Why Managed Colocation Can Be A Strategic IT and Business Investment

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The following is a textual translation and summary of InfinIT’s podcast: Why Managed Colocation Can Be A Strategic IT and Business Investment

INTRODUCTION:

Welcome to the next edition of InfinIT Consulting’s podcast series.  Our goal is to provide insight on the best IT solutions in the marketplace and address some of the most common business challenges small businesses to enterprise companies deal with. 

Today we will be talking about our partnership with UnitedLayer – a high end Managed Colocation company.  InfinIT works very closely with UnitedLayer to offer our customers customized colocation and managed services solutions.

We have three speakers with us today:

  • Sean Tario, UnitedLayer’s Director of Business Services. 
  • Pete Sclafani, UnitedLayer’s Director of Marketing and Product Development.
  • Marcos Barrera, InfinIT Consulting’s Senior Sales Engineer who will be the moderator for today’s podcast.

 

QUESTION/ANSWER SESSION:

Question:

I want to start off today by allowing you to introduce who UnitedLayer is and why you are a prominent data center in both San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Answer:

[Sean Tario]
I just want to thank both Kirsten and Marcos for having us here today as well as InfinIT Consulting. UnitedLayer is a colocation, managed services and IP transit company.  We also offer transport services between a number of data centers in and around the Bay Area and Los Angeles. We’re not technically a data center company – we actually lease space from large real estate holders who actually build out the data centers themselves, so that’s a good distinction to make.  Companies like Equinex and SAVIS, formerly SAVIS, they’ve since sold all of their data center space, actually own the facility and manage the diesel generators outside and then they lease the space inside the facilities to companies like us that offer 24x7 support and manage the clients who have power and space needs inside of the data center.

Question:

What are the main benefits for a company to move into a facility like yours as opposed to keeping their systems in-house?

Answer:

[Pete Sclafani]
There are a couple of benefits.  One of them is going to be the sheer management.  So if you like at managing any sort of infrastructure, whether it be servers or databases, there’s going to be a cost associated with having people on-call 24x7 to handle those problems.  Companies like UnitedLayer and InfinIT really address that need head on by saying – let us handle that, let us worry about that – and let the business worry about what their core competency is, which is their application or what makes them money.

Question:

So, as a company, what does UnitedLayer offer new clients that come in?  What is your core business?

Answer:

 [Sean Tario]
The primary core to our business is offering power that will never go down for your infrastructure.  If PG&E’s power grid goes down, you don’t have to worry about that – that’s what we have UPS generator backups and diesel generators for. We have been very fortunate up in San Francisco, despite PG&E going down two or three times a year, we have not lost power once inside of our data center. Our infrastructure has worked, which unlike many other facilities in San Francisco, we are proud to say.

The primary benefit I would say is being able to provide that level of service – you have power and cooling – these facilities are built for infrastructure. They are built for companies to have their servers, routers, switches, load balancers and firewalls within these facilities.  Whereas, if you build a similar infrastructure inside of your own company or just a storage closet that you want to throw this into, you will run into power problems, you will run into cooling problems. And the cost of power is also going to be significantly higher if you store it within your office because we’re dealing with megawatts of power at a time.  We can get a drastically reduced power rate from PG&E, as opposed to you having a direct bill from PG&E for just using a couple kW.

[Marcos Barrera]
So that leads well into what we do as well and our partnership together.  What we have been seeing lately with our customers is a number of users leaning towards virtualization, which basically means they are stacking a bunch more processing power, a bunch of RAM into these boxes and they are putting multiple systems onto a single server.  So, the potential for those to go down now becomes increasingly problematic.

[Pete Sclafani]
Well, whether it be a small or larger enterprise – you’re right. If you have one server that goes down and it’s the Accounting server, you can bring that up pretty easily. But if it’s the Accounting, Marketing and also CRM – it leads to much bigger problems – it’s your entire corporate life.

Question:

UnitedLayer offers a very niche market when it comes to Managed Services – in particular Linux. Can you elaborate a bit more on that feature set?

