Can’t believe another PDC came and went. The year is whizzing by so fast. Here are some thoughts and observations from PDC 2009.

1. Overall, I thought that this year’s PDC was more mellow than last year. I didn’t feel the same energy level. Perhaps it was partly due to the economy – less vendors, less attendees. Perhaps it was due to just having the PDC in back-to-back years. Remember, it was three years between PDC 2005 and PDC 2008 so there was a lot of build up of excitement for developers to get together and check out what was new. To keep the energy level high, it may be in Microsoft’s interest to keep at least 2 years between PDC conferences.

2. During the first day keynote, Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, kept coming back to the vision of “Three Screens and a Cloud”. He was referring to Microsoft’s goal of providing seamless integration between the Computer, the mobile phone/devices, the television and the cloud. However, this PDC 2009 conference was more about one screen – the computer – and the Cloud. We will need to wait until next year to hear more on the story of the other two screens.

3. During the first day keynotes, there were two guests that surprised me. The first surprise was Matt Mullenweg, the creator of open source blogging engine WordPress who came out to announce that they are working with Microsoft to run WordPress on Windows Azure. So it was announced that Azure supports MySQL, Java, and PHP. Microsoft has been putting a lot of resources into partnering with the open source community. Now, I’d like to see WordPress working with SQL server.

4. The second surprise was Vivek Kundra Chief Information Officer at the White House. He had words to say via satellite.  It’s pretty cool that the Federal CIO took time out to address the attendees of the PDC. He spoke on the partnership between government and industry and the future of exciting new applications driven by innovations like Cloud computing and the democratization of data. One example he mentioned was around the Department of Defense opening up GPS data to enable innovations in GPS enabled devices. He also talked about how NASA is making Mars Pathfinder data available for the Pathfinder information challenge a citizen scientist contest.

5. Vivek’s presentation helped reinforce the announcement of Microsoft Dallas a new data set subscription service available on the Windows Azure platform. This is pretty cool. This service should help developers to more easily access data sets for their applications that would otherwise be difficult or too expensive to get. It’s in its early stage so we’ll see how this evolves.

6. Another surprise was the presence of the iPhone for two demos during the keynotes, especially after the hoopla over Bill Gates banning iphones from his house earlier this year.  First, during his video presentation, Vivek Kundra demoed an iPhone App for job searches, in part using data from data.gov. Then on Day 2, Scott Guthrie attempted to demo Silverlight streaming on the iPhone. I say “attempted” because the demo failed and the several backup iPhones also failed. Got to feel for any speaker and, especially any keynote speaker, who has a demo blow up. Scott Gutherie handled it well though. I took a look at the video posted at iis.net/iphone on my iphone and I thought the video looked pretty cool.

7. Scott Guthrie talked about Silverlight 4 for his keynote which he announced is going to beta during his talk. He used some gratuitous demos to show different new features of Silverlight 4. Then, Brian Goldfarb came out and demoed a Silverlight App that interfaced with Facebook.  I thought that with the next version of Silverlight, I can see the possibility of some really cool business applications. It should be an exciting launch. Scott Gutherie also announced some recent wins for Silverlight with powering future huge online events like the Winter Olympics and Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show.

8. There were less Expo vendors compared to last year. You can tell the economy is affecting Microsoft partners. However, they used the same conference hall footprint so booths were far apart. Even with people in the expo floor, things looked sparse.

9. I was able to attend the PDC Underground Party at the Conga Room. The was a long line to get in. Mr. Scott Guthrie even did a talk on Silverlight during the party. Does this guy ever rest? And our friends at Neudesic sponsored a lounge area where they were hand rolling cigars.

10. Microsoft also had one of their Server Containers on the Expo floor which you could walk though. This is the kind of container that will be used to house Windows Azure. This particular unit was one that will sit outside. In the cloud data center, you will see stacks of these in many rows.  The servers in this demo container looked to be DELL rackmount servers. however, in a real production environment, I’m not sure what servers they will use. A while ago I saw a picture of a Google server (sorry wasn’t able to find the link) that they use for their cloud and it was a really stripped down thing.  I asked the Microsoft staff about it but they didn’t say what the production servers would be.

11. Ray Ozzie announced that Windows Azure will go live into production on January 1, 2009. For a period of one month, it will still be free as Microsoft tests out there billing system. I’ve seen many different types of billing systems and even for something seemingly simple like say billing for web hosting, billing can get very complicated. Now, with something like the pay as you go model of the Cloud and different metered things triggering microcharges, this billing system is going to be really complex. I don’t know if a month is going to be enough time for testing. In any case, on February 1, 2009, Microsoft plans to start billing for Microsoft Azure.

12. I met with many people and some of them asked me about how Windows Azure was going to affect us. I’ve discussed this topic before and having talked with Azure staff and seeing the presentations, I still believe that shared hosting is not threatened. The user will have another choice for hosting and depending on their needs they will choose what is right for them. The Cloud is not the right choice for every hosting need.  I spoke to many attendees as well and they have a lot of concerns about the Cloud and I think the adoption is not going to be as fast as reported.

