Instead, purchase your software from one provider, but have a direct relationship with the host. Some of our customers are starting to do this with us and Zimbra. Zimbra is sort-of like Google docs, but open source, and they host it with us, and backup to a third-party host (which is cheap to do).

Good for resellers too

Managing the backup and hosting process might be a new way that resellers can differentiate their offering or add value to the supply chain as more and more businesses look to protect their data as they move to a Cloud Computing model. Ensuring ease of data migration between cloud providers is paramount for businesses moving forward.

By not being tied to one provider, a business could easily migrate to another host, or if Zimbra becomes unsupported, for example, they would not lose their data, and we would carry on hosting while they work with us to find a new software solution. If we fail, they still have their data and Zimbra can help them get set up again. We (the managed hosting provider in this example) would not own their data even if we did fail, but no harm in belt-and-braces.

Hosting commoditisation is here

Software providers cannot realistically compete in today’s commoditised hosting market place, and instead should stick to their strengths. This also applies to migrations – when moving customers between hosts there are now companies that specialise in the migration itself but have no interest in selling software nor hosting. One such company is SEM Solutions, with whom we have recently started working.

Another big win from supply chain disintegration is that you gain total price transparency; no more getting stitched up by one provider who is just whacking a huge mark-up on a commodity service like hosting (yes, I’m talking to you, local government CIOs .

Not only does it show you which bits cost what, thus allowing you to compare with the market rates, but disintegrating the supply chain also makes migration to a new Cloud / managed hosting provider easy since you just need to work with the software supplier to migrate to the new host, and are not tied in to one provider. Equally, since you own the data on the service (because you are buying the hosting direct), moving to a new software provider is greatly simplified.

Eating my own dog food

So, do I take my own advice? Yes; Memset is one of the fastest growing technology SMEs in the country, and all our business critical information and systems are hosted in the Cloud (or at least our little bit of it) and accessed over the Web. None of my staff have Microsoft Office, we do not pay for any software, and we do not need servers in our office for administration applications. Everyone has a laptop, and since all our systems and documents (we use a Wiki for the latter) are hosted online everyone can work from home without the complications of a VPN. We do not use any paper for internal communications either, thus minimising “the printer has broken” type problems.

We also use Trac project management and documentation management system for all our internal documentation, task and project management. It is free and simple to host yourself with any managed hosting provider. Simple, scalable systems like Trac have also made it easy for us to obtain and maintain our quality, security and environmental management systems (ISO9001, ISO27001 & ISO14001 accreditations).

It was a moment’s work to kill off the torrent site, and I sent a gentle email to the customer in question suggesting that they might like to take advantage of our Perimeter Patrol™ security services. He was a lucky one – many of our customers only decide to get us to manage their server’s security for them after a major, and damaging intrusion, but in their case no harm was done. There are plenty of commercially-run sites as well; it is not all just hackers stealing others’ bandwidth, and peer-to-peer file sharing is constantly growing especially as home broadband connections become ever-faster.

There is an on-going battle on the encryption and encoding front too. Just recently in The Register I heard that someone has already cracked the new HD DVD’s anti-rip system; embarrassing in the extreme for the HD DVD format’s supporters. The problem is, at a simplistic level, if you can play it then you can copy it. There are simply no two ways about it, and I for one think the music and movie industries are fighting a battle they cannot win, and should be taking a different approach entirely.

I am hardly innocent myself; I am quite a fan of allofmp3.com (a Russian mp3 site that purports pseudo-legality), but in my defense I primarily use it for getting good quality rips of CD’s and tapes I already own and therein, I think, lies a potential savior of the music industry. People like me do not want to be criminals, and we are also quite happy to pay a modest fee for a convenient service. I could have just ripped my CD’s for free, but I preferred to pay a few dollars and not faff about with disks etc.

Traditionally, a major cost for the media industries has been distribution, but the Internet renders that tiny. I am no expert, but I am pretty sure the music industry could make good money even at a small fraction of the current prices, say 10-20p per track. If combined with a really good interface most people would be quite happy to pay rather than mess about trying to download dodgy mp3′s.

In fact, it might even allow the music industry to sell a lot more thanks to being able to make “smart suggestions” based on what other users with similar tastes also like – there are already examples of such systems out there. Equally, such a model would be a great boon to small-time artists who currently have a nightmare getting their material heard since there would be minimal costs associated with getting your music listed, and if it was good then the “smart suggestions” system would auto-promote it. Everyone wins. Hmm, why am I giving out potentially-killer business ideas to the world?