Answer:

[Pete Sclafani]
We’ve initially looked at our servers as really a platform for developing other products and services, which I think applies to my title as well.  But, even underneath the servers that we deploy for our customers, we have the monitoring systems in place to really track the relevant pieces of those servers – CPU usage, hard disk space, different applications being monitored, etc. We take a very holistic view toward our servers – and try to act as a partner or consultant with our customers as opposed to just setting up their servers and walking away and having them keep paying their bill. It’s a different approach – one that resonates also very well with InfinIT. 

[Sean Tario]
Specifically on the Unix/Linux side of things, we just happen to have the expertise in house to manage those operating systems.  So, whether it’s RedHat, whether it’s CentOS, Fedora or Debian, we’ve just found that like the diesel generators at the facility, they are the most rock-solid, true, tried and tested. You can use other operating systems if you’d like.  If you have Microsoft Managed Services needs, that’s when we come to InfinIT, the great partnership that we have, we refer the business your way. But if you’re looking for more of an open source, Debian/CentOS environment, that’s what we do best and that’s what we manage.

Question:

Where do you see the future of UnitedLayer?  We’ve had discussions on your plans to expand internationally, which leads well into our global customers looking for multiple facilities and geo-clustering.  What is your future?

Answer:

[Sean Tario]
What we’re trying to do is be the preferred, go-to infrastructure enabler and platform for companies. They know that if they come to us, they’re going to have more of a consultant approach rather than a product/service approach where this is the product that we have and if you fit into this mold, great, if you don’t, see ya. We’re trying to partner with companies like InfinIT, who have the general area of expertise outside of just colocation space and power and/or open source Linux/UNIX managed services, so that we can truly provide a platform for people to work with.  We want to have systems staggered from Hong Kong to San Francisco to Dublin for disaster recovery and that they might have a mix between some colocation and some managed services.  Maybe our customers want their testing environment and their on a managed services environment, but they want their production environment on their own infrastructure.  All we have to do is take down those specifications and then we go out and contact different provides that either work directly for us and with us or the partners that we have.  For example, we partner with AboveNet, who can provide the transit or transport from one facility to another facility.

Question:

So, how do you decide on what facilities you put your presence in? How did you choose 200 Paul?  How did you choose 1 Wilshire? And why should a customer care?

Answer:

[Pete Sclafani]
It really comes down to – where are the users? Los Angeles, for example, is very strong for having a media backbone, a lot of content is generate there. The Bay Area is infamous for having a very high concentration of Internet users. So we figure out, okay how do we keep all these users connected – and that’s where all of the high level T1 carriers, such as Comcast and Verizon are going to be.  Everyone wants to cross connect and do it in one place, not ten blocks away from each other. The closer you are to those nexus points, the better experience your users are going to have, whether it’s an enterprise application or just a user downloading a file. 

[Marcos Barrera]
So, basically it’s just because the nodes between you and your computer and that hub is less, right? So, you’re close to the cloud which makes your application that much faster and that much more accessible?

[Sean Tario]
Correct.  Those major hubs are primarily London, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Dubai, San Francisco, Chicago, Ashburn Virginia, Dallas Texas, Seattle Washington.  Around the world, those are the major points.

You’ve got European companies that are growing and expanding and they want disaster recovery, so they want their infrastructure in the United States, or they want it in Asia. Then, you’ve got the Asian companies and they’re growing and they want their infrastructure in the Sates or Europe.  No matter where you are, all of our clients are also asking for disaster recovery.  So that’s why we’re expanding and taking up a large presence in Ashburn, Virginia.  But even those people are saying, we want to be outside of the U.S. – just in case. That’s why we plan to pick up space in Dublin very soon. But then those clients in Dublin are going to say that they want to be somewhere else. So, we’re going to have the facilities to put them wherever they need to be. Every new facility that we go into or that we partner with, they’re going to say ‘hey, we need space somewhere else’ and we can have that location for them.

Question:

Where do you see the industry going?

