Codero Expands Into Dallas Market With Digital Realty

May 6, 2014By Jason VergeData center service provider Codero Hosting has launched a data center in the Dallas-Fort Worth region of Texas. Located in a Digital Realty Trust facility, this is the fourth data center location for the company, which provides dedicated, managed, cloud and hybrid hosting services.The company announced it was expanding to Dallas earlier this year, but did not disclose what kind of facility the new location would be in. It has been operating out of data centers in Phoenix, Ariz., Ashburn, Va., and Chicago, Ill., and said it chose the Dallas market for its next phase of growth because of a high concentration of hosting providers in the region.“[Dallas-Fort Worth] is the hub of connectivity for U.S. bandwidth and offers the industry’s latest technology – everything from power and cooling to density, as well as a variety of choices in bandwidth providers, flexibility in labor pool and unbeatable power costs,” Robert Autenrieth, the company’s COO, said. ”All these factors combined to make it a natural choice for our fourth data center in the U.S.”The new facility is part of the 70-acre Digital Dallas Data Campus situated along primary fiber routes and master planned for more than 100 megawatts of power.

Codero Hosting Opens New Data Center in Key Digital Dallas Data Campus Location

By Laura StotlerTMCnet Contributing EditorMSP and cloud services provider Codero Hosting has opened its flagship data center in Dallas-Fort Worth. The location is strategic as Dallas is a key interconnection and network hand-off point for the Southwest region with a large number of carriers and aggregators maintaining a presence there.The new Tier 3 facility is the fourth Codero data center, and offers access to the MSP’s cloud, dedicated and On-Demand Hybrid Cloud solutions. Located within the 70-acre Digital Dallas Data Campus, it features full redundancy, high levels of scalability and enables rapid provisioning.The data center is SSAE 16 compliant and features 24x7 security and the potential for more than 100mw of power. Dallas is a major Texas fiber hub and home to multiple carriers, which enables low latency, low electricity costs and easy access to multiple fuel service providers. The Digital Dallas Campus, owned by Digital Realty Trust (which assisted Codero in development of the new facility), is home to a variety of service providers including CyrusOne.“DFW is the hub of connectivity for U.S. bandwidth and offers the industry’s latest technology – everything from power and cooling to density, as well as a variety of choices in bandwidth providers, flexibility in labor pool and unbeatable power costs,” said Robert Autenrieth, COO of Codero Hosting.The sprawling Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area is the fourth largest in the U.S. and is rapidly becoming a force in the data center market. Valued for its relatively low number of natural disasters and burgeoning real estate market, the region is home to at least 55 colocation facilities. Players in the region include Cologix, Telx, Rackspace, Savvis, ViaWest, Equinix, EarthLink, XO and Level 3.The new Codero DFW data center features 10GB switches running to the rack and server, enabling high levels of performance and the potential for upgrades. Codero is also providing 24x7 onsite tech support in tandem with its automation layer to ensure smooth performance and provisioning. The MSP says the new facility already has several tenants and hundreds of servers and devices are already deployed.Edited by Maurice Nagle

Codero Hosting Opens Data Center in Dallas-Forth Worth Area

Codero Hosting, a provider of dedicated servers, managed hosting, cloud and hybrid hosting services, has announced the opening of its flagship data center in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. This Tier 3 facility is the fourth Codero data center in the U.S., built-out in collaboration with Digital Realty.Located 15 miles from downtown Dallas, the Codero Dallas-Forth Worth (DFW) data center is part of the 70-acre Digital Dallas Data Campus situated along primary fiber routes, and master planned for more than 100 megawatts of power (N+1). The campus is a strategic, resilient location away from seismic regions and areas prone to flooding. It is located within a major Texas fiber hub with multiple carriers enabling a variety of connectivity options.The new facility is Codero’s fourth SSAE 16 data center in the U.S. and features the following: 

• 10 gigabit switches throughout, running to the rack and server for maximum performance and future upgradability
• Access to on-site 138KV power substation delivering dual-feed 12.47 utility power from two independent utility substations to guarantee strong uptime
• 6,900 kW of UPS power
• 2500 kVA delivered by 480V service
• Four 625 kVA UPS systems configured as 2N
• Sixteen 150-ton RTUs configured as N+1 for optimum cooling
• Nine fiber providers located within data center campus

“The new Codero data center is all about serving customers requiring world-class performance, reliability and scalability running on the most advanced networking technology infrastructure,” said Robert Autenrieth, COO of Codero Hosting. “DFW is the hub of connectivity for the U.S. Whether it’s bare metal dedicated servers, public cloud hosting, private cloud, or our patented On-Demand Hybrid Cloud technology, our expanded data center footprint supports it all.”

