Data Center Hunter or Harvester/Farmer, looking for customers

In the data center industry there are many people who enjoy game hunting.

And a dominant method to find customers follows a hunting methodology as opposed to a harvester/farmer approach.

Here is an article that talks about the Hunter vs. Harvester approach.

In working with business owners and entrepreneurs over the years, I’ve noticed that when it comes to acquiring new customers, most of them are hunters. They pounce on new leads, chase the prospects, make themselves readily available to the prospect and then bend over backwards to land the new customer.

On the other hand, I’ve noticed that the most successful business owners and entrepreneurs take a different approach to customer acquisition: they are harvesters. They gather in all their leads, work hard to prevent any from slipping through the cracks, cultivate those leads and then harvest them when the time is right for the customer.

The most interesting thing about these two styles is that the hunter usually gets tired, a bit humiliated and ends up getting small margins. On the other hand, the harvester stays fresh, confident and usually earns higher margins.

I just saw this post on DataCenterKnowledge post on Data Center planning, and got me thinking about hunting vs. harvesting.

How to Avoid Data Center Planning Mistakes

September 8th, 2010 : Kevin Normandeau

Why do so many data center build outs and expansion projects fail? This white paperfrom Lee Technologies addresses this question by revealing the top nine mistakes organizations make when designing and building new data center space. It also examines an effective way to achieve success through the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) approach.

One person may think this is harvesting, but I think it is more like hunting.

Here is an example of what of what I think as a harvesting/farmer approach. 

I've been watching my top 5 data center construction companies post.  I get about 50 hits a week - every week for the past 8 months.  I am amazed there are 470 keywords that point to my post.

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And here is an example of this last week.

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Looking at the ISPs the list shows the following companies - Capital One, GM, global crossing, JP Morgan Chase, Network Appliances, and Yahoo besides a long list of ISPs.

Here are the top 10 cities for this week.  Note, the ability to look at ranges of time to see what cities the customers are in.  If I looked for 8 months, I would get the every major city.

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A group of people in Cleveland are looking for a data center.  Who?  This is obvious one.

Capital One Partners

Place page

1300 East 9th Street
Cleveland, OH 44114-1506

Pretty cool I can do this research from a blog post and Google Analytics!

Here are the top google keywords used to find my post.

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If you were thinking like a Farmer/Harvester you would be figuring out how to reach the customers who are looking for these keywords in the cities I listed.

It is common for data center vendors to pay over $10K for a booth at a conference and  maybe buy a speaking spot in front of as few as 2 dozen people.  But few people think like a harvester and prefer hunting.

Not only that, but hunting for business is tough stuff, even for those who manage to make a living at it.  When you’re in “hunting” mode, you’re dialing for dollars; you feel resistance at every turn; rejection is common; you get “price shopped” against competitors so margins are thin; and you waste tons of time working with prospects who simply aren’t ready to buy.

Seems more efficient to be a Harvester.

On the other hand, when you’re in “harvesting” mode, you’re working smart and scooping up sales left and right. You’re like the fisherman with the irresistible bait, drawing your prospects to you. You can spend your time closing deals on the phone with hot leads or go out on the golf course because you know your prospects will call you when they’re ready to move forward.

And, now that I think about it, the data center people I enjoy talking are Harvesters, and funny enough many of them enjoy game hunting.

Lead warming is about communicating with your prospects from the moment they express interest and then if they don’t buy right away, that’s OK because you then don’t let them slip away and instead breadcrumb them with information they’ll find valuable about your product, service or company

If you think you want to be a Harvester and want to leverage my post you can drop me an e-mail dave@greenm3.com.  The easiest thing to do is to drop an inline advertisement in my post, and you'll have 50 eyeballs a week.  :-)  But, there are many more interesting things to try to be a data center harvester/farmer.

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Why Twitter dedicated servers for Justin Bieber, 3% of the load

There are 247 news articles about Twitter having dedicated servers for Justin Bieber which is 3% of Twitter traffic.

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CNET broke the news with citing a tweet.

Report: Justin Bieber is 3 percent of Twitter

by Chris Matyszczyk

If you believe that Twitter is full of inane, immature narcissism, here's one in your solar plexus.

For an allegation has reached my eyes and baffled them into blindness. The allegation is that, at any given moment, at any given movement of your lungs and toes, 3 percent of Twitter's infrastructure is dedicated solely to the one person who most defines our hopes and our times.

I am not speaking of Kim Kardashian, nor of Rep. Jack Kimble. I am speaking of the one person who can unite men and women, young and old, sane and slightly less so: Justin Bieber.

A fascinatingly hopeful post at Gizmodo offers that Dustin Curtis, a designer of some repute, was told by an employee at Twitter that 3 percent of the company's infrastructure is dedicated to the little man with the unreal voice and the even more unreal hair.