Answer:

[Pete Sclafani]
I can say from a Marketing standpoint, then Sean can chime in from the business services side.  From Marketing and Product Development, what we’ve been seeing is that the trend has been that colocation is a commodity.  Anywhere you go, you can get real estate. You can get a rack of gear and power.  Uptime is obviously a key issue, so that has been a key differentiator.  When you look at Managed Services and any other additional pieces – we really see the different being not just customer service, but customer empowerment.  Previously, it’s been, as long as someone picks up the phone, everything’s fine. What we’re running into now, customers want more control, but they need it in a scalable fashion.  Our strategy is going to be, how do we create a customer portal and make it functional: how can they reboot a server from their portal?  How can they do all these things that right now they have to log onto all these different interfaces, and some customers may have it and some customers may not.  Again, we’re really transitioning from a customer service model and moving towards a customer empowerment model. That is really going to be a differentiating factor for us. That’s a trend that’s going to happen – in fact, it’s happening now.  UnitedLayer is really positioning themselves to stay ahead of the curve on that, which we are very excited about.

[Sean Tario]
What’s interesting about that question is that it’s going to change every five days with the expansion and rate of change in technology.  What we can see as the foreseeable future is going to change next week, but standing here today looking to the next five years in the future, the facilities that are coming out have a much higher power density.  So, they are putting more and more clients and heavy gear into their cabinets and cages, which require more and more power.  Because you have a finite amount of power and a finite amount of real estate, they’re pumping massive pipes of power into these facilities.  So, instead of putting 120 volts on a circuit into a cabinet, you can put four or five thirty amp circuits and have that within the entire facility, which makes it a whole lot easier for companies like us that need to manage the cooling of all this equipment, if we know that we have that as a standard on the floor. 

Going on about the advancement of technology, we were just recently at the Stanford Data Center Research Center, they’ve got all sorts of crazy new cooling units that they’re releasing through their APC that will allow you to cool down a whole lot of equipment in a very small and confined space.  You’re not going to need these massive HVAC units anymore – they’re going to be consolidated and these cabinets are going to be enclosed units and its going to leverage the heat that’s going to be produced to actually create the cooling.  I think people are starting to take more of a holistic approach, they’re taking more of a sustainable approach, so they’re trying to think creatively and outside of the box.  This industry has really only grown over the last 20 – 25 years, so the rate of change is extremely high.  The advancements of technology are going to make it so that you can fit much more equipment in a smaller amount of space and be able to cool it effectively and efficiently. 

But, what’s really interesting, is what happens five, seven, ten years from now when all the infrastructure in the ground is being used up.  The rate of people using video online is essentially filling all of the pipes.  They are either going to have to spend trillions of dollars laying more fiber, or they are going to have to find some other way to do it.  Either WiMax is going to have to be used in one way, shape or form or they’re going to have to start developing routers in space.  There are actually a few consultants that we work with that are actually developing that project right now. The future of this industry is – the sky is the limit – who knows?

Question:

As we’re talking about Managed Services, for a new client coming in, how can you describe a dedicated service from a managed server?  Where do you see the key benefits and advantages of each?

Answer:

[Sean Tario]
Marcos, that’s a great questions. What’s important to note is that everyone uses the term ‘managed services’ differently, so you really have to define what that means. It has become quite the industry buzz word – like ‘green’ or ‘sustainable’.  A dedicated server means that you provision a server with hard drives and RAM and you give root access to the customer and you let them do what on it. Initially, we install the operating system for you and then we make sure that the system never loses power. Or, if you have a hard-drive failure, we’ll replace the hard drives, or if you need RAM upgrades we can do upgrades for you.  But a managed server – which I’ll let Pete talk about - is a little bit different.

