Certainly the most challenging discussion of the show, purely in terms of the amount of information to absorb and the breadth of understanding required was the conversation I had last Wednesday with Michael van Dijken and John Zanni of Microsoft, the company's main ambassadors to the hosting business, at least as far as conferences (and my own experience) are concerned.

The key point in their message at HostingCon this year was the emergence of the company's Hyper-V technology - the hypervisor virtualization engine for Windows Server 2008 that became officially available just a few weeks ago.

Most hosts are already aware of Hyper-V and its intended purpose. It's a virtualization technology designed as a core component of the Server 2008 operating system. Unlike a software-layer virtualization technology, such as Virtuozzo (which obviously has its hosting implementations), a hypervisor virtualizes a server at the hardware level, creating individual virtual instances of the operating system, so virtual machines can function fully independently of one another. Performance problems, errors and even attacks won't affect the performance of the other virtual machines hosted on the same server.

It's worth pointing out that while there is a huge amount of compatibility between many Microsoft and Parallels products, Virtuozzo and Hyper-V really represent two different visions of a "virtualized" environment. And while they aren't really intended to work together they are also not meant to compete.

The most apparent comparison for the Hyper-V technology is VMWare, which has been making its way into the hosting market for at least a year now, and represents an obvious challenge to Microsoft on the virtualization front. But Microsoft says there are certain up-front advantages to Hyper-V, among them being the deep integration with the operating system (Hyper-V is technically a part of Server 2008), its ease of operation through the System Center platform (particualrly through the Virtual Machine Manager, currently in beta) that controls most of the other server OS functions - and Microsoft's own considerable involvement, and investment, in the service provider space.

Hosting providers have their own initial impressions of what Hyper-V ought to mean to the hosting market. Its introduction has undoubtedly been as a tool for creating VPS-style hosting packages - we've reported on a handful of early offerings here at the WHIR from hosts with Hyper-V based VPS packages in various states of completion (including Layered Tech and SoftLayer). A lot of hosting providers develop for-free testing-ground type hosting packages using new products through Microsoft's "Go Live" licensing, and several brought Hyper-V solutions out that way.

But Zanni and van Dijken were careful to point out that the usefulness of Hyper-V to the hosting community definitely does not begin or end with VPS hosting packages.

The Hyper-V info section on the Microsoft website has a lot of information on the ways the technology can be used in a data center environment. Some of the ways it can be used by hosting providers include serving both Windows and Linux environments from the same machine and testing upgrades and other changes before bringing them live, as well as running multiple applications of the same physical server, or otherwise consolidating data center resources onto fewer machines.

Obviously, Hyper-V is important to the hosting space - it's just a function of the kind of clout that a company like Microsoft wields that when it launches a product like this, it quickly becomes sort of universally relevant, if not from a "deploy it immediately" perspective, then at least as an interesting aspect of Windows, worth noting and understanding.

By the sounds of it, that understanding is coming. The folks at Microsoft's HostingCon booth said the interest from attendees was encouraging. And you can pretty safely assume Microsoft isn't done promoting its virtualization technology (for one, it's promoting a launch event for its virtualization products on its website).

You can also count on the fact that we're not done covering Hyper-V here at the WHIR. There will be plenty of information to come, but I can really only remember so much from one conversation, not to mention a whole conference.

HostingCon was last week, I'm aware. But by the end of the show I had talked to more people, and absorbed more information, than I was able to blog about. So I-ll be filling in a few holes this week before all is said and done.

Normally I'm not one for hosting conference swag. I already have a stack of memory sticks I don't use, and enough t-shirts to go jogging every day from now to eternity without doing laundry (note: this is a slight exaggeration).

But when I stopped by the MailChannels booth at HostingCon last week to set up an interview with CEO Ken Simpson, I was surprised to find myself coveting their swag. I filled out a quick survey, and I walked away with one of these. The WHIR office is now considerably more rad.

MailChannels showed up at HostingCon with a veritable armory of Nerf weapons, and they were a hit - gone long before the show ended. As it turns out, this was one part of a confluence of facts that enabled the company to walk away from the conference with considerably more interested that it had expected.

According to Simpson, MailChannels- Traffic Control product was never designed as a product for the hosting business. He says a customer with a deep understanding of the anti-spam market got in touch with him, and let him know that the product was "perfect for hosts."

The Traffic Control solution uses "traffic shaping," which prioritizes and slows down suspicious traffic before it reaches the mail server. Some of the results of this is that bot-nets attempting to deliver spam tend to move on from the slow or unresponsive connections, and the slow-down gives more traditional filtering technologies more time to react, which massively lightens the mostly-spam workload of email servers.

