I would like to personally thank our clients for helping us achieve another record year of growth and profitability. Our goal is to deliver real value to our clients while helping them operate faster, cheaper and more reliably than their competitors. Over the past 8 years, we’ve expanded to 400+ customers and serve many different industries segments including health care, manufacturing, media, web 2.0, engineering and more.
Everyone measures success in one form or another. In 2009 Profitability.net delivered on 100% of our top success metrics including:
100% Data center power availability
100% Network availability
Increase of sixty customers
Eight straight years of increasing revenue
Five straight years of profitability
We’ve also outperformed market competitors. In 2009 and on a 3-year average Profitability.net has had better uptime and availability than Cincinnati Bell’s (CBTS) 7th street data center and continues to surpass Fuse.net in market share for DNS management . Our support, commitments to our customers, and strong record of performance has established Profitability.net’s prominent position in the Cincinnati data center market.
We have spent the past year preparing for the next cycle of growth and we will focus on three core service areas in 2010 including data center, cloud, and hosted applications. We will continue to invest in our facility and team to ensure we can execute on opportunities for the regions most demanding companies.
In the past 15 months we have made significant investments in:
New primary flywheel UPS that eliminates battery risks and reduces energy loss
New redundant flywheel UPS
N+1 Dry Cooler expansion (heat rejection system)
N+1Glycol loop pumps and controls system
3,500 square foot or 120 cabinet data center suite expansion
Upgraded cabinet electronic locking and notification system
Enhanced customer compliance portal
Green project to transfer heat from the data center to office areas in cold months
We also performed an arc flash analysis and breaker sequencing audit that thoroughly reviewed the operational safety of our electrical infrastructure and validated the proper sequencing of all distribution circuit breakers in the facility. This third-party audit is critical to data centers who care about safety and availability as there have been some well publicized outages due to problems in the electrical systems.
2010 will be an exciting year for us. Our carrier neutral data center offers access to the most carriers of any privately held facility in Cincinnati and we want to expand upon that. We will continue to offer a more compelling model than our competitors given our proximity to major carriers, track record of performance, included features, and partner network. We have developed a premier network of partners that offer a range of services including IT, SAN on demand, Hosted Exchange, backup, hosted virtual desktop, VoIP, and more. This year we will also be finalizing the launch of a cloud service offering that will enable public and private cloud computing and storage environments.
We welcome your call at 513.361.0800 to discuss your current IT needs, and our ability to customize a long-term data center and IT strategy for your organization.
How do you add new dry coolers to the 6th floor mezzanine of an urban data center located on a busy downtown Cincinnati street? Engineering, permits, meetings, cranes, and more meetings. On August 11th, we raised two 60 ton dry coolers to provide 120 tons of additional heat rejection for our Cincinnati data center. The process involved requesting a city permit to partially close the street for the day and using a large crane to skillfully raise the dry coolers and insert them into an opening in the building. Each of the dry coolers was over 22′ 10″ long and 4′ wide. See our short video of how our facility manager and his team completed this feat.
Duke Energy experienced a brief and rare power outage along the downtown Cincinnati corridor shortly before 1:00AM on July 24, 2009. At Profitability.net, this provided yet another opportunity to test the resiliency of our UPS and generator systems. I’m happy to report that 100% of our systems performed as expected with zero impact to our customers.
At Profitability.net, our facility team monitors our Cincinnati data center 24×7 and alerts if any errant condition exists. Our monitoring systems immediately identified the power issue from Duke Energy and signaled our generator power system to start. This entire transition happens in less than 10 seconds. Customer equipment is further protected by redundant flywheel UPS systems that are engineered to carry the power load for the short interval required for generator systems. When there is a loss of utility the UPS and then generator systems protect our customers to ensure 100% power continuity.
If your business was impacted by this outage or other regional power issues, I invite you to contact us at 513.361.0800 to discuss how you can further protect your business in our Cincinnati data center.
Most data center operators are very good at securing exterior access but are unable to fully control interior security or threats from insiders. Cameras and facility personnel are certainly deterrents, but are inadequate measures to truly secure an environment. As a colocation facility, we assume all client data is sensitive and must be protected. That is why we started investing in cabinet level security for our customers by implementing an electronic cabinet and cage locking system in April 2006. This system eliminated key rings and the need to rekey cabinets, but required access by our personnel to generate audit logs for customers.