[Pete Sclafani]
We should clarify - even a dedicated box is managed to an extent, because we do still manage the network port that goes in.  We know whether or not you’re getting traffic to that box.  Additionally, if power goes out, it’s managed, so we’re on the hook for that as well as it is in our facility. So, in some degree they are managed.  But, as we go up the stack, that’s where we start managing more on the operating system level.  So, we’ll actually take control over the operating system and we’ll actually have root access, not the customer. We will give the customer access to do certain things for their application.  But, what that allows us to do is provide a very homogenous environment, where the customer can be assured that they have access rights to do whatever they need to do to get their application to work and pushing releases live.  But at the same time, for us on the support side, we’re now managing the OS, which means we’re on the hook for the stability of that operating system.  So, that way a customer can still break a box, but at least we have the control and the login to go in and fix it very easily and very quickly.  It requires that we essentially learn the business that customer is in because different customers are going to use servers in different ways.  We need to be able to speak intelligently about it, understand it.  This may be an online media company or a social networking company.  Under the hood it’s all the same, it’s a matter of how they use it that’s going to be different. 

[Marcos Barrera]
Then ideally, the more customer base that you have, the more experience you have, and then the more direction you can give to a new fledgling company looking for a particular solution that maybe doesn’t have that expertise in-house. They know they have a brilliant idea that they want to develop – maybe they have a full development team – and they come to you saying ‘we have all this, how do we make it scalable?’

That’s where the consulting side of things comes into play. For example, we have a lot of companies that say – we’re a multimedia startup and we’re going to be pushing a lot of content and a lot of video, we have no idea what type of server or bandwidth commitment we’re going to need. So, that’s where we can look at the history of the clients we have, the hundreds of clients in our space, pull out the fifteen or sixteen or so that are in that specific niche, look at those metrics then go back to the customer and say – here’s what worked for these customers, this should work for you. Then, what we can do is reassess them every three months.  Looking through the different monitoring tools that we have, we can look at the bandwidth and look at the capacity on the hard drives and we can get back to them and say – okay it’s been three months, everything is fine and should run smoothly for you – or we can say – it looks like you’re going to need some more capacity so let’s revise our original plan. We can do whatever they need to help them scale their business.

[Marcos Barrera]
Let’s talk about scalability then.  We live and work in the Valley that’s the ‘garage idea capital of the world’.  So, you have these people that are coming up with the next big thing.  From a scalability standpoint, how do you leverage your experience, equipment and managed services offerings to provide people to quickly develop an idea, put it on one server and then the next thing they know is that they’re the next big thing. What do you do in that case?

[Pete Sclafani]
There are two things that UnitedLayer does very well.  One of those is our human capital – so we have a lot of great expertise in-house and we’re not afraid to use them or get them in front of customers and share their expertise.  UnitedLayer works very hard to be transparent and we really believe in doing knowledge sharing with our customers.  We’ll even introduce customers to each if we think there is a synergy there and they can both learn from each other.  When it comes to build vs. buy, we’re very keen on looking at best of breed technology partners.  For us, we realize the benefits of having a technology partner – they can provide that scalability option.  Typically, solutions residing in our space tend to be homegrown or cobbled together.  For example, some of our competitors will offer standard backup product ‘xyz’ for a standard cost.  But that won’t necessary be the best solution for that company or for the competitor if it does not provide the scalability that they are looking for. It may work initially, but it doesn’t pay off in 6 months to 1 year when they get those ‘facebook numbers’.  So, that’s why we look directly to those best of breed technology partners that give us insight on those truly scalable solutions, then we integrate those into the our Managed Services platform. So the servers are one piece, and as we add on backups, load balancers, firewalls – all those other pieces – that’s where those best of breed scalable technology partners really start making sense.

[Sean Tario]
The key is, there are two different types of clients: you’ve got the Managed Services client and the Dedicated Server client, where we can just provide them boxes or something like the Compellent solution that can provide infinite storage on demand, which will help prevent any downtime from occurring when you try to add more capacity. For the colocation clients, we’re simply trying to provide the space.  We’re constantly striving to find more space.  We just took up twenty-thousand more square-feet two months ago at our facility in 200 Paul, San Francisco.  We’re going to be picking up another fifteen-thousand square-feet in the next three months because the demand is there.  That’s why we are constantly growing our presence.  So, if you want to hire us on for consulting, we can help consult you as to the best layout and design and just deploy you into the locations that you need to be deployed.  But on the Managed Services side, as Pete was saying, we want to help you architect something.  For example, we want to throw load balances in there or we want to segment your database server from your file server and your web server, so that those too can scale accordingly. We want to keep your production environment totally separate from your development environment. So that your production environment can grow and scale while you keep your development environment small and manageable. 