While on a Run, Apps to Match the Playlist to Your Pace

Personal Technology: App SmartBy Kit Eaton

If you are headed out for a walk or jog, consider adding an app for your trip. Several smartphone apps can add a helpful boost of motivation, or just some fun information, to a workout or leisurely walk.

Music can be a great help to runners, but sometimes putting together a playlist can be a chore. So leave the song selection up to RockMyRun. This free iOS and Android app streams music while you run, serving mixes of tracks from its archive, with a fun twist: You can choose how many beats per minute the music should have, and the app will match the songs to the pace. If you are out for a fast run, you may choose a speedy setting of 150 to 160 beats per minute. For a slower jog, try 120 beats per minute, and so on.

You can also choose the music genre, mix the lengths of songs, decide whether explicit lyrics are allowed, and even search for a particular track or artist you like.

The app then selects the mix, which can last up to two hours. You can skip a song you don’t like, but that requires fishing out the phone to tap the screen.

RockMyRun works really well. It sometimes serves up music I haven’t heard before, which stops me from getting bored when exercising. But its interface can be a little confusing. For the best experience, it’s worth remembering to download mixes over Wi-Fi before leaving home — streaming music over a mobile data network can quickly eat up your monthly allowance.

To get a wider range of mixes, or mixes longer than 45 minutes, you have to register the app and upgrade to a monthly, quarterly or yearly premium package; the yearly package costs $3 a month.

For an alternative, the free iOS and Android app PaceDJ does a tempo-matching trick similar to RockMyRun’s, but it uses your music archive. This means you hear music you are more inclined to like. PaceDJ works by scanning your archive and logging the beats per minute of each track. You then choose a beats per minute rate you like and it starts playing.

If you’re not sure about your pace, the app can measure walking or jogging speed using your phone’s motion sensors. And if you upgrade to the full version for $3, the app can deliver a staged workout that starts at a slower pace, picks up, then slows down again. This beats per minute shifting feature is not available on the Android version, however.

There is a lot to like about this app, including its clear, good-looking interface and great in-app instructions. It can, however, take a long time to scan a large music archive. I also wish the music controls were bigger, so they would be easier to use while running, walking or cycling.

While music apps can help you run or walk, texting apps can be a hindrance. Texting while walking often puts pedestrians in danger as they focus on their phones instead of looking where they are going. For those who want to do it, there are apps like Type and Walk and Walk n Text. These apps use the phone’s camera to display the view in front of you as you type. The idea is that the image will help you avoid making a wrong step.

Type and Walk, free on iOS, in addition to showing the area in front of the phone, shows useful information like a word count and lets you snap a photo to include in your message. You can also share a text via Twitter, if you’d like. Walk n Text, a $2 Android equivalent (on sale recently for $1), has a few extra features, including one that makes the keyboard transparent for extra visibility.

These apps will not stop you from hurting yourself, though. You must remain aware of your environment while you type. And don’t even think about using these apps while driving.

Finally, if you are out on a long walk or run, check out Map My Walk, a favorite of mine. This free iOS and Android app tracks your routes by using GPS and shows them on a map. While you are walking or running it will also deliver audible updates on your pace using a synthesized voice, so you can learn how swiftly you are moving without having to reach for the phone. It runs in the background, so you could even use it with one of the music apps above. But be aware: The app’s complex interface does take a while to master, and GPS apps like Map My Walk tend to burn through battery life.

Quick Call

EBay’s free app for Windows Phone devices has just had a big overhaul. The app has improved search and filtering to help you find auction deals, and you can pin a particular item to a live tile on the home screen to see the auction progress from outside the app.

