Invent

Colocation


How ColoAdvisor Works Video

Better to not to perfect something if the time to complete it will double in length. It’s good to allow a “version 1″ of your project out the door rather than losing the opportunity to have the project launch at all. (Concept stolen from 43folders and Guy Kawasaki but not necessarily in that order.)

I remember back to my “large company days” – our websites did a great job of offering info on compliance, financial reports and the management team. They all failed terribly at telling folks what the heck we did. I found a few things were prevalent:

1. The more info that was crammed into the site, the better management seemed to think it was.

2. The wording was so vague and complex that it really defeated the purpose of the website all together.

3. The offering of services was so vast that it seemed unlikely that we were really good at any services listed.

To combat this, we decided to put up a video that would graphically illustrate our “datacenter locator service” so anyone could grasp our model which is the matching of datacenter providers with potential clients at no charge to the client.  This was back in February of last year and we did our best with the resources we had at hand. Here’s the “v1″ video:

(direct link here)

The content was ok but the colors were a bit pale making the graphics unreadable. We also recorded the video at different times so you can tell that the tempo and pitch changed between recording sessions.

Deciding to redo the video here’s what we came up with:

(direct link here)

We’re much happier with this version of the video for sure. Within 1 minute 49 seconds most folks in the industry will understand what we do.  The dots concept we used came from Jeff who specializes at modeling complexity with dots.

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Colocating your Mac Mini

I remember a few years back I ran across a firm that would take your Mac Mini and colocate it for you in a datacenter. At the time I thought the idea was “cute” and figured some small businesses may consider that for that client server based Mac App that some business would be running.

I hadn’t really thought much more about it until I realized that running dual monitors and tons of apps for 14 hours a day on my 4 year old MacBook Pro was starting to take a toll on it when I decided I would use the MBP for traveling, working on the terrace or working just away from my desk. I considered the iMac  but I already owned 3 monitors and couldn’t justify the iMac and the Mac Pro was just overkill. I settled on the Mac Mini and now I know why there are firms out their that colocate these amazing machines.

First of all, I got the 2.4 GHz, 2 GB RAM model which I thought would be power starved. Actually it’sresponsive, boots up lightning fast and really takes a beating daily without showing any signs of slow down. Not only do I run lots of applications at once, but instead of 2 monitors, I pulled out a 3rd that I had stored and now run 3 monitors on the Mac Mini without any performance hits. (If you are wondering how, the Mini has HDMI which I’ve converted to DVI and it has a mini-display port which I’ve also converted to DVI. The last monitor was connected with a display link adapter that converts one of my USB ports to a DVI port.)

I could definitely see with 4GB or perhaps even 8GB’s of RAM that this small machine could be an excellent server in a datacenter while barely consuming power and space. This whole thing got me to thinking about a company called Sea Micro who uses small PCI board based computers to deliver 512 Intel Atom cores in a single unit. So rather than virtualizing really large servers with hundreds of virtual instances, you’d literally be able to have lots of “mini computers” in a single unit that has a really high back plane through-put for network and redundancy on all elements. So rather than splitting up large scale computers into smaller chunks, you would just buy smaller chunks of physical computing. Interesting things to consider these days

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