13. Ray Ozzie also talked about the two Cloud data centers in the US that are live now. Two more are being built in Europe and two more are being built in Asia. These international data centers are to go live next year or two some time.

14. At the MSDev booths, they were giving away T-shirts and they made you fill in the t-shirt “_______ was my idea” going along with the “Windows 7 was my idea” campaign. They took pictures with the people and their shirts. Some other shirts proclaimed “The Internet was my idea”, “Web 2.0 was my idea” so here is the one I did right quick:

15. And oh, did I mention they gave out laptops?

Takeshi Eto
VP Marketing and Business Development

You may have seen many hosts touting their “green” status lately. Hey, green is good, right? But what does it really mean?

At home you may do things to reduce your energy use, recycle waste, reuse, reduce – all the steps an individual can take to lessen their negative impact on the environment. But just about every web hosting business typically consists of two things; an office and a data center. A company can certainly take steps to reduce consumption within an office; turning off unused lights and monitors, using less air conditioning, encouraging car pooling, etc. But the bulk of a host’s consumption takes place at the data center, and that’s where things get a little fuzzy.

Servers require a large amount of electrical power and a cool atmosphere. If the temperature in a data center starts to nudge it’s way up into the high 80’s or low 90’s, servers begin to fail. Cooling entire floors of large buildings that contain tens of thousands of servers is an expensive proposition, both in cost and environmental impact. But it is an unavoidable cost, since the servers can only function within a narrow temperature range. Additionally, all computers contain small amounts of toxic materials necessary to their construction. That’s why your city may have a specific site where they ask you to bring in your old electronics, rather than dumping them into a landfill. The harsh reality is a host cannot do much to reduce its environmental “footprint” where their data centers are concerned.

So if a host wants to declare itself green, what can they do? Well, typically they buy “carbon credits.” When you see a host sporting a “green” logo, that is very likely the path they have taken. The problem with these credits is they allow a business to make claims of being green while otherwise not changing a thing that they are doing. They still have to power and cool their servers, so there is always that inevitable level of energy use that cannot be sidestepped.

Buying carbon credits seems disingenuous. If there is no effort to reduce your actual use of energy or toxic materials, what have you really done by buying a “credit”? All you have done is pay for a logo to place on your web site. You are assuaging your guilt, or the wishes of your customers, by writing a check. What does that really accomplish?

Everyone in our business is being forced to look for ways to consume less power, simply because power in most data centers is now at a premium. You can get all the space you want, and all the bandwidth you want, but electricity is harder and harder to come by in the vast majority of large facilities. But if you choose to rule out carbon credits, your options become much more limited. We do not tout ourselves as a “green” host because – at least at this point in time – we do not believe such a thing is really possible. And as the technology improves and becomes more widespread, and an honest “green” label is within our reach, it is something that we will certainly pursue.

Having said that…

There are a few options. One is using a “green” data center, meaning a facility that gets its power from renewable sources. As you might imagine, they are few and far between, they are rarely really “green,” and there are none at all anywhere near our base of operations. The second option is the aforementioned “carbon credits.”

Where we can make a difference by our choices, we do so. Aside from utilizing newer, less power-hungry CPUs in our new servers, we have also introduced a sophisticated power monitoring system in our Irvine, CA data center. This allows us to maximize the load on our existing power supply in order to avoid bringing in additional power. Without a monitoring system it is more or less a guessing game – “How many boxes can we load onto this circuit?” and obviously in most cases you will err on the side of caution (to avoid overloading a circuit and taking down a dozen servers). Erring on the side of caution inevitably leaves you with an underutilized supply of power.

But with our new systems we can monitor power usage in real time and maximize the use of our power allotment. This has reduced our power “waste” (power provisioned but unused) by 20 – 25%. You can imagine the overall savings that could be realized if all large data centers provided such a monitoring service for their customers, but very few do. And those that do typically charge a premium that forces most smaller companies to opt out of the monitoring. Our Irvine data center – a very large place – offers no such detailed power consumption analysis service, which is why we had to bring in the hardware ourselves.

But probably the major step we have taken is with our newly opened data center in the U.K. The architecture there is completely different than the U.S. network. We utilize central file servers and “virtual machines” for the web servers. What this means is that a handful of centralized units can do the work that used to require dozens of discreet servers. This configuration has the added benefit of actually being more efficient in serving files as well, so we save a tremendous amount of power and provide a speedier service. A rare win/win situation, but so far it is performing quite well. If we continue to see positive results in the U.K. we will consider moving to a similar architecture in our U.S. data center, where the bulk of our accounts reside.

Now, when it comes right down to it these were business decisions. Saving energy is good for our bottom line. But whatever the intention, the end result is the same. So if it takes a cost analysis to convince some people that reducing energy consumption is a good thing, we’ll take that as a small victory. Most people who are driving smaller, more fuel efficient cars these days are not doing so out of noble intent. They are trying to save money. But we still reap the environmental benefits, so it’s a good trend overall.

Until truly green data centers start cropping up in Los Angeles we will continue to work on our windmill up on the roof of the building. It’s not much to look at now, but give us some time.