isabel wang's blog

Brave New World

1. A long, long time ago, a friend of a friend quit her job at a big name law firm, cashed out her 401(k), divorced her husband, got a tattoo and moved to Guatemala. She said she wanted a new life. The purple highlights I got this afternoon brought unexpected enlightenment; I'm starting to understand how she felt.

2. Vlad says he's seen it coming for a while, but the first sign I remember is Lance telling me in July that numerology-wise, I'm in a 9 year; a good time to prepare for new beginnings. A couple of weeks later I came across Anne's What Rinses You With Happiness post. Around the same time I had a long email exchange with Ramiel about the importance of doing work that's an offering from one's heart.

But it was my cat Sara's sudden illness that finally made me stop and think. While frantically shuttling her between neurologists and radiologists and internal medicine specialists, I realized how little relevance data centers and servers have to my real life. As her condition deteriorated, I decided to take a step back from the Internet infrastructure world - at which point she passed away.

I met Sara 10 years ago, while making the unlikely transition from investment banking into web hosting. So many adventures she's seen me through! As I bid her a sad goodbye, it's time, too, to get ready for what's next.

3. I'm planning to take a few months off to volunteer at the Washington Humane Society,  brush up on Chinese, re-learn Hindi... We all have wish lists that we set aside until we have enough money and more time. But as Anne wrote in another post, experiences are what make us feel rich. And as Sara's so unexpected demise shows, "more time" isn't something to be taken for granted.

I'm sorry this means I won't be blogging about tech stuff any more, or going to any tech conferences. Sorry because of all the friends I've made through these channels, but I hope we'll stay in touch!

4. When I wrote my ice harvest post last week, I felt like I've been going around in circles. I had made the same arguments before, in not very different words. I was disappointed in myself for having nothing new to say. It's time to set sail from Prospero's island; wish me luck!

links for 2007-08-22

• VentureBeat » Facebook debunked
  "Because news feeds are one of the best ways to reach out to users, expect a News Feed Optimization (NFO) industry to develop just like Search Engine Optimization (SEO)"
  (tags: newsfeeds)
• VMware Launches Professional Partners Program - Software - IT Channel News by CRN and VARBusiness
  "For every dollar of VMware software licenses sold there are $5 to $8 in additional high-margin service, training, software and storage revenue opportunities"
  (tags: virtualization)

links for 2007-08-21

• Service Level Automation in the Datacenter: Business doesn't ask for utility computing,either...
  For Rackspace: "IT architecture is actually very rarely a business issue... Which is why arguments from the business that 'I don't want to share my server with anyone' shouldn't hold a lick of weight with IT"
  (tags: virtualization)
• MobileCrunch » British Text for Pizza
  "Order pizza from 470 outlets in the UK: there is no need to search for the nearest Domino’s in a directory. By texting your order, the nearest Domino’s will find you."
  (tags: mobile)

The Ice Harvest

1. From the Thomas Jefferson wiki:

"In the winter of 1802-1803, the summer's harvest of wheat was safely stored in barrels and barns. Monticello overseer Gabriel Lilly had to wait for freezing temperatures before he could harvest his next crop: ice from the Rivanna River. Every available neighborhood wagon was assembled to bring ice from the river to the newly constructed ice house..."

Jefferson made ice cream, drank chilled wine and astonished guests by putting iced-filled coolers on the table in July. Unfortunately, as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos might point out, such luxuries required a great deal of undifferentiated heavy lifting. Gabriel Lilly's hard work didn't make Jefferson's drinks any colder than that Heineken in your refrigerator. Which might explain why ice harvests aren't so popular any more.

2. My experience at EV1Servers was in some ways similar to Lilly's at Monticello. I spent long hours explaining to customers that while we instantly swapped out their failed hardware, their apps won't be back online for some time yet because we've still got to reinstall their OS, after which they could restore their data...

At the time, my understanding of "good service" was limited to being available and responsive and empathetic. But the ability to reach me 24/7 didn't make customers' lives any easier than a virtualized utility computing platform such as 3Tera's would have (disclaimer: I am on 3Tera's advisory board). Just as Jefferson never imagined that there'd be ice makers in kitchens across America, I had no idea it'd be possible for customer apps to auto-migrate themselves from failed hardware onto other resources on the network.

3. Bob Warfield's comment made me realize something troubling about Rackspace's attitude towards virtualization. (BTW, check out Bob's post on web hosting world domination.) Rackspace is selling its upcoming VMWare-based service like an ice harvest, which takes tremendous expertise and herculean efforts to coordinate.

Amazon and Microsoft, meanwhile, present their platforms as no-brainers: *of course* you can have redundancy and scalability! Ray Ozzie even promises low latency access to users anywhere in the world - at the "lowest, lowest possible cost". Which story do you think the public would prefer to hear?

4. As a former customer, I found Rackspace's Fanatical Support nearly as indulgent as Jefferson's ice house. My account rep was sooo amazingly attentive! But luxury is a concept that evolves with time.