I'll get more into the technical aspect of the application in an upcoming WHIR feature (and there's plenty of information - and a download link - on the MailChannels site), but some of the effects are massive reductions in the amount of email server hardware required, and (for hosts) enormous drops in the volume of support calls received about email and particularly spam.

This was enough to generate genuine interest from just about every hosting provider that stopped by the booth, according to Simpson. And on top of that he had a more hosting-oriented revenue-sharing model devised for hosts that want to incorporate the service as more of a paid-for offering to customers.

Assuming they threw away my survey (me being useless to MailChannels as a sales lead), they still walked away from HostingCon with something in the vicinity of 300 solid leads, said Simpson. And that, out of a field of roughly 1,500 attendees, was much more than satisfactory.

Apparently a very big stack of excellent swag and a genuinely intriguing proposition are a recipe for a successful HostingCon. Hopefully that-ll lead to the availability of more excellent stuff in years to come.

Also, by way of a further update, apparently the Nerf-related promotions aren't over for the company, which sent out an email last week following up. According to MailChannels, you can upgrade your "spam cannon" (which was how they were describing the toys they were giving away) to a THIS, via a couple of methods.

One of those methods was "attend a webinar next Wednesday at 12pm Eastern," which is my real reason for discussing the email.

That "Wednesday" it mentions is tomorrow. Sorry for the short notice, but if you-re interested in MailChannels or Traffic Control you still have time to check it out.

It was a few hours ago now, but this afternoon we held the draw for the 50" HDTV that has been brightening our networking lounge since Tuesday morning.

The winner was the lovely Dianne Stayton of Web Your Business, who seemed more than a little excited to have won the prize.

Congratulations to Dianne. We had a lot of fun at the networking lounge this year.

A while later, at the other end of the exhibit hall, most of the exhibitors who had prizes to give away took the stage at the presentation theater to announce the winners (the TV was a little bit big to bring over there).

At the conclusion of things, Keith Duncan of Ping! Zine took the stage. After a little grandstanding and the obligatory good-natured potshot at the WHIR, Duncan proceeded with the much-anticipated showstopper, giving five lucky winners the chance to sit on a motorcycle for a couple of seconds.

Nobody wins! Goodnight everyone!

I suppose it was understood in advance that there was really a very slim possibility that somebody would actually win the motorcycle (about 2 percent, I believe - five people each drawing a key from a bowl of 250, one of which apparently unlocked the box containing the actual key to the bike). But it was still a bit of a lame duck promotion, and it should have been apparent to everyone hyping it up that it could be a let-down as big end-of-show prize drawings go.

Sure, it would have been fun if, against all probability, somebody had actually won that motorcycle. As it turns out, there was a bit of "how do we know there's a real key?" and "let everyone take one more key." Nothing too serious, but it wasn't much fun. I'd rather have a Nintendo Wii.

Kudos to Keith for making a big to-do out of what basically amounted to nothing. I suppose it was a pretty good promotion at the end of the day.

By the way, you heard it here first: at HostingCon 2009, anyone who can throw a baseball from Navy Pier to the W hotel wins 100 spaceships, courtesy of the Web Host Industry Review (a challenge made all the more difficult by the fact that the event's going to be in Washington DC).

I'll keep this one brief. As many of you may already know we're giving away a really excellent tv this afternoon. It's pictured below. Just to give you an idea of its scale, I can say without exaggeration that the laptop sitting next to it is ten hundred feet tall.

Yeah. It's huge.

Anyway, we're doing the draw at 3pm. So you have about two hours to come over to the networking lounge (booth 627 - it's really big) and drop your business card in the fishbowl.

That really only takes about one minute. So you definitely have time.

Good luck!

Last Thursday, after the Microsoft Hosting Summit wrapped up, the WHIR contingent had the opportunity to tour Microsoft's Redmond, Washington campus with lead marketing manager for hosted solutions Michael van Dijken.

The tour actually began at the company's Bellevue office, just a few steps from the Westin hotel, where the conference took place.

We didn't spend much time at the Bellevue office, but we did get a chance to check out the lunchroom on the top floor which has a beautiful (dare I say, belle) view of Seattle - not to mention the very strangely enclosed immediate vicinity in Bellevue.

Over at the Richmond campus, the really remarkable thing is not necessarily the offices themselves - which from what we saw were about what you'd expect from any normal office space - but the overall scale of the campus itself.