With the launch of our customer Compliance Portal in 2008 we started working on integrating the cabinet locking system. The requirements quickly exploded as we created an internal access control and cabinet inventory management system that allows us to create logical cabinet doors and cabinets, assign a unique door number, and then assign that cabinet and doors to a specific customer. When a customer accesses the portal he or she can create a user and assign access to individual cabinet doors. All of this activity is logged to provide a full audit trail for that customer so they can manage and demonstrate compliance.
To further increase security we just upgraded the Compliance Portal so that we can alert our customers 24×7 via email or to their phone via SMS when someone physically accesses their cabinet or cage environment. This essentially provides a 24×7 alarm and audit trail that includes customer and Profitability.net access. Knowing who did what and when is an essential part of compliance for our customers.
If your organization has any compliance requirements or concerns regarding physical access of IT assets this is unique feature that our competitors in the region do not offer. Electronic locking and the Compliance Portal are standard features offered at no additional cost to our cabinet and cage suite customers. If you would like to tour our data center and see this capability first hand, please contact our sales team at 513.361.0800.
The screen shot below displays how an administrator can specify who has access to specific cabinet doors and if they want an instant notification via email or SMS when any user accesses the cabinet. Administrators can also specify who has rights to view cabinet access logs.
Energy efficiency is a big deal for our data center and as early as 2004 we realized that energy efficiency was going to shape how we operate our business. We measure every watt of consumption in real-time so we can better identify opportunities for savings in power and cooling. We recently identified a clear opportunity to reduce our power and cooling consumption in our UPS systems.
This month we are completing a replacement of our secondary battery based UPS with a flywheel based system from Active Power. While the physics behind flywheel systems are rather old, the actual use of kinetic rotational energy in a data center environment can be measured in dot com years.
UPS systems provide ride-through time until a generator can start and assume the electrical load. A battery based UPS system uses energy stored within a string of batteries to provide emergency power. The problem with traditional battery based UPS systems is that if one battery is bad within a string, the UPS will not function properly. For our UPS systems we previously deployed redundant battery strings to minimize this risk. If you are trying to differentiate service providers ask them about their UPS systems and the level of redundancy in their battery strings. At Profitability.net we operate an “A” UPS and a “B” UPS to provide our clients with a dual source power option.
The Active Power Cleansource UPS uses several flywheels in motion to provide Profitability.net with sufficient ride-through time until our generator system can handle the load. According to the vendor, our new flywheel UPS is seven times less likely to fail versus a legacy UPS. This makes sense because as long as those flywheels are spinning you should have ride-through power. In addition, the Cleansource UPS operates at a much higher level of efficiency at partial loads and emits less heat than the system being replaced. All of this adds up to reduced energy consumption for our data center. Stay tuned for further announcements regarding several more energy efficiency initiatives we have planned.
Virtualization solutions such as VMware, Xen, or Microsoft Hyper-V can generate significant ROI in the right application environment. While the demand on IT resources continues to increase, physical servers are often underutilized, wasting hardware, space, and electricity. Application compatibility issues traditionally forced IT to separate applications by running them in silos on different server platforms.
By consolidating workloads into a virtualized environment, you can reduce server count and typically improve availability of critical business applications. Availability is further improved through colocation in enterprise data centers. In our Cincinnati colocation facility, we provide redundant UPS systems and branch power circuits to each cabinet to ensure power continuity. The UPS systems are protected with redundant battery strings and 5,000 gallon fuel reserve for the generator set. With this type of environment readily available in Cincinnati, it’s just too risky to place critical business applications in an insecure office environment. Colocation is a cost effective alternative and creates an opportunity to address other gaps in IT infrastructure.
Many organizations are solving business continuity concerns as well through the use of disaster recovery or business continuity solutions. In a virtualized environment, the server count and investment required to replicate certain environments is dramatically reduced.
