I think that the success of Leaseweb is based on its unique culture and I welcome this new influx. The Leaseweb culture is based on an open dialogue and I have found our foreign colleagues to be adapting quickly.

Hosting vacancies

The main attraction for foreign professionals is that we have an international customer base and a culture of empowerment. We cherish this multinational culture and want to foster an international workforce. This means we will actively encourage people from abroad to help us fulfil our vacancies. It makes it also for me personally more interesting to work with people who have a refreshing view of the world.

Lingua franca

The internationalization led to a wide mix of languages in the corridors. It is interesting to hear different languages but it is important that people do not feel excluded. We therefore decided to adopt English as the official language within the company in order to avoid misunderstandings. English is also the lingua franca of the internet and most of our customers also use English to communicate with us. Although we are proud to be a Dutch company, we have to evolve.

                          

It is very important to really think through your choice of hardware. In particular the energy loss of a power supply unit of a server is concerning. Google claims in a white paper that you are likely to loose 30 – 40% of power in a typical power supply unit. The reason is that the power supply unit converts AC to DC power which results in heat (ie loss of energy). Google however has developed servers which loose only 10% of the power.

Choosing hardware with efficient power supply units is obviously of paramount importance. But where do you find these efficient power supplies ? The answer is simple: you cannot. Humans have built nuclear reactors and sent people to the moon but efficient power supply units are still not around except for the likes of Google.

It is quite sad that despite all their green slogans that the hardware manufacturers have still done so little to really reduce global carbon emissions. Another example will add to my argument: operating temperatures. If you read any spec sheet, most servers will support environmental temperatures of 10 – 35 degrees celsius. This range is so wide that you have to ask yourself why datacenters are still running inlet temperatures of 21 degrees celsius. Therefore, the easiest solution to enhance power efficiency and help out mother earth is to increase the temperature in the datacenter. However, I do not hear hardware manufacturers advocating the raising of temperatures. I just wonder why.

                          

My main point was that IT managers are often not responsible for the energy bill. If the IT department does not have an incentive to become more efficient with power, then it will be difficult to get them to save energy. The IT industry will have to take a more integrated approach to managing the computing resources. Especially since around 70% of the TCO during the life cycle consists of power and cooling expenses and just 30% the hardware itself.

A copy of my presentation is here: netappv13.ppt

                          

Amsterdam contains many high tech companies and datacenters account for 6% of total CO2 emissions of the city. Therefore the city is organizing a Green IT project. The objective of this project is to facilitate the exchange of best practices from the leading players in order to improve efficiencies. In fact the article in Parool is based on a report of the Energy research Center of the Netherlands which was based on the first results of among others our new climate neutral datacenter. Based on this report the city is planning to impose a Energy Usage Efficiency (EUE) factor of 1.3.

This EUE is derived from the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) which is a metric developed by the Greengrid and is the total facility kW power divided by the kW power used by the servers. The EUE differs from the PUE because it is expressed in kWh instead of kW. Datacenters built during the 90s typically have EUEs of around 1.8 – 2.2. This means that you need at least 1.8 kWh in overhead (such as cooling, lighting, UPS loss, transmission losses etc.) for every kWh used by a server.

If the city will impose a mandatory PUE of 1.3 on new datacenters, then this will seriously raise the hurdle for datacenter operators. We have already made many innovations in our datacenter and will meet this requirement. Our operations director Rolph wrote earlier an interesting post in this blog on our datacenter innovations. However, for others it will not be easy because many managers of datacenters are typicslly not rewarded for efficiency. Rather their incentive is on reliability and uptime. Moreover, these types of efficiencies require substantial more capital as the investments in energy saving technologies are expensive and have a relatively long pay back time. It requires therefore a radical change in culture to meet these new requirements and companies will have to make more risks in their designs to meet these objectives.

The ECN report is well written and touches upon all technologies enabling to achieve substantial savings ranging from geothermal cooling, free cooling, cold corridors, to absorption cooling. I really recommend this report for people interested in this subject.

We support this initiative of the city of Amsterdam and hope that other countries will adopt a similar approach in order for this to have a meaningful impact on a global scale and provide for a level playing field within the industry. The European Commission is also talking about a code of conduct for datacenters and hopefully they can take inspiration from this report.

                          

I do not consider myself to be such an authority as Carr with special contacts but I was at a Microsoft Round Table discussion in December 07 for the Dutch hosting industry when this point was openly discussed by Microsoft executives.

The people from Microsoft announced that they would enter the hosting business themselves over the next few months. This created quite an uproar from some of the hosting providers present. The hosting providers are an increasingly important distribution channel but is not yet taken very serious by the top honchos in Redmond. Their SPLA licensing is very complicated indeed for the hosting industry and requires a doctorate in law.

It is easy to understand why certain hosting providers feel threatened by the entry of their supplier in their market space. For your information, Microsoft will begin offering hosted Exchange, and Sharepoint applications.

In my mind it is inevitable that Microsoft will enter our space given the competition from Google. Their recent bid to acquire Yahoo fits this vision of cloud computing from the datacenter. I think they will focus on mass market commodity products for consumers and Soho.

We at Leaseweb are not worried. Microsoft has a tendency to make a lot of noise and then remain inactive for a long period of time. That is not surprising given their size and culture as a “shrink wrap” vendor of proprietary software.

I know from experience at Leaseweb that developing a new activity like building and managing datacenters requires a different skill set which is not to be underestimated. These datacenters are like huge boiler rooms where you have to get your hands dirty.

Nonetheless, their entry in the hosting business validates our vision that cloud computing will be the future. We therefore wish our friends at Microsoft success in their endeavor. However, we expect to continue to innovate in the area of datacenter automation, energy efficiency and virtualization in order to have a compelling value proposition which satisfies our customers. That is the only recipe for success in this constantly evolving industry.

                          

The image of the hosting business is not great. Some companies are even ashamed to call themselves a hosting provider and try to come up with many new categories such as managed service provider, internet infrastructure provider, etc. I think they all boil down to the same thing, ie enabling customers to use computing capacity from a datacenter that is connected to the internet. The last thing we need in today’s tight labor markets is an image problem among potential employees.

Fortunately, the industry finally managed to found the Dutch Hosting Association and hopefully this will improve the image problem. Perhaps the next step will be the foundation of a European association as more and more decisions are taken in Brussels.

I really support the foundation of this association because we have many common challenges such as infringement on copyrights, internet fraud, spam, deceiving advertisements by hosting providers, content filters, energy efficiency, net neutrality and I can continue for a while.

Leaseweb is one of the largest hosting providers and as such we are often in the news in relation to one of these subjects. As we say in Holland, high trees catch a lot of wind. However, it would be nice if we could do this jointly with the entire hosting industry.

The first step has been set and I see also that the government is increasingly collaborating proactively. An example is the steering group set up by the Dutch NICC (National Infrastructure Cyber Crime), part of the ICTU (www.ictu.nl); which is an alliance of the interior ministry and the Association of the Dutch Municipalities.

I look forward to working with the stakeholders to establish the hosting industry in the Netherlands at the center of the worldwide internet in a similar manner that Schiphol and Rotterdam are instrumental in the global logistical flows. Hosting providers transport data packets instead of logistical packages so this vision is not that far fetched.