MinneBar 2010, an (un)conference aimed at getting Minnesota tech and design communities together, was held on May 22^nd at Best Buy Headquarters.  Here’s a short recap of the event and what’s new on the Minnesota tech scene:

Opening remarks were by MinneBar co-founders Luke Francl and Ben Edwards. They thanked sponsors, including W3i.

The first session I attended at MinneBar 2010 was “Legal Implications of Limewire on File-Sharing Business Models” by Ryan Miest of Robius Kaplan Miller Ciresi, which described how most of the copyright concerns involving file-sharing networks go back to the Sony BetaMax VCR law suit from 1984. No one thought Napster had a leg to stand on. Others like Grokster andLimewire were able to continue after learning not to be centralized like Napster. The Limewire decision is likely to be appealed with respect to the courts findings of personal liability of their CEO. I didn’t think they sufficiently covered veil piercing.

Graeme Thickins briefly introduced me to Rick Mahn founder of Social Media Breakfast Minneapolis and Myke Roventine. I joined about 75 others to hear Myke’s MinneBar session, “Social Web Design: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back”. Myke pointed out what he felt were flawed design strategies by the market leading social media players like Facebook, Twitter, Google and Yahoo. Does everyone need to put their Twitter feeds on their blog? The Twitter feeds miss the context of the conversation, and aren’t making the web better when being on others’ blogs. He also commented that Facebook has changed functionality multiple times unnecessarily, such as moving the search box several times over the past couple of years. These unnecessary changes caused confusion for users. He also commented how Twitter’s “infinite scrolling” for tweets could be improved by adopting additional UI controls such as those found on BlipFM. He said the big guys are trying the changes instead of user testing. Phil Wilson remarked during the session how this was “try fast, fail fast.”  Also during the session Steve Borsch announced that he just deleted his Facebook account due to privacy concerns.

Next I went to “Bowling for Market Share- How to Grow Your Startup by Narrowing its Focus” by Curt Prins. Curt provided very good start-up marketing advice. Curt laid out his very pragmatic approach to B2B marketing for tech start-ups, and the developers in the audience definitely seem to embrace his methods.

Over lunch, Robert Stephens who was so gracious to advocate for Best Buy to allow Minnesota techies to use their space, briefly remarked on Best Buy’s strategy around digital televisions, and his recent trip to Google IO.

Next at MinneBar, I caught Aaron Kardell’s iPhone app marketing session entitled, “Getting started with iPhone & iPad Development.” Aaron is the founder of Performant Design and developer of the popular iGarageSale app.  Aaron shared his lessons learned in iPhone app marketing, such as the importance of getting on the top 100 lists, requesting app store reviews within your app, ideally after the user has been using it for about a week, some ideas on how to get noticed by Apple (such as taking out ads in Cupertino on Facebook), using roadblock ad campaigns at popular Apple/Mac blogs, using incentive app downloads to burst your downloads, and using vendors like Tapjoy and Flurry App Circle.  After the business discussion, Aaron coded an Italian food finder iPhone app using Yelp’s API and Mapkit.

The next MinneBar 2010 session I attended was “How to Measure P&L When Your Price is Free” by W3i’s Product Manager, Kristin Oberhaus. With users wanting free apps on the Internet, you need to balance the demand gained for free app versus paid app promotion.  Kristin pointed out various models to drive revenue for free applications, including cross-subsidy, three-party, freemium, and nonmonetary.  When free is your model, your P&L must be based on the value driven by your free app and not the price.   

Next I spoke on a panel of Minnesota tech thought leaders, and discussed “How Can Minnesota be Better”. Thank you to Jeff Pesek and Mike Bollinger for inviting me to participate. The session was largely centered on the culture of risk aversion in Minnesota, how Minnesota tech start-ups need to focus on home runs and not just niche singles and doubles, and funding. Jon Dahl, co-founder of YCombinator-backed, Zencoder said that if Minnesota was going to try an incubator concept like YCombinator or TechStars the incubator would need a lot more cash, given the lack of local angel funding and VC activity, and a mentorship program– both essential elements of YCombinator.

MinneBar 2010 proved to be a great place to network with top Minnesota tech experts. I spent a couple of hours after the sessions ended schmoozing with several new faces, including Derrick Shields & Dylan Petersson & of WebproLeads, Matt Bauer of Pedal Brain, and Thomas Grabowski, co-founder of LogLogic. I also listened in as the first ever Minnespark award winners were announced. 