(Credit: Screenshot: Chris Matyszczyk/CNET)

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20015781-71.html#ixzz0ywhpUh60

What I haven't seen anyone attempt to explain is why would there be Racks of Servers dedicated?

This is common sense with no information from Twitter folks.

When you want speed in your servers you want to keep your whole search index in RAM in a server. Google, eBay, and Amazon are good examples of companies who use this method in their search servers to support keyword lookup and result match-up.  Any time you go to disk or another server you will slow down the search results by magnitudes.

The costs to put your whole search index in RAM is too high, so break down the problem.  Analyzing the flow of tweets, Twitter figured out many people are focused on a few areas, and probably stick to that topic watching the tweets.

Second Life was started with the idea of virtual reality and avatars, but many people are too lazy to keep up their 3D appearance.  Tweets are much more efficient to support a virtual presence.

In the same way that Saudi Arabia wanted to get access to RIM's encrypted data the information and analytics available in Justin Bieber's servers can be useful.  And, Twitter is probably figuring out ways to monetize access to analytics.

Which brings up an interesting point is Twitter the next service which governments want access to crawl?  For many people, e-mail and blogging is in the past.  And, Twitter is their main method to communicate.

There was a rumor of part of the reason why Twitter chose Salt Lake City is to be near the NSA's new data center in Salt Lake City. 

Room to grow: a Twitter data center

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Later this year, Twitter is moving our technical operations infrastructure into a new, custom-built data center in the Salt Lake City area. We're excited about the move for several reasons.
First, Twitter's user base has continued to grow steadily in 2010, with over 300,000 people a day signing up for new accounts on an average day. Keeping pace with these users and their Twitter activity presents some unique and complex engineering challenges (as John Adams, our lead engineer for application services, noted in a speech last month at the O'Reilly Velocity conference). Having dedicated data centers will give us more capacity to accommodate this growth in users and activity on Twitter.
Second, Twitter will have full control over network and systems configuration, with a much larger footprint in a building designed specifically around our unique power and cooling needs. Twitter will be able to define and manage to a finer grained SLA on the service as we are managing and monitoring at all layers. The data center will house a mixed-vendor environment for servers running open source OS and applications.
Importantly, having our own data center will give us the flexibility to more quickly make adjustments as our infrastructure needs change.
Finally, Twitter's custom data center is built for high availability and redundancy in our network and systems infrastructure. This first Twitter managed data center is being designed with a multi-homed network solution for greater reliability and capacity. We will continue to work with NTT America to operate our current footprint, and plan to bring additional Twitter managed data centers online over the next 24 months.

The probability of the NSA talking to Twitter at some point of time is almost certainty.

Is Twitter's dedicated servers a help for the NSA?  There are Twitter servers dedicated to President Obama.  And Oprah too. :-)  Are the number of dedicated servers the new status symbol and measure of popularity?  It used to be records sold and movie revenue.  Is it now the billions of tweets?

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William Gibson signs his first Kindle (mine) at a Zero History book signing

A friend and I went to hear William Gibson read a chapter from his new book Zero History.

Zero History

While William was reading a chapter,  I decided to download the book to my Kindle 3.  After reading the chapter, William took 1/2 an hour to answer various questions.

One of the questions was on how William uses Twitter, and he told the story of "Detection of Novelty" and how he used to spend $200-$300 on foreign magazines and randomly flip through them to simply lte him be attracted to what catches his eye.  With Twitter he focuses on finding efficient novelty aggregators that gives him the exposure he used to get from his foreign magazines.

When watching the standing room only crowd holding their hardcopy books, I thought what does William think about book signing with people having Kindles?  I decided to ask William this question which turned out to be the last before book signing.

William responded with humor that he could use a carbide tip to etch his signature in a strategic place, and how some people have brought those silver pens to sign black things.  Then there were some fanatics who wanted William to sign their laptops and motherboards.  William went on a bit more and used my question to end the session and transition to book signing.

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Luckily, I sat in the front next to the door where they were going to start the line for book signing.  My friend went 1st as he had a hardcopy book.  I was next with my Kindle 3.  I showed William my Kindle 3 screen and chapter 1 of Zero History, and asked him to sign the Kindle 3.

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William Gibson said this is the first Kindle he has signed.

I asked the last question, on the first day of William Gibson's book signing tour for Zero History, and have the first Kindle he has signed.

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Boy I am glad I sat in the front and was #2 and not in the line of a hundred people behind me.  ;-)

Is this a new trend to have book authors sign Kindles?  I don't know, but I have the first Kindle signed by William Gibson.

And, here is William's tweet.

Signed very first Kindle at Microsoft. Actually, *touched* very first Kindle. Appealing unit, IMO.36 minutes ago via Twitterrific

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Google confirms Daniel Costello joins the company

DataCenterKnowledge was able to get the confirmation Daniel Costello joined Google.

