Clarity in Marketing Materials

Ignorance Isn’t Bliss: The Importance of Clarity & Accuracy of Marketing Material

“100% Uptime Guarantee.” Anyone who has ever hosted a server, worked at a collocation facility or even used an Internet connection knows that the ‘100% Uptime Guarantee’ is nothing but a marketing slogan. For most companies doing business on the Internet, it is not a service level they are getting from their providers. It may be a technically noble goal to aspire to, but guaranteeing it is a dangerous practice. So why do so many collocation facilities claim it? If you look at collocation facilities as an industry and compare it to other industries, the answer will become a little more clear.

Let’s compare industries. In construction, no contractor will guarantee that their building will remain erect. What if a 9.8 earthquake hits? What if there is flooding and the foundation becomes shaky, what if… that’s why you have insurance. With data hosting, you are also dealing with infrastructure: Physical buildings, fiber optic cable, servers, switches and routers.  Any one of these components could stop functioning or be damaged at any moment, rendering the ‘100% Uptime Guarantee’ unsustainable. Of course, some of these factors can be mitigated by geographically diversifying the suppliers, connections, and locations where equipment is hosted – but the system is still not 100%. So how is it that an industry such as construction, with such a long history is unable to make such a claim, but the telecommunications industry – a relative new comer – is comfortable making the 100% uptime claim?

In reality, most data hotels and hosting solutions (even the Tier 1 providers) can not make such claims for most of their customers. The costs are simply too great. For certain mission critical applications sufficient redundancies exist so that an uptime nearing 100% can be achieved, but that does not apply to most co-location centers.

Vancouver Colocation has a different strategy when communicating its uptime capability with its clients.  Instead of a relatively meaningless guarantee, we provide information on our equipment, infrastructure and disaster recovery procedures. Cumulatively, that information provides you with an accurate assessment of not only how likely it is that you will experience outages, but what processes are in place to minimize any potential outages.

As an example, we don’t wait for our backup equipment to be needed before testing their reliability. They undergo quarterly checks and annual parts replacements (where applicable). This kind of due diligence increases the likelihood that all systems continue functioning without interruption in the event of a large scale 3^rd party outage.

Contact us at 604-473-9700 for a full review and outline of our network infrastructure including our business continuity and emergency procedures plan. We’ll give you just the technical facts without a sales pitch!

Shaking Hands with Giants

Shaking Hands with Giants: Peering, Interconnects and Your Content

The old adage, “It’s better to be a big fish in a little pond, than a little fish in a big pond” doesn’t apply to the Internet. If you are big in a little pond, it just means your pond isn’t important. Interconnecting and Peering with big portals and international providers allow for the little fish to talk directly to the big fish and get their content out on the Internet without the costly infrastructure. But how does a little fish get to talk with the big giants? Vancouver Colocation is the answer.

Presence in major interconnect points is like having a membership at an exclusive club. You can sit there and not talk (No need to interconnect because your content is not latency, mission critical or time sensitive) or you can interconnect (talk to the famous and rich for a price – important if you have content you need to get out right away).  Vancouver Colocation can provide you with such opportunities. Alternatively, you can use our location and infrastructure to connect directly with the Tier 1 providers of our choice.  Either way, the opportunity is there to increase how quickly and to how many people your content is distributed. Your content could be anything from podcasts to snapshots of your newest painting.

As your traffic needs become more pronounced, so will your peering needs. Now you have enough content to be a big fish, and others will want to grab it from you and give you their content in return instead of charging you transit fees.  Peering arrangements can help reduce your costs for data transmission as well as increase your reach. This is what the Internet is all about – connecting to as many uplinks as possible resulting in as many distribution points as possible.

The other benefit of peering is reducing your dependency on one uplink while providing best possible routing. Traditionally it was thought an impressive benefit to have more than one uplink provider. But realistically, why just stop there? Why not have multiple. Peering does not set a limit for how many peers or uplink providers you can have – the more, the merrier. Doing the peering yourself can of course be costly (from an equipment point of view) but that is precisely why facilities such as Vancouver Colocation can provide the means to access interconnect points without the hassle of managing your own interconnect equipment.