So what is the catch? When you add complexity to an environment you create risk. Licensing, support, and deployment costs are fairly steep, but may become more competitive as there are more alternatives in the marketplace. You might also be creating a new single point of failure even though you eliminate others. If something happens to the physical machine or virtualization software that controls all of the virtualized servers, you would have a widespread outage acorss your virtualized business applications.
Many of these challenges are solvable with the right investment and deployment strategy. There are many resources available if your organization is considering a virtualized environment. If you want to simultaneously use colocation for your equipment and/or create a business continuity site in Cincinnati, we welcome your call at 513.361.0800.
When email goes down, your computer may as well have just flown through a window. There isn’t a worse feeling than customer interaction coming to a standstill. For many businesses, revenue generation and service suffer. The days of paying an IT consultant to place critical servers and data in the office closet are over.
Relax. There is a better way. You may have heard of Software as a Service (SaaS), which allows you to access a hosted application and pay as you go, much like a utility. Rather than deploying servers in your office, you can merely outsource the applications you need and access them from anywhere in the world.
Our core business has been colocation and data center services with a mix of hosted applications. The launch of Hosted Exchange marks a large effort on our part to help our clients operate more efficiently. I challenged our technical gurus to put together an enterprise quality Hosted Exchange service offering that would wow our customers. The result is a zero point of failure solution that is infinitely scalable, flexible, and reliable. We’re branding this effort “Exchange Your Way,” and delivering s customized solution that yields significant cost savings over in-house systems.
We are including an Exchange Control Center that enables our customers to add and remove users and allocate storage as needed to individual users. This storage flexibility eliminates wasted storage and reduces operating costs for our clients.
Exchange Your Way is powered in our enterprise data center. We’ve launched an environment that will support thousands of users and includes no less than two Foundry load balancers, four Cisco switches, sixteen custom Dell servers, and a LeftHand high availability SAN.
We also invested in an enterprise point-in-time backup and recovery solution that will enable rollback and restoration of individual emails and mailboxes. Our Managed Exchange environment is also compatible with numerous third party email archiving solutions including Microsoft Exchange Hosted Archive.
Knowing that we help our clients compete better is very rewarding for our team. Our clients have an opportunity to work with us to make their email more reliable and their business more competitive. You can reach one of our Exchange gurus like Ben Baker or Tim Humbert by calling 513.361.0800 for a free demonstration.
It’s 2008, and we just launched our new customer portal and blogs by me and Andrew Cruse, our CTO. In short, we are providing one interface that enables you to better manage your relationship with our company. From this central console, you can now reboot devices, view bandwidth graphs and backup reports, or view invoices. You can also create support requests, manage user permissions, and set maintenance notification preferences.
Managing user permissions is critical for our clients, especially those with compliance requirements. We also added a portal audit and logging feature that allows administrators to view what actions users took within the portal. An example of this in action would be to restrict access to your AP team to just viewing invoices while your IT team would have access to request changes to backup schedules, update firewall rules, or view facility access logs. I invite you to start using this valuable business tool.
Why start blogging now?
We hope to deliver invaluable information about Profitability.net and the data center and hosting industry and welcome your thoughts. Andrew Cruse’s CTO blog will detail technology we use and some of the cool things we are doing behind the scenes to ensure we over deliver on our promises to our clients.
Domains never tasted so bad…
Domains never tasted so bad for Network Solutions who is in the news for holding domains searched for from their site for five days. You can still purchase the domain from Network Solutions but you can’t buy it from other registrars during that time. I first heard about this from Adam Strong’s article at DomainNamenews. Network Solutions isn’t the first vendor to break a general sense of public trust regarding whois and they won’t be the last. Is this a case of good intentions gone awry? There are serveral posts from purported Network Solutions employees who claim this is an effort to protect their clients from “domain tasters.”
ICANN can eliminate domain tasting by simply removing the 5-day grace period for registrations. Furthermore, registrars should be specifically prohibited from using whois information to speculate and/or advertise on these domains. Pay to play at least changes the economics of domain tasting and eliminates the need for Network Solutions to further “protect” their revenue, err clients. To their credit, ICANN is currently reviewing domain tasting and released an initial report on January 7, 2008. Hopefully ICANN will make the right decision for the industry and eliminate this practice.