Daniel Costello Moves from Microsoft to Google

September 7th, 2010 : Rich Miller

Daniel Costello discusses the use of PACs (pre-assembled components) in Microsoft data centers at The Uptime Symposium in May.

Google has confirmed that Daniel Costello, who has been a key member of data center design teams at Microsoft and Intel, has joined the company’s data center staff. “We’re excited to welcome Dan to our infrastructure team,” said a Google spokesperson. “He has a great track record working with Microsoft and Intel, and we’re happy to have him on board.”

Now that Rich has posted, watch the news spread to other media outlets.

Rich referenced my post as part of his.

Does Costello’s departure from Microsoft (first noted by Dave Ohara) tell us anything about what’s ahead for data center design at Google? Or is Google simply the next frontier for a man with Costello’s design experience? Time will tell.

Thanks Rich.

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A Motivation for Greenpeace’s targeting Facebook – Money and Power!!!

It has been interesting watching Greenpeace target the high tech industry.  Greenpeace has gone after Dell, HP, and Apple for their products use of components that have an environmental impact.  Mike Manos and I talked years ago how it was only a matter of time when Greenpeace target data centers.

Why Data Centers?  Because, they are big expensive buildings run by rich companies (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, and Financial Companies) that use huge amounts of power.  Greenpeace has a difficult time changing the behavior of electric utilities as they have protested nuclear power plants, hydroelectric dams, etc.

As an alternative Greenpeace goes after the biggest consumers of a product they consider bad for the environment.  One of Greenpeace’s recent targets is Palm Oil and Nestle.  Here is Greenpeace’s post on Nestle on Mar 23, 2010.

Nestlé doesn't deserve a break

On this page

Feature story - March 23, 2010

Nestlé has remained relatively silent since issuing its initial statement of contract cancellations with palm oil supplier Sinar Mas. This is despite the fact that it is still receiving a barrage of complaints and criticism via its Facebook page from people who recognize that Nestlé's concessions made last week are not enough to protect Indonesia's rainforests.

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Nestlé is buying palm oil from companies who are destroying orang-utan habitat.

The contract cancellations do not go nearly far enough to protect Indonesian rainforests because Nestlé will still be using Sinar Mas palm oil, but just getting it from other suppliers.

In response to the ongoing criticism it has faced online Nestlé also began to circulate a Q & A on its palm oil use, which also included its commitment to using only "Certified Sustainable PAlm Oil" by 2015. Again, this is not a solution and it does go far enough. 2015 will be far too late for the already endangered orang-utan and Indonesia's rainforests - which are being deforested at the fastest rate of any major forested country in the world. Earning Indonesia an unfortunate place in The Guinness Book of World Records.

And here are reported results.

NaturalNews) Nestle recently announced that it would stop purchasing palm oil from the world's second largest producer out of concern over rainforest destruction, but Greenpeace alleges that the company has failed to keep this promise.


Following a Greenpeace report accusing Indonesian palm oil producer Sinar Mas of responsibility for widespread destruction of endangered rainforests and peatlands for palm oil plantations, Nestle announced in March that it would cease doing business with the company. In December, Nestle rival Unilever had cut ties with Sinar Mas over the same issue.


"We will continue to pressure our suppliers to eliminate any sources of palm oil which are related to rainforest destruction and to provide valid guarantees of traceability as quickly as possible," Nestle said.

NYTimes reports on Soros donating $100 million to Human Rights Watch

Soros to Donate $100 Million to Rights Group

By STEPHANIE STROM
Published: September 6, 2010

  • George Soros, the billionaire investor and philanthropist, plans to announce on Tuesday that he is giving $100 million to Human Rights Watch to expand the organization’s work globally.

As the NYTimes reports, Soros action drives other money to his causes.

Last year, in the depths of the recession, Mr. Soros gave the Robin Hood Foundation, a charity that fights poverty in New York, a $50 million contribution that helped it raise significantly more than that amount. He also gave every family with children on welfare in New York State $200 to buy school supplies, a grant worth $35 million that enabled the state to gain access to some $175 million in federal money for which it would not otherwise have qualified.

Now, go back to the Greenpeace post on Palm Oil I put above.

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Note the “Support Us” in red above.

Greenpeace cannot survive without support for its causes. 

In Greenpeace’s core values.

  • In exposing threats to the environment and finding solutions we have no permanent allies or adversaries;
  • We ensure our financial independence from political or commercial interests;

Greenpeace needs power and money to be independent.

Going after Facebook’s coal data centers let’s Greenpeace raise money and show its power to create change.

Do you think Greenpeace is going to back down until they get Facebook to change its power composition proactively?

Oct 1, 2010 is the opening of “The Social Network” the Facebook movie.  Just wait until October for more pressure from Greenpeace.

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