Further, it was refreshing to hear a lot of buzz about Minnesota tech jobs. I gathered that W3i is not the only company hiring right now. It seemed to be a common theme that Minnesota tech jobs are in abundance as many of the companies present indicated they have positions available.  Minnesota Recruiters survey indicates that there is optimism for job growth in 2010 and an increase in personal job security. Minnesota’s tech scene has a large, highly skilled, and growing workforce demonstrated by the energy and attendance at MinneBar and the tech job buzz being generated there.

Thanks to the organizers and attendees, along with Best Buy for allowing us to use their campus (which is absolutely cool) to promote Minnesota tech and design.  As evidenced by the increase in attendance over the 2009 event, MinneBar rocks.

Rob Weber, Vice President of Business Development and Co-Founder, W3i, LLC
Rob is an Internet marketing pioneer with over ten, profitable years evolving W3i in the consumer application industry.

So, you know you need to have a mobile app for your next campaign, but you don’t know where you should start. I asked Aleksey Cherfas, our top mobile app developer, to tell me what he thinks digital marketers need to know about app development, and he distilled his guidance around how to choose a platform, how to choose what type of technology to use, how do you determine what features to include in your mobile app, and how to drive continuous engagement.

One of the most important decisions in preparation for mobile app development is to decide which platforms you will target. Do you go for the iPhone OS, because everybody seems to be so hyped about the iPhone and iPad; Android, because you heard it is a promising open source platform; or the BlackBerry, just because this is what your boss uses? Regardless of whether you decide to cover multiple platforms right away or focus on just one from the beginning, you should start with analyzing your prospective users and the marketplace. Determine if you plan your app to have a global reach or focus on local markets and seek out device usage in those markets before committing to any particular device. A safe bet would be to single out one device to start with and then gradually expand to others, focusing on those that are more relevant to your domain.

Once you decide on the platform, you have at least three choices in terms of the type of applications you can develop. You can go for developing a native app, which takes advantage of platform specific functionality and design, arguably making it easier to operate for your users, though condemning your development effort to be very complex and technologically involved.

On the other end of the difficulty spectrum in the world of mobile app development are Web apps. These applications are Web pages that are rendered inside a mobile browser and capitalize on the browser’s multitouch technology for navigational interaction. Some basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is usually sufficient to build a simple and effective application. There are even frameworks that allow you to harness the power of JavaScript in mobile browsers without much effort. JQTouch, a jQuery plug-in for mobile app development, is one such framework.

Your third option is a combination; kind of a half-native, half-Web app where you would create a native app that uses a browser engine for rendering your content as Web pages but requires you to develop your own navigation instead of using built-in mobile browser navigation controls. This option is a little more technologically involved than a simple Web app. Because you are using a browser engine for displaying your content, the effort is not quite as involved as with the native app.

At this point, it should be mentioned that there are several services that try to solve the multiplatform conundrum and complexity of native development, making your entrance to mobile app development a lot easier. These services will allow you to write your code once, in many cases using JavaScript and HTML, and they will take care of compiling applications into the native code for different devices. Some of the more prominent of them are Rhomobile, PhoneGap, and Titanium. If you plan to develop an app by yourself, do give high consideration to these services.

As you think about the design of your mobile apps, consider these options. You can either make your design very specific to the standards and conventions of each platform, or use your design from other domains (website, desktop software) and transplant it onto the mobile app. Even with the array of platforms out there, it’s possible to use blueprints that will nicely fit into different platforms without violating too many conventions for each platform. There’s no right answer when it comes to design. If you deviate from the standards, you should still stay within familiar metaphors so that the users don’t have to work too hard to learn how to use your mobile app.

The main difference of mobile apps from your other domains is limited display area, so keep it very simple and to the point. Don’t try to incorporate every single feature into the first version of your app. Start with a simple feature of essential functionality and let the user feedback drive your future functionality and application design. One way to keep functionality to the minimum is a product requirements document (PRD). In its simplest form, PRD is a list of application requirements (features) with a brief explanation and some weights attached to each feature. The commonly used weights are “must have,” “good to have,” and “may have.” Keeping these weights in mind makes it easier to set development priorities and move unessential application features into the next releases. Again, keep it simple – think in terms of “must have” requirements for the first release.

Even after users install your app, you are still only one of many that occupy their home screen and will constantly need to compete for their attention. Updating your app often is one approach to keep users engaged and interested. Many successful apps release updates at least once a month. With each update they address bugs and performance issues, but most importantly they try to come up with a small new feature that will keep users interested and prompt them to re-download and open your app.

With so many options to choose from when developing for mobile platforms, your decision should be based on your requirements and resources. If you are to remember one takeaway from above, it’s: keep it simple.

Rob Weber, Vice President of Business Development and Co-Founder, W3i, LLC
Rob is an Internet marketing pioneer with over ten, profitable years evolving W3i in the consumer application industry.