(AppSmart: Running Partners video.)

Amazon Not Curbing Spending

Rick Watson, CEO of Merchantry speaks to Emily Chang, host of Bloomberg West.

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Codero CEO, Emil Sayegh (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I’ll switch gears a bit. Given all these things that you’re seeing in the market, can you look ahead to the 5 to 10 year horizon. Tell me your thoughts about what’s going to happen. What do you anticipate as new that is going to happen?Emil Sayegh: We are all heading toward a world where data is being collected every micro second, where wearable devices are going to be common and where data is collected even in our house. Vital data collected from us can be predictive. We’re heading toward a world where massive amount of data is going to be collected. We think we’re collecting a lot of data now. With avant-garde customers that I’m talking to, that data is going to take shape in the form of numbers, videos, and pictures. To accommodate this huge flood of exponential growth in data, we’re going to have to find ways to store and retrieve data very quickly and very efficiently. That’s going to be the next frontier for a lot of us. That’s going to impact storage – the cost and performance of storage.Also, a lot of what I’m talking about here is going to be bottlenecked by how big and how fat their network pipes are. You’re going to start to see winners and losers in this space of accommodating all these data based on how big the pipes are and how inexpensive their storage is. Kind of like a price and performance ratio on storage more so than it is about pure computing performance like what we’ve seen to this point. I would say over the next ten years, storage is going to be important. High performance networks are going to be much more important. Of course, you said that hybrid is going to be much more prevalent and important. What we’re seeing is an exponential growth in the amount of data storage and retrieval and how efficiently you can do these things. Those two things really hinge on storage and network performance.Sramana Mitra: Given that discussion as a backdrop, where would you advise young entrepreneurs to look for opportunities to build new companies?Emil Sayegh: Infrastructure as a service is yesterday’s battle. You have companies that are well established. What you do with that infrastructure is the key. I see young entrepreneurs focusing on how to use that amazing array of computer resources that’s available to them and providing services that we haven’t thought about yet. Let’s take the example of medical service. If we’re sick, we’re in the hospital. They monitor our vital signs. What if young entrepreneurs really focus on the predictive nature and utilize the vast amount of infrastructure, computing, and storage resources that are available out there. I would advise them to go one layer deeper into yesterday’s opportunities and look at how how efficiently you can do these things to build new companies.With all these vast amount of data available, how can we come up with algorithms that will give us the ability to extract quickly or organize data quickly so that we’re utilizing this massive amount of data and organizing it in a logical way. I see opportunities at the usage and at the utilization of data more efficiently.Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Codero CEO, Emil Sayegh (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Is there anything substantially different in any other segment of customers that you cater to besides the two use cases we discussed?Emil Sayegh: You have SaaS customers that are similar to the e-commerce value proposition.Sramana Mitra: These are SaaS customers who are themselves public cloud vendors?Emil Sayegh: They are public SaaS vendors. They’re leveraging our cloud infrastructure to offer SaaS to consumers.Sramana Mitra: What are we seeing in that segment? That’s an interesting segment. I’m sure you have a customer base in that segment.Emil Sayegh: Yes, we have a great customer base in that segment. They’re very similar to an e-commerce customer from the fact that if their application is down, their whole business is down. We cater to companies that make their living off their web presence. SaaS companies’ value proposition is very similar to the e-commerce customers. From an architecture standpoint, they are also similar because a SaaS company needs to scale up very quickly at the front-end with as many users that are logged in at that point. They need to create as many of those sections as they can.I’m going to give you this odd example. We have one company that provides SaaS to agencies that are involved in rescue efforts and act in times of disaster. When there are no disasters in the United States or in the world, they’re probably not very busy. But as soon as there is a disaster, then you have a bunch of agencies that are descending on one region and they need to be able to process the cases. It’s kind of like Salesforce on steroids but focused on disaster recovery. That’s their specialty. In terms of need, they scale up extremely quickly. They spin up a bunch of cloud instances in the front-end. They may add a couple of database servers in the back-end so that they can accommodate that load.This is an unusual example that I’d like to give for SaaS companies that benefit from the hybrid infrastructure because the corollary of this is if you were to go with a monolithic, either cloud or dedicated, they would have to essentially commit and get a bunch of dedicated servers – if they want the performance – or they had to just get stuck with just cloud and suffer from a performance standpoint. When a disaster happens, they may clobber their database servers and their database servers may stop working in the most immediate time of need. If they get a database server that’s dedicated and they get a bunch of cloud servers that are just invoked at time of need, that is the optimal, most economical, and highest performance solution that they can have.