Some people want disaster recovery, which means you have to have a mirrored copy of what you have in production running simultaneously in another environment somewhere else.  Some people just want backup – so if that’s all you want, that’s where the Compellent solution comes into play. There are a lot of different variables that come into play when it comes to scalability – you have to be aware of what those variables are and how they affect your business. Every business is different; everyone’s needs are completely different.

Questions:

Disaster recovery should be a big topic for every business.  What is the idea disaster recovery solution?

Answer:
[Sean Tario]
From a colocation standpoint – and I’ll let Pete talk from a Managed Services angle – disaster would be PG&E loses power, or whatever the grid is that is connected to the facility goes out. What happens immediately at that point, the PG&E or electrical feed then comes through a battery backup, something that we call a UPS.  That immediately reads that there is no more power coming from the electrical grid, so it switches on automatically.  That provides a good 7 – 10 minutes for the diesel generator that is sitting outside to kick on.  It depends on the facility, but 200 Paul for example uses a diesel generator as well as our facility in Los Angeles. So, that backup battery essentially acts as a buffer until the generators come on.  We can also provide an ‘n+1’ configuration, which essentially means that we have an extra backup or generator standing by just in case the primary one that is supposed to kick on, doesn’t kick on. The diesel generator will then kick on after about 30 seconds to a minute, the battery system will then click back off.  And our view is, if these crucial facility operations don’t work, there are other major factors at work that you need to be concerned about.  These are the primary aspects to think about on the colocation side of disaster recovery.

[Pete Sclafani]
San is right, when you look at the colocation side it’s a very physical mentality.  You’re looking at these humongous generators, a bunch of batteries, and just making sure that the systems don’t go down.  When you look at disaster recovery from the services angle, you’re really concentrating on business continuity.  How can we get or recovery our data as quickly as possible to not affect our business.  Do you have a five-minute downtime window? Do you have a 10-minute downtime window? Do you want active sites running concurrently; for example having a geo-load balanced solution across the country so your East Coast customers see your East Coast database which is being synchronized live throughout the entire day – if one goes down, the other then becomes the primary, until the other one comes back up.  There are all sorts of strategies associated with that, but because on the Managed Services side, we control the servers, we control the networking and the infrastructure and we also have this physical aspect to it.  It really gives us this nice overhead view to come up with a viable solution depending on what the customer’s needs are.  If you only have the colocation piece, you have a very limited scope in what you can see into.  Working with someone like UnitedLayer and InfinIT is really when that expertise comes into play.  You can really develop a strategy that spans the globe as opposed to just a local strategy.  The minute you start looking at the big picture, you really need a larger partner to help talk to you through and come up with the best solution.

Question:

What is your niche market?  Obviously enterprise customers have an array of solutions available to them – but what about the small to mid-market customers?  What options do they have?

Answer:

You actually hit on an extremely important and key question for small and midsize businesses – and that I – how important is it that your online presence is up and running, live and active?  Most small companies and startups say – well if I ever reach that time where my website is getting so much traffic that I don’t know how to scale it, that would be a great problem to have. My response to that is – you’re out of your mind. Especially if being live and online is your business.  Because you’re going to be talking about weeks, if not months of downtime if you do not plan for that ahead of time.  If your company’s infrastructure is at the core of your business, it has to be first and foremost on your mind, and you have to architect it the right way at the beginning so that it can scale.  The unfortunate reality is that a lot of businesses don’t do that. So, they have one massive server that they keep everything on and it’s stored in their mom’s garage somewhere.  And when they do start gaining traffic and realize that they actually have to start taking these things seriously and they need to move to a distributed architecture – it’s going to take them months to move all of that data from that one server.  And they might have to rearchitect their entire application while they’re at it as well.  So yes, that’s a very key question that really needs to be ingrained and embedded into the minds of small to midsize business owners.  If you’re planning on being big, and growing big, you need to take this seriously. 