Picture this: you have all the beloved pictures from your first child on your laptop. You took the time to organize them by month and importance.  You renamed them from the archaic naming scheme that your camera uses to something like “babyname.FirstSteps.jpg”. The screensaver on your laptop cycles through the pictures for all to see. Then one day the laptop makes a dreaded noise and you see the lovely blue screen of death and POOF, your pictures and everything else on your laptop are gone or corrupted.  Devastating!  You need a backup plan.

Did you have anything backed up to another source other than your laptop? Did you put them on CD’s, DVD’s, an external hard drive, or the cloud? You need to think about these things in the modern age that we live in with digital media and our growing dependency on it. You can use cloud based backup services such as mozy.com or carbonite.com to back up your files. You can use external hard drives or DVD’s, but you need to keep them offsite at a trusted friend’s house or a bank deposit box. However, they need to be easily accessible so you can keep them updated.  I bet you are thinking “Why do I need to keep them offsite – that seems pretty inconvenient?”  A slight inconvenience will be worth it if your house burns down and your only backup goes with your laptop in poof of smoke and flames. Theft is another reason to backup your data and keep a copy in an offsite location.

Businesses also need to keep this in mind. You can backup data all you want within your data center but what if your data center disappears tomorrow?  Where are your backups? Ask your IT staff if your data is backed up and can be retrievable in the event of disaster. Ask yourself how important your business data is and how devastating it would be if it was lost.  An ounce of protection today can prevent a ton of pain tomorrow. I don’t care if your backup solution is a manual file copy from one office to another. The point is that you need to have a backup plan, so think ahead and prepare for potential disasters and how you would survive them.

There are numerous software packages and companies that specialized in enterprise disaster recovery tools. Commvault is one of the industry leaders that have a holistic backup solution. We, at W3i, utilize Commvault for our enterprise backups both in our data center and to copy data to an offsite location in the event of a disaster in our production data center. We test key systems on a quarterly schedule to ensure that we have full faith in our backups.  Our confidence level of our backups is extremely high. How high is your confidence level?

How would it feel to lose the precious pictures of your first born? How devastating would it be if your company lost its essential production databases? Plan for the worst, and you will be prepared if it happens.  If you have any other advice for backing up your data, feel free to leave it in the comments?

Matt Brauchler, System Administrator, W3i, LLC
Matt has over 7 years expirence working in Information Systems. He is a System Administrator for W3i with an emphasis on Enterprise Virtualization and Disaster Recovery Solutions. He is also a lawn perfectionist and enjoys learning new technology.

Over the past few years, our Business Intelligence group developed solutions under the SCRUM Agile development methodology.  The SCRUM methodology provides a superb framework for the development process, however, we started to encounter shortfalls with regard to widespread understanding of what information was available for consumption and, more importantly, how to leverage that information to derive business value.

After stepping back and taking a look at how we as a Business Intelligence Team architected, developed, and released our solutions, we were hard pressed to locate a flaw in the process – Development commitments were being met every sprint, team members were engaged and enjoyed their work, the information made available by our solutions was accurate and timely.  Why weren’t more people using this new information?  Why hadn’t we taken over the world yet with this new found insight?

“Because we never fully explained how to use it.”

Well, that’s not entirely true as ad-hoc training sessions occurred quite frequently; and we even held multiple, large-scale sessions throughout the years, but the argument was made that our priorities focused largely on solution development and minimally on education.  In hindsight, it is quite ridiculous to assume that the existence of new information is intrinsically valuable – information is only as valuable as we make it.

This realization threw a little bit of a wrench in our well-oiled SCRUM sprints as there was now this new need, “show and tell” if you will.  SCRUM has a mechanism for this in the form of a Business Review where developers demonstrate what was created, walk through new features and interfaces check off functional requirements and illustrate how the solution meets all specified acceptance criteria.  Traditionally, this business review happens between sprint iterations directly after the previous iteration’s stories are released.  While we faithfully conducted Business Reviews to introduce our solutions to business users – that is all we did, introduce them.

We have since committed to setting aside a certain percentage of every Business Intelligence Developer’s resources each sprint to spend time working with these solutions and presenting compelling demonstrations of how to leverage these solutions to derive business value, support initiatives, and, of course, conquer the world.

Never get too wrapped up in all your business intelligence – you may lose sight of the business.

Tim Laqua, Business Intelligence Team Lead, W3i, LLC
Tim uses his three years experience in Business Intelligence and 10+ years in the field of Software Development to lead his team here at W3i.