It's probably fair to say that with a few exceptions scattered throughout, Microsoft's campus takes up about just all of what we saw of the city of Redmond (like Bellevue, a sort of suburb of Seattle). Obviously that's not entirely the case, but according to van Dijken, Microsoft currently has in the vicinity of 40,000 employees working at the campus. And according to Wikipedia, a recent census puts the city's population at somewhere in the range of 46,000. So anyway, it's close.

Another remarkable aspect of the campus is the fairly excellent job Microsoft has done building around the green parts of the city. There are trees - really huge trees, as a matter of fact - just about everywhere you look. Nice place to visit and, presumably, a nice place to work.

We spent a good chunk of our time in the Visitor Center, which provided some entertainment, as well as some of the best photo opportunities. I suppose it's a testament to my vanity that among my favorites was a picture of me, but there were some pretty amusing scenes - and it's my blog, so I suppose you'll have to bear with me just this once.

Another of the really interesting features of the campus was the "Connect" system Microsoft has in place. Because it's such a big place, the company - in an interesting eco-friendly undertaking - has set up a system of hybrid cars to shuttle employees between offices on-campus, which saves them from having to get into their cars to drive a mile or two. It's worth noting the sheer number of these shuttles. They were really everywhere, making up a sizeable percentage of the cars we saw on the streets.

Finally, we set up with Michael van Dijken for a WHIRtv interview. The full video of which can be viewed on the WHIRtv blog page.

These are just a few of the pictures I took on the tour. There are dozens more you can check out on our WHIR flickr page.

On Wednesday, Google was assigned the patent for something called the “Modular Data Center,” a distinction for which it applied in 2003, and which was given the final approval this week by the US Patent Office.

 

Specifically, the idea describes a data center built within an intermodal shipping container - the sort of container handled by multiple carriers and shipped in multiple modes.

 

The obvious application there being the sort of prototype mobile data centers that have been on the road the past few years, such as Sun’s Project Blackbox or, say, APC’s InfrastruXure Express.

 

The patent itself describes using rack or shelf mount computing systems, mounted and configured to be shipped and operated within the container (A lot of that is, from what I can tell, language taken directly from the patent, just barely paraphrased).

 

So it would seem that Google managed to patent the (very general sounding) idea behind some of the more interesting data center construction projects in recent years. However, the point here is not “what about Project Blackbox?” As many of the writers covering Sun’s Project Blackbox tour were quick to point out, the mobile data center is not so much a breakthrough as a refinement. HP and IBM have offered things like this for a while – to customers who were willing to pay.

 

The idea, according to this Register article, seems to be that Google is unlikely to set out immediately to impose its patent rights on companies like Sun, given its past complaints about the injustice of the patent system. But it’s not clear just what Google does intend to do, or whether the company has modular data centers either in production or operation.

 

According to The Register, Sun is aware of the patent issued Wednesday, but is holding off on making any sort of comment about it until the company is better acquainted with just how it stands to be impacted.

This week, Bob Parsons had Go Daddy’s new spokesman Chad Johnson as a guest on his Internet radio show, the recently renamed Go Daddy Live.

 

Assuming you concern yourself with such things, you’re probably aware of Johnson’s position – flashy Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver. Johnson is a perennial challenger for the league lead in receiving yards, always scoring more than a few touchdowns, and more often than not celebrating those touchdowns in exceedingly theatrical ways.

 

Johnson is regularly fined by the league for his behavior, a fact that was discussed on the Parsons program. He says it doesn’t bother him though. He tries to put a positive spin on it by matching the league fines he faces and donating them to the Feed the Children foundation, a charity with which Johnson does some work.

 

He even said he’s trying to talk the league into making sure the fines themselves go to the same organization.

 

Parsons piped up at that point, promising a donation of $50,000 to the foundation if Johnson were to perform a “Go Daddy dance” as his celebration after a touchdown. Johnson, of course, said he’d try to work it in.

 

All very straightforward, except I was left wondering what exactly I was looking for. What exactly does a “Go Daddy dance” look like?

 

As if they were reading my mind, I received a press announcement form Go Daddy on Friday that, among other things, explained what I’d be looking for:

 

“Chad would be doing the same dance made famous by the original Go Daddy Girl Candice Michelle.

   

"You may recall the GoDaddy Girl commercial was pulled by FOX during the 2005 Super Bowl because the spoof on the Janet Jackson ‘wardrobe malfunction’ was not ‘in keeping with the tenor of the game.’  It aired only once during the 2005 Super Bowl."

