everything, or just a folder, or just a file. I like this particularly well because we have all been at the point where we know we just had this certain file but can’t find it. No problem. I can access Data Cave online, grab my file, and bring it down within minutes (depending on the file size of course). This provides me with ease of mind as well because I know my data at Data Cave is being replicated, so there are multiple copies there as well.

Whew! That is a lot of my data being backed up in a lot of ways. And that makes me (and my wife) feel secure that our data will not suffer another family history loss. I am going to continue researching the best, most secure ways to backup, but what are your opinions? Do you see a better service or better way of doing things? Let’s discuss…

Wizard of Oz

I have been fascinated by tornadoes my entire life. Ever since my first exposure to the twister in the Wizard of Oz (don’t laugh it seemed quite real and scary to a seven year old), I have always wanted to see one first hand. You would think that growing up in the Midwest I would have had plenty of opportunities, but the closest I ever got was video from Storm Chasers and the Weather Channel. That changed this last summer when I finally had the chance to see one up close and personal.

It was the middle of the day when the tornado warning sirens went off and my first reaction was to run to the front of our facility, push open the door and ‘check it out”. Maybe not the smartest thing to do, but when you love storms, it’s almost an irresistible impulse (that’s my story and I am sticking to it). Getting the door open was no trivial matter in itself as the front of the storm was packing winds of close to 75 MPH. The light rain coming down was actually moving horizontally, and part of me wanted to run out into the parking lot to see what it was like to walk in those kinds of winds. Now I know some of you are shaking your heads and labeling me as slightly nutty, but I bet at least some of you would have been tempted to do exactly the same thing. Somehow caution prevailed (I think it may have had to do more with the look I could anticipate from my wife when I explained to her how I got soaked rather than any sudden streak of common sense) and I stayed in the doorway.

Low and behold, as I watched about a quarter of a mile away that horizontal rain suddenly started to move in a in a giant slow circle, and I was able to watch the entire process as the overhead cloud started rotating, and the dark funnel slowly descended until it touched the ground. Totally awesome! I am still at a loss as to why it never entered my mind to take a picture or a video.

It was absolutely perfect! Nobody was hurt, and most of the damage was limited to some trees.  Now, I have to admit that if I had been in my car or at home this experience would have brought with it a fairly high level of, well…fear. I have a great respect for the power involved in that type of storm and while I want to watch it, I don’t really want to participate in it. But I had the good fortune that day to be at work which is  the Data Cave data center, a facility designed and built from the ground up to withstand winds in excess of 207MPH. If the tornado had decided to make a turn, or had come down right in our front yard all I had to do was take two steps back, let the door close, and I would be protected by rebar reinforced, 12inch thick concrete-filled block walls rated to shrug off an EF5 tornado. Now I realize all that design and construction was implemented to protect our clients IT equipment, but let me tell you if you have to be in the vicinity of a tornado that is the place to do it from.

Next time, I promise to take some pictures.

Storm Photos from May 25, 2011

Midwest Tornadoes

Data Center Design by Design: Keeping the Roof Over Our Heads

Facility Infrastructure

But SOPA goes further than existing laws, in many disturbing ways.

Many people have opined that “SOPA” would spell the end of the idea of the internet, and will abrogate historical protections of due process. This really should come as no surprise. The government has been passing increasingly un-Constitutional laws and rulings for some time now. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court of the state of Indiana has ruled that there are no legal grounds to resist police entering your home, despite hundreds of years of precedence requiring a warrant as outlined by the 4th Amendment. Most recently, the federal government just passed “NDAA”, which, among it’s provisions, would permit the permanent detention of citizens under allegations of “terrorism,” despite protections under the 6th Amendment.

Despite this unsurprising power-grab by copyright holders, lots of outrage has been displayed over this particular proposal. Reddit led a boycott of registrar Go Daddy for their support, which has caused them to reverse their stance on the bill, proving nothing other than that they can be bought, and for almost nothing, since the number of domains transferred away from them was a drop in their bucket.

Despite these other laws, and the current trend of legislation in general, I’m actually more sanguine about the prospects of SOPA than other commenters. The problem is that the law is structured to use technological means to combat illegal activities, and it will only have jurisdiction in the United States. If internet service providers and domain name registrars in the US try to abolish infringing content, it will just pop up in a different place. The only people it will shut down permanently will be people who are at least trying to run a legitimate business, who have legal residences and identities within our borders. Illegitimate businesses and their illegitimate owners’ identities will just find a new way to setup shop online.

There are lots and lots of places to host content on the web, and only some of them exist within the jurisdiction of the US Congress.

As both a protocol and a software, DNS has a long history of problems. For a long time, people have warned that they could take down the system whenever they wanted. If SOPA passes, I expect the hackers of the world to unite to bypass, obfuscate, overwhelm, and otherwise circumvent whatever method of DNS meddling the government and the service providers can come up with. Programmers have been working for some time on an extension to DNS that  would prevent any interference with the system, including blackholing entries by government agencies. SOPA would target such software by making anything designed to bypass the law illegal, but I doubt its effectiveness. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act does this sort of thing as well, and we see how well this has worked. It’s still easy to find software to copy DVD’s, anyway.