However, this all powerfully reminds me of a sub-text to an excellent book I read last year by Peter F. Hamilton, Misspent youth. It portrays a world where ubiquitous high-speed connectivity and massive personal storage capacities have rendered copyright impotent, and the professional production of new novels, music and movies ends. Such a future seems, at times, chilling near.

Normally our data centres have plenty of over-capacity in their air-conditioning systems. Cooling a data centre is one of their big design challenges – each of our 1 metre square racks uses around 4KWatts, all of which gets turned into heat which is roughly the same as four electric fire bars; standing behind one is positively toasty! Believe it or not we are fairly conservative as to how we stack the servers as well – a rack full of blade-servers might easily double that figure.

The record temperatures this month have caused problems though. When the outside air temperature increases it becomes harder for the air-con units to dump heat – after all, for the external units to be able to radiate heat away they need to be hotter than the ambient temperature, and that is compounded by the fact that the area they are trying to cool is being additionally heated as well. When temperatures spiked to over well over 30 degrees Celsius earlier this week one overworked air-conditioning unit at our Fareham site failed. The data centre team was swift to respond and it was back up and running within an hour, however what under normal circumstances would have been a reduction in capacity well short of the safety-margin over-capacity actually meant there was not quite enough cooling for that brief period, thanks to reduced efficiency of the air-con units and the generally increased ambient temperature.

The result was a small rise in the building’s internal temperature, which was then compounded. As the temperature increased slightly, the hotter-running servers had to increase their fan-rates to keep cooler, and hence use more energy. On top of that CPUs tend to become less efficient as they heat up, again using more power. More power usage means more heat generation, and suddenly you have a positive-feedback loop, although thankfully quite a slow acting one.

Thanks to a swift response no serious harm was done; however one of our busier machines did manage to pull a whopping 400Watts and contributed to a power-trip being blown which, frustratingly, caused an unscheduled reboot for the handful servers on that power bar.

Along with increasing energy costs and a moral responsibility to battle climate change, this sort of technical consideration in the face of ever hotter Summers is yet another reason why IT hardware & infrastructure providers need to have energy firmly on the agenda. We certainly do.

Up until recently I had been using a massive Dell Inspiron 9100, which is a great laptop as long as you don’t actually put it on your lap or try to lug it around on the tube. I have also been a faithful Palm user for many years, but trying to do anything useful on a PDA, even with a bluetooth keyboard, is painful thanks to slow & limited applications, terrible reliability issues and poor battery life.

So, I recently splashed out on a gorgeous little Sony Vaio VGN-TX2HP (see right). Not only is it perhaps the ultimate geek-girl fashion accessory (and great for starting conversations on the train!), but it is so small that it fits in my handbag, so light that it is a breeze to carry, and has a battery life that puts the energizer bunny to shame (4-7 hours!)! It comes in-and-out of standby mode really fast too, making it so convenient to use that I will often put it to sleep while changing lines on the underground and just wake it back up for another 10 mins work tube-hop.

My other problem was mobile connectivity. I was using 3G on my hopelessly slow, chunky and unreliably Nokia 6680, which not only had major issues handing over between cells causing the connection to bounce irritatingly when on the move, but was also limited to 112Kbps thanks to the bluetooth connection. Therefore I recently gave in to temptation and bought one of Vodafone’s new high speed mobile data cards. I went with their more expensive £25/mo, 250MB/mo one rather than the popular £17/mo, 2,000MB/mo T-mobile for three reasons: i) I trust Vodafone’s network more ii) Vodafone don’t filter the traffic – T-mobile block things like VOIP and even MSN apparently, & iii) Vodafone’s can do up to 1.8Mbps when the new HSDPA system is fully rolled out. I have been seriously impressed so far; I get a persistent link almost all the way from Guildford to Waterloo, and the connection speeds are truly broadband-like. Even the latency is better – I can happily use PuTTY/SSH without a painful lag.

This sort of true anywhere-connectivity gives a whole raft of new options as well. Already, all my email is stored centrally on a remote IMAP server, along with most of my critical documents, diary and so forth. I am only a few steps away from having everything important centrally stored with my laptop acting as little more then a client application terminal, and when I have managed that the days of fretting about backups will be gone. I am not alone either; we are seeing an ever increasing demand for online business applications from IMAP email to CRM solutions and centrally hosted groupware.

Anyway, you may be saying “that’s all very well, but those are not cheap toys!”, and you’d be right. However I am quite sure that they have already paid for themselves in terms of my increased productivity. Money well spent I say (and come on, they’re so cool! ).