 

I do, in fact, recall that dance. For those who don’t, Go Daddy explains:

 

“If you see Chad Johnson highlights after Sunday's game and notice him celebrating with both arms up and his hips swirling... that means the www.FeedTheChildren.org organization will receive a $50,000 donation in Chad's name.”

 

Full disclosure: the Bengals happen to be playing the Seahawks as I write this. And the Seahawks happen to be my team. With all due respect to the children, I’d personally prefer Chad keep his swirling hips out of the end zone until next week.

It’s always a little bit funny to me when I find myself genuinely interested by a fact that is technically irrelevant. And such is sometimes the way with revelations about the physical locations of hosting companies.

 

That kind of exploration is usually beyond the means of someone like myself, typically tied to the same location. And, as I pointed out, the physical location of a hosting company is often irrelevant to the operation of its business.

 

For the local paper, it’s a bit of a different story, though. This article in the Chicago Sun-Times describes a part of that town it describes (maybe a little glibly) as “Chicago’s hosting boulevard.”

 

A good chunk of the article is a sort of profile of the hosting provider FastServers, and its young CEO Ian Andrusyk. Certainly an interesting story, but old news from a people-who-know-things-about-Web-hosting point of view. Elsewhere, the article discusses Server Central, located just down the street, and helped by the similarly young Jordan Lowe.

 

Interesting comparison, certainly. But I’m a little disappointed that the hosting concentration on W. Jackson Blvd. amounts mostly to two companies: FastServers at 175 and Server Central at 209.

 

Nevertheless, the idea of a neighborhood with a concentration of hosting businesses, outside of the obvious examples that exist in telco hotels or similar facilities, is sort of intriguing. There are examples of similar occurrences in places like Houston, and I can only assume elsewhere.

 

I’m not absolutely sure whether there are specific benefits that either company could see from having another hosting company operating on the same block. But it gets you thinking. 

 

Maybe they have picnics.

HostingCon has a bit of a reputation as being the event for the Web hosting business. The singular focus of the event, makes it specifically relevant to a certain base of attendees, which in turn makes it particularly possible for those attendees to do business.

 

That’s not so much a criticism of other events per se, but an attempt to highlight the specific strength of HostingCon, which appears to be that you can, very specifically, put your finger on the business value of the thing. You can see the deals going down all around you. And if you’re in the right business, it’s very easy to come across the sorts of people you want to talk to.

 

 

What I mean is that I’m on board with that assertion that HostingCon is the event for the Web hosting business. And a lot of the value, it seems to me, lies in the resource represented by the people in attendance.

 

It’s hard to dispute that there exists a hosting business. It’s right there – a tangible thing that leaves no room for confusion. But I’ve always been sort of unsure about the somewhat nebulous notion of a hosting community.

 

But I left HostingCon this year with the feeling that this community exists. In the sessions, the shared ideas and just about every element of the event, there was a sort of unity of purpose.

 

Sure, there are notable Web hosting companies like Go Daddy or Web.com that presumably stand to gain very little from an environment like this - or, really, from interacting with other hosting providers in this way. But that doesn’t make the community any less relevant.

 

So what?

 

Well, there’s potential in a community. And there’s power in that potential. Web hosts could use that power to steer the business in the right directions. There are questions in the Web hosting world that can’t be answered by a single individual, company or authority. Those issues were present at HostingCon, whether in terms of technology or ethics.

 

I’m interested to see whether that community goes about answering those questions, and what those answers might be.

This is probably going to be a pretty brief post. There’s not really that much that needs to be said. It's something that needs to be seen (though, admittedly, the “need” is totally subjective). But I firmly believe it’s worth noting when a technology company’s efforts to produce funny or, dare I say, “cool” promotional materials are successful.

 

Apparently I missed the video clip in which Hewlett-Packard shoots a server cabinet with a gun to illustrate the notion that it’s equipment is “bulletproof” - a semantic distinction I might quibble with, given the fairly large hole the bullet leaves in the cabinet.

 

So I wasn’t precisely aware that HP was at it again when I read this blog post by Computerworld’s Robert L. Mitchell, which points to this HP-produced video clip, in which some men in white lab coats blow up a functioning set of data center equipment in order to demonstrate the company’s disaster recovery capabilities.

 

Anyhow, HP is at it again, evidently. With pretty amusing results. I suppose if you’re a frustrated network administrator, you might take some visceral pleasure in the violent destruction of the hardware. Of course, there’s the demonstration of the technology, which is no less interesting to witness.

 

And I couldn’t let an amusing promotional clip go by without taking the opportunity to fondly recall the Mr. T clip from Hitachi Data Systems.