Back in 2001, all I needed was a secure, reliable place for my totally self-contained code and data. But if I were to start another web-based business today, I'd want a hosting provider that offered application frameworks/APIs/machine images (and maybe even data sources!) I could leverage. I'd look for a community that provided opportunities for social networking as well as access to collective knowledge.

Sadly, it seems every traditional web hosting wagon has been called down to the frozen river. Oh well. Leave it to Amazon, Microsoft and perhaps Google/eBay/Salesforce.... to fulfill these new wishes.

5. Last night I had a long email exchange  with Jason from Fortress ITX. He said compared with production-quality managed hosting, EC2 leaves so many questions unanswered. I'm sure early refrigerators also didn't deliver on every wished-for feature. Thankfully their inventors persevered instead of spending their time hauling heavy blocks of ice.

Only 7 percent!

I was talking to Charles Jolley and Chris Bauman from SproutIt yesterday. They're exploring the possibility of marketing their email management app through the hosting channel. Their reasoning is, web hosting providers already have relationships with zillions of businesses. This puts them in an excellent position to give customers technology recommendations.

A convincing myth, this is. And one that lots of folks in the web hosting business believe in - even Peer 1's Ted Smith, a super brilliant guy who I've learn something enlightening from in every conversation.

Ted is surprised that a significant proportion of respondents in Rackspace's virtualiztion survey (PDF) weren't interested in testing virtualization through a hosting provider (36%), or hosting mission critical applications on a 3rd-party-managed virtualization platform (29%). Why such low confidence if these companies are ALREADY using an outsource provider for key IT infrastructure?

Ted concludes that hosting expertise might not necessarily translate into virtualization expertise, but I think the problem goes deeper. According to Rackspace's survey, 40% of its customers are very familiar with virtualization while another 34% have some hands-on experience. 57% already use virtualization for internal infrastructure. Rackspace, on the other hand, is still taking baby steps towards its first virtualization offering, making it a late adopter relative to most of its customers.

It makes sense, then, that 67% said they prefer testing or reading up on virtualization themselves, while just 7% expected to learn about it from Rackspace. Not quite the level of influence Charles and Chris envisioned, is it??

links for 2007-08-17

• Microsoft's two faces of SharePoint | Tech news blog - CNET News.com
  SharePoint is the next OS, it's Microsoft's answer for controlling the next decade of IT? Not sure I'm convinced it's quite that threatening...
  (tags: Microsoft)
• Amazon Web Services Blog: "The Start-up Project" - Don't miss it!
  1/2 day event for startups. Gets VCs and developers together to talk about AWS. Such a great idea...
  (tags: Amazon)
• How Does Virtualization Impact Hosting Providers? (A Secret Blueprint for Web Hosting World Domination) « SmoothSpan Blog
  "So there you have it, hosting providers, virtualizers, and software vendors: a blueprint for world domination."
  (tags: wow)
• Oracle AppsLab » Connect is Just the Beginning
  "The point is people. People make software. People buy software. People use software." And no, I didn't know ABN AMRO has 3000+ people on its Facebook network.
  (tags: enterprise2.0)
• ComputerWorld: Dow Chemical launches social networking project
  Spotted via Oracle AppsLab. Main goal of Dow Connect is recruitment. Shouldn't there be a Rackspace Connect if they're looking to get 4,000 new hires in the door??
  (tags: enterprise2.0)

Applying Fanatical Support where it counts

On the same day VMWare's share price valued the company at $21 billion+ (that's more than 20x its annualized revenue of $1.03 billion), and Citrix acquired XenSource for $500 million, Bryan Betts from Techworld.com quotes Rackspace that virtualization is "not ready for the big time".

Bryan's assertion is based on results of Rackspace's recent virtualization survey (see press release and survey results PDF). He claims 87% of 3,000 customers would not be willing to share a physical server with other companies. Which is wrong.

Rackspace got a ~12% response rate, which means ~360 rather than 3,000 customers participated in the survey. 13% said yes to server sharing, 36% maybe, 51% no. So 183 respondents and not 2610 supported Bryan's conclusion.

What's even more misleading than Bryan's misinterpretation is the way Rackspace equates "using virtualization through a 3rd party" with "sharing a physical server with others". Customers, of course, said such an arrangement made them nervous about performance (46%) and scaling issues (10%).

Have the folks in San Antonio not heard of Amazon's S3/EC2, or Microsoft's utility computing plans? Ironically, Jeff Bezos and Ray Ozzie see their platforms as solutions to, NOT causes of, performance/scaling challenges. There's a world of difference between within-a-box and beyond-the-box virtualization, which gives customers on-demand access to multi-server resource pools.

So I agree with Bryan that hosting providers offering virtual servers could be "barking up the wrong tree". Partitioning standalone boxes into multiple virtualized environments is so 2004! Sadly, Rackspace's Nicholas Keller tells Bryan this is exactly what he's planning to do - by the end of 2007. Nick acknowledges he's "a bit behind the curve", but under-estimates the extent to which Rackspace is missing out.