[Marcos Barrera]
 Since we focus on the infrastructure side, for a lot of customers that we walk into, we always ask – what is the cost of your downtime?  And that is not a question that is most to many companies by IT professionals, but it should be.  Business owners are so concentrated on growing the business – but to what extent?  You can only focus on growing your business for so long  before your business productivity is tied to IT.  And it gets to the point where if your business goes down, you actually lose money.  If it’s just employee salary, that’s one thing, but what if you stop making sales all together.  The widgets stop going out the door – that is a quantifiable cost.  Keeping that up actually becomes a top priority.

[Sean Tario]
If you’re running an ecommerce website, you’ll see that immediately. If your site goes down for a week or a month, that creates a perception that you are no longer in business and your user will quickly go somewhere else.  In this day and age, people constantly have new information flooding at them every second – they will just Google another company and purchase your product or service from the next company on the list. If you’re not up and running, you probably have no idea how much business you might be losing, most likely ten times more than you ever imagine. So that’s the key question every business must consider.

[Pete Sclafani]
We have a customer that is an RSS Feed Aggregator that was impacted by a competitor of ours and essentially the outage to their facility created its own problems.  Of course they lost power, but the real issue is that their site need to be brought back up in a very specific order and when the power came back on and tried to automatically bring up the site, it created all of these auxiliary problems and completely broke the site. So, what happened to this company is that they were truly crippled for a matter of months.  So, for other environments that simply have functionalities that switch on or off, they really create a whole array of other problems for customers that they didn’t anticipate.  So, this is the benefit for having a Managed Services colocation partner, someone that you can go to and someone that really knows the ins and outs of your application. 

[Sean Tario]
The great thing about working with someone like InfinIT or UnitedLayer is – this is what we do for a living, this is what our specialty is.  So, you can pay a little bit of money, or less than the equivalent of paying someone full time to manage this for you, and have mountains of engineers that are backing the decisions that are being made.  When someone says – well, I can’t afford to hire a $150,000 systems engineer – you don’t need to.  You can literally spend a fraction of that to hire someone like Marcos working for you full time.  Having all of our expertise behind the construction of the infrastructure that is supporting your business is extremely important.  For us at UnitedLayer, we love getting in front of people and helping them stay informed about what variables can impact your business.

[Marcos Barrera]
 There is no need to re-invent the wheel when it comes to IT. There are enough changes on a daily basis when it comes to new and improved technologies that is difficult enough for our entire team to handle – let alone assigning that task to one team member, you’re talking about a very high-end engineer.

[Pete Sclafani]
There is a key difference between a technology partner and a technology provider.  I think both of our companies see things in a very similar fashion, where a technology partner is out there educating the customer because we already have that expertise in-house.

[Sean Tario]
We’re not just offering a product and a service, we’re offering a solution that is going to help you and we’re offering an entire team that is going to help you.

 

CONCLUSION:

Thank you for joining us for today’s podcast.  You can access our entire podcast series anytime on-demand through our website at www.infinITconsulting.com

Be sure to join us for the next topics in our podcast series.  We will be covering the hottest topics in the industry including virtualization, SAN storage solutions as well as key products  including MOSS 2007, Exchange Server 2007, SQL Server and the newest Windows Server 2008 – Longhorn. 