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Codero CEO, Emil Sayegh (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Give me the number again of where you would say the flip happens from a public cloud to a hybrid cloud.Emil Sayegh: The flip is starting to happen as companies that started in the cloud are looking at their bills now and they’re seeing the exorbitant prices. I think there’re a couple examples. One of them is Target.com. They were with AWS. There’re a lot of public stories as to why they moved. There’s Moz. You may have read some of the publicity here in the last two months where they left AWS for pricing reasons.This is the analogy I always give and it works. Essentially, if you have a constant workload for your application or even a workload that varies but in a rational or measured way between day to day and month to month, putting all your applications in the cloud is like living 365 days a year, 24 hours a day in a hotel. Sure, living in a hotel is convenient and you can scale up very quickly by adding more guest rooms if your family and friends started to show up. That’s not a way to live your life. It’s not that private. It’s expensive.Sramana Mitra: So the main reason the flip is happening is that the price of hybrid cloud for really high workload, as companies scale, is much higher than what it would be in a hybrid environment?Emil Sayegh: Exactly. With pure cloud, the price is much higher than it would be with a hybrid environment because hybrid environment allows you to offload your constant workloads on to dedicated servers. If you get a similar instance between dedicated servers and an Amazon Cloud Service, which have exactly the same specs, and you run them both for one month continuously, you’re going to pay three times more on AWS than on a dedicated server. For those workloads that are constant, on a hybrid cloud you can easily put it on a dedicated server while you leave your variable workloads on cloud.Sramana Mitra: Can we talk about a different use case? Let’s talk about publishing. Do you have customers that are in publishing?Emil Sayegh: We have customers throughout all the spectrum.Sramana Mitra: With publishing, the customer behavior is a little bit different. Online video is a big trend. With a publisher that has enough video content with millions of people accessing that video content, what does the infrastructure requirement look like there?Emil Sayegh: One of our big customers is one of the big networks. What they have on our array of servers is a whole bunch of videos for their affiliates. All the videos that their affiliates show on their affiliate websites are all served up on servers that are at Codero. That’s one of the examples. Those guys are using dedicated servers and not cloud because of performance consideration. You have to render that video. That takes a lot of processing power. They are using an array of dedicated servers and then the front-end interface of each one of the customized web interfaces to their affiliates is put on cloud. But the hardcore data storage and data rendering is all done on an array of dedicated servers on a hybrid type of structure.

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Codero CEO, Emil Sayegh (Part 2)

