Ouch, Cloud may have holes in it, Rackspace stock drops, is reality catching up to hype?

Cloud, Cloud, Cloud.  It is the way of the future.   Yeh. Yeh, Yeh.

It looks the Cloud may be a bit over hyped.

GigaOm's Barb Darrow covered the Rackspace news.

Laggard Rackspace growth sparks concern: is there enough cloud biz to go around?

by Barb Darrow

1 HOUR AGO

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photo: Flickr / mnsc

SUMMARY:

There are lots of potential cloud workloads out there but there are also about a zillion clouds. Is there really enough paid work to support them all?

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Here’s the narrative that cloud vendors would like us to believe: there are infinite workloads flowing to clouds of infinite capacity. There’s enough business for all, keep moving.

Rackspace did add 4% more servers quarter to quarter.  So even though there may be some pricing issues, bottom line the server growth was only 4%.

 Total server count increased to 94,122, up from 90,524 servers at the end of the previous quarter.

Data Center Marketing Hype vs. Social Networks

One person recently asked me what is going on in the data center industry.  I said the big are getting bigger, the small are disappearing and the middle is trying to make it seem like things are great.  Those who make the most amount of noise aren't necessarily doing the best.  When a company is quiet with few press releases and presence at trade shows doesn't mean they are not growing. I found it interesting when you would give a small presentation at a conference like Uptime Symposium and half the room is full of your competitors. If you have something really good that sells, you don't want to tell your competitors how you market your product and how it addresses customer needs.

What got me to write this post is reading Chris Crosby's post on Pardon My Hyperbole.

Pardon My Hyperbole

 

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Everyone exaggerates. The big one that got away gets bigger with every telling. That one yard plunge you made for a touchdown in high school now stands at 50 yards, and getting longer, and of course you really did use to have a 30 inch waist. Hyperbole is not a bad thing. The advertising business is built upon it and so are most of our egos. Al Gore has made a career of it ($200 million at last count). In our everyday lives, we accept a certain amount of puffery surrounding most any assertion that we hear—let’s call it our personal plus or minus 10%—but sometimes we just have to jump in tell someone that “it’s time to pull in the reigns there cowboy”. I ran across just such a case the other day when I read someone describe data centers as “today’s steel mills”. While I agree that everyone has a right to use hyperbole to make a point, I think this guy’s abusing the privilege.

When I first read this I thought of the marketing over promises of what a product or service will deliver.  Most vendors know their customers will under utilize the product/service so its performance will be fine.  But the bigger players are working at a scale that challenges the limits of products and services.  What do you mean the product has issues at 80% load.  Well no one runs the product at 80% load most are aren't even at 50% load.  You mean your specifications aren't accurate.  Well no one has actually run our product in production at 80% load.  One of my friends was a the nightmare tenant in his colocation facility.  He would consistently push circuits to their 80% of rated capacity.  His landlord would constantly talk to him about the dangers of running the facility at 80%.  My friend knew he was paying for the capability so why not use it.

Here is a crazy idea for the vendors spend some of that marketing budget on listening to the experienced influentials.  Learn what issues they have with existing products/services and what they need in future products/services.  Oops, just shared what some of the smart people have figured out.  Hanging with the influentials to listen is worth more than trying to sell them something.  

One of the funniest stories is when a salesman cornered a data center executive and lectured him how he is making big mistakes not working with his company, one of the top companies in the industries.  You aren't buy into my over promise and under deliver market dominance strategy. :-)

Life changes when you hang around the really smart people to listen, learn, and socialize.  You start to see the reality of what works and what doesn't.

The big are getting smarter as well as bigger.  The small have no idea what is going on.  The middle is well, stuck in the middle.

Roasted King Salmon and Roasted Artichokes

Cooking is my Zen moments for the day.  Be focused, breath, relax, concentrate.  Be in the moment.

Today's meal is Roasted King Salmon.  One piece is just salt and pepper for the kids.  The other has a salmon rub I got from the last 7x24 Exchange conference.  Salmon Rub from a data center conference?  The Phoenix conference has a great reception and part of their food areas was a spice display where you can have spice mixes made - chicken, beef, or fish.