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ADDITIONAL COMMENTS:

[Sean Tario]

I realized though that I said something that I have since learned is simply wrong.  Specifically, when I respond to "Where do you see the industry going?" with "But, what's really interesting, is what happens five, seven, ten years from now when all the infrastructure in the ground is being used up.  The rate of people using video online is essentially filling all of the pipes. " 

The bottleneck in fact is not the fiber in the ground, but the routers and switches at each POP receiving and sending packets of information. Specifically, the technology exists to send Terabytes per second and the capacity is available within the fiber in the ground, however the switches and routers receiving and sending this information at best can only push 40 Gbps at a time.  Thus, a forklift upgrade will need to be done at each major and minor pop to replace the gear with more advanced and capable equipment to support the load going across the wires.  This is entirely separate from a discussion about IP space however, specifically the fact that we are running out of IP space on the v4 protocol and thus the new v6 protocol has been slowly released. 

This too however will mean a forklift upgrade to the way the current system works, and though something that can be done over time, will result in serious changes to the way the infrastructure running the internet works.

[Pete Sclafani]

Sean, I would say that your statement is true to an extent. A couple years ago - Gigabit speeds were only possible via fiber. Then came multiplexing, then 10G - etc. We keep finding ways to transmit more information over the same pipe - but given the level of bandwidth required to truly bring ambient connectivity to the cloud - infrastructure will still have to be addressed and capacity will still require "ripping up the streets".

Scenario - you have a 1G fiber infrastructure. You need more capacity - how do you address it? You put in multiple strands. 5 years later, 10G infrastructure becomes attainable - but now you need 100G of capacity - so you add more strands again!

By assuming that content generation / usage will stay constant, your remarks could be construed as false. But I understood your statement as "content continues to be increasing in type and density - faster than the routing / decoding technology is expanding"

Example - streaming MPG2 (DVD) quality video is ok - but even on-demand offerings only do so with limited selections. So streaming true HD content? We are several years away from that - and by then there will be a new video codec/standard that allows for more detail or interactivity that will require more horsepower.

I don't know about you - but the dream of "Fiber to the Home" has been in every geek's dreams since the dot-com days - but it is most definitely not how things are right now. The infrastructure is just not up to it - and it's going to require an investment. Look at the many municipal wifi programs that have crashed and burned. Cities were looking for an easier way to bring broadband to constituents without having to invest in physical infrastructure.

Case in point - my DSL is physically limited to 768down/128up because of my distance from the CO. Scary considering I live in the middle of San Jose and am surrounded by old infrastructure. Last week Comcast added fiber and replaced a bunch of the copper that used to be in use, so now I have access to 6Mb broadband speeds...

Capacity with fiber is generally limited to the bandwidth of the routers - but I would caution that with the need for multiple paths for traffic - their capacity will need be addressed during those technology "lag moments" where the need is there - but we physically can't fit it on the line with our current technology.

A recent news release published on CNET News.com discusses just this...
http://www.news.com/2100-1034_3-6237715.html

 

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About InfinIT Consulting - Bay Area IT Consulting Service Provider

InfinIT Consulting, Inc. specializes in high end IT consulting, database management solutions and web optimization to empower businesses to embrace the real potential of IT.

InfinIT Consulting focuses on helping small, midsize and enterprise companies resolve their IT challenges and ultimately facilitate their daily business operations. 

Their most demanded expertise includes IT managed services, IT integration for mergers and acquisitions, Sarbanes Oxley compliance, web portal design and implementation and IT infrastructure support and optimization. In addition, they offer a wide range of IT services including ERP project management, IT staff augmentation, data mining, database administration and web services including SEO, PPC campaign management, custom web design and web development

Their customers are located across the nation with worldwide branches allowing them to cover areas from coast to coast, Asia and Europe.

 

For more information, please direct all press inquiries to:

Audrey Olsen
InfinIT Consulting
aolsen@infinITconsulting.com
408.439.9596

Kirsten Burkhardt
InfinIT Consulting
kburkhardt@infinITconsulting.com
408.205.8415

 

 

 

InfinIT Consulting is a San Jose, Bay Area IT consulting firm specializing in custom IT solutions for midsize and enterprise companies looking to resolve business and IT challenges. Our top Bay Area IT consultants serve clients throughout the Silicon Valley - Bay Area, California and nationwide.