Emil Sayegh: Fast forward to 2014, what we are seeing right now in the market is both of these models hitting a point where frankly they’re becoming less useful as a monolithic type of offering. Companies out there want to be able to benefit from the ability to grow very quickly with the cloud offering for the right applications but also need a solid performance of what used to come with dedicated servers for certain applications like databases and Big Data applications. All those applications need very high I/O still need traditional infrastructures.Now, you’re in a dilemma. I put my front-end web infrastructure on something like Amazon cloud or Rackspace cloud, but then where do I put my high performance computing needs? Very few companies have been able to bridge those two elements. What we’re seeing is the emergence of hybrid cloud, which allows customers to essentially spin up front-end web resources in a cloud environment in a utility-based model and then have their back-end on robust dedicated gears. That is in the use case of e-commerce wherein you need front-end web and back-end databases all combined in one extremely fast network probably encapsulated in a private network.That’s where we’re seeing the demand of the e-commerce use case shifting. E-commerce customers want a hardware cloud, which allows them to do both – dedicated for high performance workloads and then web front-end on cloud for workloads that require rapid scale and don’t need as much I/O performance.Sramana Mitra: When you describe this e-commerce use case and the hybrid cloud demand from that particular segment, I imagine there’s also a size segmentation. What threshold of e-commerce activity are we seeing in this kind of behavior? At this point, e-commerce is a very large industry and there are lots of niche e-commerce players that operate in lightweight infrastructure mode. As the business scales, somewhere that is slipping to the phenomenon that you are describing. What is that threshold?Emil Sayegh: In e-commerce, you’ve small stores that have few hundred transactions a day to those that have tens of thousands of transactions per day. These customers rely on their web presence for their livelihood. Basically, these are pure e-commerce companies. They are transacting close to half a million to a million a month. Those customers are moving away from a monolithic type of architecture of either just a couple of dedicated servers and maybe one database server, to a more hybrid infrastructure where they’re using both cloud and dedicated to basically scale their environment.I would say it’s that mid-sized customer that is moving more towards that hybrid infrastructure. You do have some of the smaller companies that can operate on just one or two cloud instances and configure one of those cloud instances as a database. It’s not a lot of high transaction load. The I/O contentions are not big of a deal. I would classify that as a serious e-commerce site.With hybrid, I think you can actually start with hybrid because it’s not that much more expensive. Start with the hybrid from the get-go even if you are someone that was transacting a few hundred dollars a month and then grow with it. It allows you to grow. It allows you to spin up more dedicated or more cloud. We were at Austin. I can’t tell you the number of startups that stopped by and were tired of hosting at Amazon because they don’t understand why their bill is so high. They don’t understand why it’s so complicated. They’re looking at hybrid as a way to have more sanity in their e-commerce infrastructure.

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Codero CEO, Emil Sayegh (Part 1)

Cloud hosting, as companies scale, is moving from public cloud to hybrid cloud. More in this discussion.Sramana Mitra: Emil, tell us about Codero and yourself so that our audience can get to know you a bit.Emil Sayegh: I’m Emil Sayegh. I’m the CEO and President of Codero. By way of a quick introduction, Codero has been around, as a company, since 1992 in various names. It started as a small corner computer reselling shop in San Diego. Quickly, the Internet came about. They got into shared hosting, domain name registration, and web design. The company grew and evolved into dedicated hosting and managed hosting, and later cloud. In 2006, Catalyst Investors out of New York came and purchased them. They divested from the commodity aspects of the company – shared hosting and domain name registration – and sold it to a company called Hostopia. They kept the crown jewels of the company, which is dedicated, managed, and cloud hosting. They renamed the company to Codero in 2009.I have taken over as CEO of Codero in January of 2012. I have been in the industry for a long time. I was the Vice President of products at Rackspace. Later, I became the General Manager of the cloud business at Rackspace and helped Rackspace enter the public cloud market. From there, I was recruited by HP to build the HP public cloud business. I was there as the Vice President of Cloud Services. From there, I came to Codero.Sramana Mitra: Sounds like the best place to have this discussion focused on is in the area of cloud hosting. Of course, that has been one of the first major adoptions of cloud – the cloud architecture and technology. Tell us more about the trends you are seeing at this point.Emil Sayegh: I’d like to just give a quick history of the industry and tell you about the trends and shifts that are happening. What we saw about 10 years ago is the trend to outsource a lot of IT to other providers. Things that normally internal IT would be doing, like running your own servers, are being outsourced to “hosting providers.” Companies like Rackspace prospered during that era. Customers, from small to large companies, saw the advantage of outsourcing to someone that could do it better, cheaper, and faster.Then, the phenomena called Amazon Web Services (AWS) came about in 2007.  Frankly, there was also a tremendous progress in technology which allowed companies to offer private servers in a virtual fashion – not necessarily based on physical gear. AWS leveraged that technology trend and started what is later called the cloud. You had basically an industry that was based on traditional dedicated hosting and then you had AWS disrupting that market. Both groups of players had their own place in serving search and workloads. AWS did great with startups, those front-end web applications, and those customers that needed variant workloads that varied tremendously between times in a day. Traditional hosting companies continue to run more traditional workloads that require higher performance and databases.