I use Lodge cast iron the most to cook.

Three minutes on one side, then about 10 minutes on the other in the oven.

Also tried to to Roast Artichokes.  Cut in half, olive oil, salt, garlic clove and lemon.  Put in the oven for 45 minutes.

Here are some of the zen concepts for cooking.

TRANSFORMATION

Cooking, like life, is about transformation. When we cook, we work directly with the elemental forces of fire and heat, water, metal, and clay. We put the lid on the pot and wait for the fire to transform the rice, or we mix the bread with yeast and put it in the oven to bake. There is something hidden, almost magical about it.

This kind of transformation involves a certain amount of faith. We work hard to prepare the food. We wash the rice, knead the bread, and break the eggs. We measure the ingredients carefully. We mix, stir, blend. But then we have to wait. We have to let fire and water transform the food we’ve prepared.

But we also have to keep an eye on things. We have to be aware of what is going on. For the Zen cook the old adage, “A watched pot never boils,” is only half-true. We leave the lid on the pot most of the time. But we also lift the lid every once in a while to taste the food.

The Zen cook follows the middle way. We have faith that the soup is coming along—but we still check now and then.

The accomplished Zen cook is something of an alchemist. He or she can transform poisons into virtues.

The Zen cook doesn’t do this by adding a secret ingredient, but by leaving something out. The Zen cook leaves out attachment to the self.

For example, anger is considered a poison when it’s self-motivated and self-centered. But take that attachment to the self out of anger and the same emotion becomes the fierce energy of determination, which is a very positive force. Take the self-centered aspect out of greed and it becomes the desire to help. Drop the self-orientation from ignorance, and it becomes a state of unknowing that allows new things to rise.

Pictures of Google's Douglasville data center

Atlanta Business Journal has a post with a slide of the Google's data center that had a media tour.

Jacques Couret

Senior Online Editor-Atlanta Business Chronicle

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You’ve heard how cool it is to work for Google. Now, you can see for yourself.

Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) on Tuesday opened up its new super-energy efficient Douglasville, Ga., data center for a media tour.

But, after looking at the slide show, I found the stuff that Google publishes on itself way better.

First on Google Maps, here is the site.

And there is a whole gallery of pictures on the data center here.

The Douglas County Sentinel also covered the data center with Joe Kava VP of data centers at Google as a tour guide.  

This is what the mechanical area looks like with good color matching.

Unfortunately, the photographer had real bad color matching.  

Search engine giant Google hosts rare tour of local data center

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Google hosts rare data center tour

Google opened its doors Tuesday for a rare tour through its Douglas County facility, which is one of the world's most energy efficient data centers. Joe Kava, vice president of data centers at Google, guided select media through the center and provided a behind the scenes look at the cooling floor. He also provided insight on what Google does to reduce energy by using cooling infrastructure. "One of the unique characteristics of Google is that all of employees work tremendously hard to make sure all of our users data is kept private and safe and the data center is up and reliable everyday,"  Kava said. "But we think that you can also have fun while you're working."

Another Data Center Company targets the GigaOm audience with the Cloud

Part of hanging out with GigaOm is seeing how the rest of the data center industry interacts with their audience.  I've consistently seen Dupont Fabros, Softlayer, and Verizon Terramark sales teams at events, and they are quite happy with the audience they talk to.

What got my attention today is Internap sponsored a post on their webcast on GigaOm.

Sponsored post: Cloud and co-location hybridization (live webcast)

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SUMMARY:

Learn how hybridization of the cloud and co-location can result in improved visibility and flexibility in our June 5 webcast, “Hybridization: shattering silos between cloud and co-location.” We’ll discuss the benefits of a hybrid environment and use cases in which co-location and cloud efficiently work together.

...

Attend this webcast to learn:
• Advantages of both co-location and cloud solutions
• How hybridization of the cloud and co-location can result in improved visibility and flexibility for your IT infrastructure
• Real-world use cases in which colocation and cloud efficiently work together

Here are descriptions of them media, event, and research products.

Disclosure: I work freelance for the GigaOm Pro Research group.

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