Give us a call at 604-473-9700 to get a quote on our bandwidth pricing!

Hungry for Latency

Hungry for Latency: Why Latency Matters for Your Online Business

Imagine for a moment that you own and operate a thriving online business (it could be anything from hand woven picnic baskets to hosting corporate websites with flashy videos). You will of course have visitors to your site from all over the world who will want more information or desire to purchase what you are selling. Your customers will have certain expectations – that your product is useful, the value is good, and that the service is speedy. Before they can even experience all of those things, they have to be able to get to your site. And they have to get there quickly, from anywhere, anytime.

Welcome to the modern website dilemma. No longer is the singular problem of web success worrying about your website ranking , how your site is designed, or even convincing potential customers to buy what you are selling – the new problem is being more accessible than your competitor. The new problem is making sure your site is always accessible and available faster to more people than your competitors.

This is where latency becomes the key to success. Imagine you are running that corporate web hosting site and one of the services is streaming video. Streaming video looks cool but it eats up a lot of bandwidth. If you are hosted on a poor connection or in one location only, you might as well walk through the streets of  your local town handing out the video on CD’s. That will be the circle of your potential audience – people in other countries, never mind other continents, may experience too much latency when trying to access your content. Things will be slow, they will not stay, you will not be happy.

There are several ways to mitigate this problem. A hosting or co-location facility which interconnects with major providers, allowing for your content to be accessible by a larger audience is one example. Another solution is for your hosting company to Anycast over multiple, geographically varied servers. This will not only help with accessibility, but also increase redundancy (if your server in Guatemala goes down, no problem, people in Montreal can still access your site).

Accessibility is now a serious concern for businesses operating online. The Internet is becoming congested with more traffic and more businesses and one important and vital strategy for becoming noticed and getting new customers is the ability to get your site, your content and your product viewed by potential customers faster than a competitor.

At SmarttNet, we are constantly monitoring our latency and improving our network so that you can have the kind of speed and reliability your business needs.

Zinc Whiskers

Zinc Whiskers: Tiny Enemy, Big Problem

With the proliferation of data centers, the technologies used to house, cool and protect the various servers, switches, cables and power components have evolved as well.  Unfortunately some of these advancements are actually causing damage to such data center facilities. One such enemy creating havoc for raised floor installations and bigger headaches for system administrators are Zinc Whiskers.

Zinc Whiskers are collections of small metallic fibers which accumulate on various surfaces (specifically electroplated surfaces) over the life time of a data center. They can range from several microns to a few millimeters in length depending on how many fibers have interconnected. Raised floors which are not hot-dipped or sprayed are particularly susceptible to accumulation as they are the natural place for such zinc whiskers to settle over time and then become dislodged in large quantities once floor plating is shifted. The Zinc Whiskers then may float in the air until they settle again – sometimes ending up within server casings and in the worst case scenario, landing on the PCB boards which can cause short circuits.

The easiest solution for reducing both accumulation and the travel of Zinc Whiskers is proper air flow. Zinc Whiskers develop as a result of natural data center maintenance. Screwing/Unscrewing rack mounted hardware can create small filaments – which then accumulate because the raised floor tiles conduct air below the surface and push it directly into the racks. Outside of the rack enclosures there is no or little movement of air creating the perfect environment for Whiskers to develop.

Another overlooked but equally important concern of zinc whiskers is the danger to human health. As the size of the particles can vary from a few microns to a few millimeters, they can pose a health risk if inhaled. These combined factors combined with the management and upkeep of data centers can potentially make a raised floor data center a liability rather than an asset. Weigh the pros and cons carefully before co-locating your mission critical services at a raised floor data center.

The Co-Location facility at Vancouver Colocation  avoids this problem altogether by creating a hot aisle/cold aisle open rack system. Aside from constantly moving air in the entire data centre and reducing the likelihood of stagnant Zinc Whiskers forming, it has the secondary benefit of reducing hot pockets where air can linger and overheat one section of the data center. The hot/cold aisle architecture has been pre-designed in such a way that no additional cabling or ducting needs to be run, challenging the myth that raised floors are required for cable management and power distribution.