I believe the law will prove to be ineffective in short order. Because of this, I’m hopeful that a better law would eventually replace it.

On the other hand, we can’t forget about the internet kill switch that was proposed in the Senate last year, where China was held up as a model of being able to control the flow of information during a time of war. (And here we thought that the internet was the great equalizing factor during the “Arab Summer.”) You can be sure that there are forces within both the corporate lobby pool and within the various military departments of the government that would love nothing more than to add this tool to their box. If this sort of law gets passed, then the government will be able to shut off internet traffic at our major backbone connections, which we already know they surveil, and this is the one we won’t be able to get around.

Let me give you an example. You have 50 racks of equipment and you are looking for a data center. You can rent an entire suite at Data Cave which allows you and your staff to be the only ones with access to that room (except our staff, or course). Not only that, but you can decide the layout of the racks and duct work. You can also choose which CRAC units and PDUs you would like. While our facility is 2N redundant, meaning there is two of everything (and I do mean everything), you can even choose the level of redundancy you desire. We are so flexible that Olympic gymnasts are jealous.

The other design feature of note is that the equipment that maintains your space (CRAC units, PDUs, generators, chillers, etc) are all outside of the areas that customers and vendors are able to access. No one could be within an arms reach of this equipment without being escorted by Data Cave personnel.

Every door within Data Cave has a key card scanner (with exception of the bathrooms and offices). The hallway accessing the customer suites also has a biometric hand scanner. The hand scan and key card must match in order to gain entry. We are serious about security and monitor anyone coming and going from the building.

Data Cave was designed and purposefully built as a data center. While deciding on a layout, our CEO, Angie and President, Caleb went on a number of data center tours and did a great deal of research. What they found was that having individual customer areas (or suites) made the most sense. A smaller space means heating and cooling is easier to monitor and control, the area is highly secure and customers still have the ability to only pay for what they use.

It’s always better to see it for yourself. Contact us or call 866-514-2283 for a tour.

So what do we think the cloud is? We believe the cloud is remote storage for absolutely any bit of information that you want to store. At Data Cave it’s remote storage that will always be available, always be secure, and always be safe. That means we always have power and internet connectivity, always keep data secure with industry standard security practices, and always keep data safe with our astounding structure. As Caleb noted in a previous post, Cisco agrees that Data Cave’s data center is the type of structure and infrastructure that cloud services will need in the future. And guess what; the future may be coming sooner than you think!

Courtesy of Forbes.com

In a Forbes article from earlier this month, contributor Joe McKendrick says that Cisco estimates that more than 50% of all workloads will be processed in the cloud by 2014. Uh..that’s just 2 years from now. If you don’t think that’s significant to the direction of where the industry (and the world) is going, then you should stop using your computer. Right now. There is a nice cabin in the mountain, away from the internets, just waiting for you to sit and quietly whittle away.

Another point to note, with the move to the cloud happening so quickly and so seemingly suddenly, data centers that were built without the cloud in mind will most likely have a hard time catching up to the cost savings and solid infrastructure built into Data Cave.

If you’d like to talk more about what the cloud means to us, or express what the cloud means to you, please do!

This is disturbing to say the least. SCADA is employed in a number of different systems to monitor and control things like utilities and medical devices. Back in August, a security researcher, Jerome Radcliffe, figured out how to hack his own wireless SCADA insulin pump. According to Radcliffe, he intercepted the wireless signals, reversed them and was able to insert fake data which he sent back to the pump. He was able to increase and decrease the amount of insulin without any warning from the pump. In essence, some evil-doer could kill a diabetic using their own insulin pump. A similar situation was found with wireless Pacemakers a few years ago. The study states that the researchers were able to reverse engineer the device’s communication protocols through an unauthorized channel and retrieve unencrypted information about the patient (name and diagnosis) and their treatment plan. They could even revise the therapies the patient was receiving through the device.

Some fixes are simple, like encryption, but other solutions can be very costly. I assume that’s why they weren’t implemented in the first place. We can all hope that no one would hack someone’s insulin pump or pacemaker but that doesn’t mean SCADA systems shouldn’t be more secure. Our utility infrastructure should be a major concern with these outdated systems in place.

Hacked construction sign in Austin, Texas.

Some related articles:

SCADA hack targets Iran

HP printers vulnerable to hacking

SCADA vulnerabilities in prison cells

Hackers break into SUV through text message

Need offsite backup with single or double encryption? Contact us!