Amazon and Microsoft made me realize that Internet infrastructure solutions should be - will be - delivered in 4 layers:

(a) Data centers/physical servers/virtualizataion software
(b) Utility computing fabric comprised of large pools of servers across multiple facilities
(c) Application frameworks, such as Amazon's web services APIs
(d) Shared services, such as identity management and social networking

Rackspace absolutely excels at (a), and Nick sees that the next phase of virtualization will be about infrastructure management, or (b). I think his plans to apply Rackspace's signature Fanatical Support at this level is a mistake. It's man vs machine, dude - time to think SLAuto and not just SLA!

More importantly, Rackspace is already losing business to Amazon because of its inability to deliver on (c). And there's no place like (c) for a professional services organization like Rackspace's to add value!!

SoftLayer, by the way, is all about automating (a) and (b) so that it can focus on (c), where it will need to either leave behind its "unmanaged hosting" mentality or build a 3rd party professional services ecosystem. The latter can't be done without (d).

PS - Lew Moorman nails it in his latest Racklabs post. He said VMWare's long term value will depend on how they handle the race to virtualization ubiquity. Now they're in the driver's seat, but they'd better re-evaluate their high prices before it's too late. Um, doesn't the same apply to Rackspace? Shouldn't Lew and his team move Rackspace's value proposition out of the infrastructure layer in a hurry before utility computing ubiquity crushes their pricing structure?

PPS - Allan Leinwald says even telcos should reach beyond the infrastructure layer (BT is certainly working on that). He wonders if Verizon or AT&T should buy a Web 2.0 property like Facebook; it'd give them lots of friends. James Urquhart responds that plumbers are plumbers. While Google/Amazon/Microsoft/eBay/SalesForce will make a buck off the rest of us with the full (a) through (d) stack, telcos most likely won't be able to complete - but at least they own the underlying network. Rackspace, SoftLayer and other hosting players will have to think hard about where they fit into this picture...

links for 2007-08-16

• Econobonics - the vocabulary of New Business | Cote’s Weblog
  I love these!
  (tags: fun)

links for 2007-08-15

• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Edgeio vs. Freegeio
  "The Edgeio service automates the creation of a distribution network, at both the logistical and the contractual level."
  (tags: ecommerce)
• blog.pmarca.com: Luck and the entrepreneur, part 1: The four kinds of luck
  "Whereas the lucky connections in Chance II might come to anyone with disposable energy... the links of Chance IV can be drawn together and fused only by one quixotic rider cantering in to intercept the problem at an odd angle"
• Alt Search Engines » Blog Archive » A Bedtime Story (or The Future of Search)
  “But Grandpa,” Billy protested, “we still haven’t talked about Semantic Search yet!”
  (tags: Search)
• GigaOM: Something Simpler Acquires PubSub Assets «
  Go Lance!
• virtualization.info: Citrix to announce XenSource acquisition tomorrow
  Wow. For real? "Virtual Iron may need to fork Xen to stay on business, while Novell and Red Hat may want to drop Xen support and turn to KVM, which is already integrated in Linux kernel."
  (tags: virtualization)

On the soon-to-be emergence of corporate tag gardeners

The Peer 1 folks are so hip! They've got an active contingent on Facebook and just started a Ning social network. I'm impressed - even if Vinnie Mirchandani might scold Lance and Rajan for not making faster progress.

In his latest post, Vinnie calls similar experimental initiatives at Oracle AppsLab and SAP "a thin coat of innovation paint" on old business models that don't come close to delivering the transparent, interactive experience one gets with pure play Web 2.0 vendors.

The scary thing is, Oracle and SAP - thanks to their enterprise install base - are reasonably well insulated against new contenders, but Peer 1 and its traditional web hosting competitors enjoy no such luxury. Amazon's increasingly comprehensive suite of web services will become an ever greater threat to standalone dedicated servers. Microsoft, too, with its triple-layered utility computing cloud...

Not that the changing landscape won't present interesting opportunities (a la Navisite's S3/EC2 monitoring service) along with unexpected challenges. Web 2.0 adoption, I think, will be one important factor that separates vendors who thrive in the brave new world from those who don't survive the tempest.

Last week I put forth some suggestions for a customer social network. Peer 1's Ning community got me thinking about how a vendor's employees fit into the picture. I like the sounds of Oracle's Connect, where each staff member maintains a profile. In addition, maybe people should have the ability to broadcast their expertise (be it accounts payable or MySQL performance tuning) via "how I can help" tags?

Imagine if "how I can help" tags from employee profiles could be matched up with "what technologies I'm using" tags from customer profiles. How cool would it be if a newly hired FreeBSD expert could immediately engage with an easily definable community that shares his interest? He'd feel like such a rock star!! And how much time could be saved if customers could see whether/when/how many Windows techs are available before clogging the level 1 support queue with requests for updates?

Most importantly, corporate tag gardeners could gain invaluable insights from monitoring tag trends. They'd be able to forecast sales, plan marketing campaigns, identify training requirements... using real time data! Just think - what could be better?