I doubt that you spend much of your day thinking about your roof. It’s just sort of there to keep rain and snow off of your head, and as long as it’s not leaking on your desk, it’s rarely a topic of conversation. I agree that most roofs lack the dynamic quality to make them interesting, but that was before I had the pleasure of watching a Tier IV data center being built specifically to protect IT equipment from the excesses of Mother Nature. I’ll talk about some of the other amazing infrastructure components in future blogs, but this is about the roof.

Being located in the Midwest, our primary adversary is tornadoes. They are fascinating to watch on Storm Chasers but are tough on buildings and their contents, so our facility is built specifically to withstand that threat, and a key component is the roof. The roof is approximately 43,000 square feet (bit smaller than a football field) and is constructed of 8” thick concrete reinforced with ½” rebar laid in a 12” grid, covered with a rubber matting which is in turn, covered with gravel. There is nothing located on the roof, and no penetrations. Those are the rather dry statistics, but the cool part is:

It weighs 4.5 million pounds! 2,041,186 kilograms! For those that might relate to numbers differently that is the equivalent of 1,258 average midsize cars (Chevrolet in this case), or 372 African elephants (with intact ivory) or 34 fully loaded Abrams battle tanks, all in a roof that is smaller than an acre! It took over 100 fully loaded concrete trucks just to supply the material, and it was a non-stop process from start to finish. To watch load after load after load of concrete dumped into the hopper of the delivery boom and blown onto the roof in a seemingly endless stream of grey slurry was fascinating. (Authors note: I did shorten the viewing process slightly by actually only watching the first few and last few trucks but the principal holds).

Why did we make it so bloody heavy? Easy for those of you who watch natural disasters on the weather channel; to keep it there if we ever experience a very personal visit from a tornado. Twisters have a tendency to pull off or lift away a roof rather than push it in. We decided to leave the whole Wizard of Oz thing to someone else.

The end result is a roof with no edges for the wind to catch; no equipment on the roof to generate wind resistance, no penetrations through the roof for leak points (doesn’t matter if your roof stays when the wind ripped off your air conditioner and dumped water onto your equipment through the holes) and enough weight to stay put during an EF5 tornado. How many facilities to you know of that are totally secure in a 207 MPH storm? Puts a whole new spin on the humble roof!

Here are some past roof related blog posts we did during the construction process:

Setting Steel for the Roof

Roof Rebar

The Roof

Concrete Pouring Video

Please Contact Us if you would like more information or would like to see what’s under the roof. 

One online provider, Newegg.com, has been preparing for the shortage by raising prices. One example:

newegg.com price tracker, camelegg.com

This is just one example of a hard drive price increase recently. However, it is great that Newegg.com allows you to price track their products. If you have been considering purchasing a HDD and are worried about the price increase, go to camelegg.com. Search for a product and see what the price has been doing. You can even set it to alert you when the price drops where you want it. Pretty neat.

How will this affect the rest of us? Data centers focused on storage, like Amazon for example, will probably be paying more for HDDs. PC and server manufacturers will likely be hit as well. Time will tell how far reaching this shortage will be. Western Digital will be hit pretty hard, while Seagate, who wasn’t affected as much, will probably gain from the raising prices.

Relevant blogs and articles:

James Hamilton’s Blog

Marc Bevand’s Blog: Zorinaq

ExtremeTech.com Article

DataCenterKnowledge.com

The 2011 Monsoon Season in Thailand has affected more than 3 million people, leaving 506 dead. We are keeping those affected in our thoughts during this tragedy.

Things like this do happen and we all need to be prepared. Whether or not you have offsite backup or disaster recovery, you should make sure your servers aren’t near ongoing construction, overhead water pipes or windows. The equipment should not be in a basement or first floor, if possible. This reduces the chances of water damage from flooding. This won’t help you if a pipe bursts on a higher floor like at Abilene Christian University where a pipe burst due to cold temperatures and flooded the third floor back in February. The school’s IP server was damaged and no new computers could be connected to their network.  That seems like a fairly lucky incident. Lost data or lost internet connectivity would have been much worse for staff and students.

Not everyone is as fortunate. Last year, a water main break caused a massive flood in the basement of the Dallas County Records Building in Texas. Their servers were located on the fifth floor but UPS systems and key electrical equipment were six feet under water in the basement. The County had no backup system at the time. It took three days to get critical computer systems back in place. During those three days, half of the civil courts and one-third of the criminal courts could not operate. Police officers were unable to run background checks during traffic stops. The building remained closed to the public for a month and the reported cost of repairs: $10 million dollars.

This is a risky business. Lacking a backup system leaves you extremely vulnerable in the event of a disaster. Some business couldn’t bounce back from an incident like Dallas County, Texas suffered. According to the Red Cross, 40% of small businesses do not reopen after a major disaster. A water main break might not be a major disaster but what about ice and snow causing impassable roads and power outages? What about a tornado, hurricane, fire or flood? Do you have a contingency plan for these situations?

Downtime is easily avoidable and Data Cave can help.

Questions? E-mail us at info@thedatacave.com or call 866-514-2283