At a high level, the concept of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is fairly straight forward.  This is to say that most people would agree on the concepts and principles behind it.   However, as you dive deeper into the detailed aspects of delivering a system based on SOA, it can begin to mean different things to different people.  Understanding exactly what SOA is, is not made any easier by major players in the software industry like Microsoft, Sun, IBM, Oracle, and more who tend to define or bend the definition of SOA in a way that aligns the principles of SOA with the implementation details of their platform technologies, development tools, and methodologies.  Try entering “SOA” in your favorite search engine today and you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.  In this article, let’s take a look at concepts of SOA, examine some of the business benefits, and attempt to come up with an “elevator speech” definition for SOA.

SOA in a Nutshell
SOA is basically an architectural style for building software systems based on discreet but interacting components called services.  Each of these services delivers on some set of specific business functions.  The key with SOA is breaking up a large monolithic software system into discreet services that can be presented to or assembled for the user in different ways to provide a high degree of functionality and flexibility.

Services – The Key to SOA
Breaking up the functions of a software system into a set of services allows the business to plug in new services or upgrade existing services in a more granular fashion in order to address new business requirements.  Existing services can be consumed by different business channels, therefore, leveraging existing infrastructure and development investments.  Adding new functionality required by a growing business is a matter of adding additional services rather than rebuilding an entire system.  Modularizing a software system into loosely coupled discreet services is a good thing since it allows us to change the software more easily and respond better to rapidly changing business needs.  Let’s take a closer look at real world business benefits of SOA.

As an example, consider a typical internet store-front system. The shopper is presented with a catalog of items and a shopping cart that the shopper can move items in an out of, and eventually the system accepts an order. The items presented in the store are ever changing. Marketing people are likely to want to change the presentation of items, content of item descriptions, and layouts frequently.  Even the whole shopping metaphor may change from a shopping cart to scrollable item list on a sidebar. Marketing may want to experiment with different fonts, colors, and screen layouts and use various presentation technologies, including Ajax and a myriad of other options. But none of this has anything to do with the core business functions encapsulated by the services. The services that acquire catalog data and submit orders remain unchanged despite all the changes to the presentation of products. This underscores the importance of separation of the underlying business process of processing orders from the never ending changes of presentation.

Beyond constant change with presentation, business processes, change as well.  Offering new types of products or reaching new markets may require adding additional business processes such as currency exchange, age verification, etc.  Meeting the challenge of adding new functionality is more of a matter of adding services in SOA than needing to change major parts of the system.  The bottom line is that the services in SOA do not change that often, but the pathways through these services and when and where they are used, do.

SOA is more than just defining and creating services.  What separates SOA from other software architectures of the past is the way in which services are discovered, understood, and interacted with.

Contracts – Getting to Know Your Services
Beyond defining the discreet services that are capable of working together to solve business problems, establish a contract for each service. A contract states what a service will do for you, information about what is required to use the service, and the rules or policies around security, etc for using the service.  The consumer of the service needs to understand the contract in order to know how to use a given service. 

Messages – Using Services
A message is basically a unit of communication between the service and the consumer of a service.  Messages may take different forms like SOAP, HTTP GET, SMTP or more.  Regardless of the protocol, messages are basically made up of header and a body.  The header provides information about routing whereas the body contains the actual message data.

End Points – Finding Services
An Endpoint is basically an address where the service lives.  In the case of web services it’s a URI (Uniform Resource Identifier).

On The Elevator
Software architectures are basically defined in terms of their components, attributes, relationships within, and the rules that govern them.  So we can define SOA as a guide for building systems based on autonomous components labeled as services.  Each service is accessed at a known endpoint and exposes its processes and behaviors via contracts which take the form of messages.

The business benefits of SOA can be summed up as providing a higher degree of agility and allowing the business to respond quickly to ever changing requirements of the marketplace while leveraging investments in applications and software infrastructure.

Minneapolis, MN – On February 6th, several hundred high tech entrepreneurs connected at an event called MinneDemo. The conference provided a chance for high tech start-ups from the Twin Cities and the broader state of Minnesota to network and to show off their cool new technology.  Great job to everyone involved in organizing and sponsoring this event!

Click here to listen to Rob Weber’s podcast interview by Graeme Thickins at MinneDemo(http://minnov8.com/2009/02/07/m8-gang-episode-24/, featured at 11:00 mins)

Rob Weber, Vice President of Business Development and Co-Founder, W3i
Rob is an Internet marketing pioneer with over nine, profitable years building proven business models that increase revenue and distribution for downloads.

When Scott Warzecha and Matt Riley looked for a site for their high-tech firm, they quickly narrowed their search to a five-block stretch in downtown St. Cloud.The St. Cloud businessmen wanted to be as close as possible to a communication switch center on Sixth Avenue, built decades ago by Bell South, to ensure their company has the fastest and most reliable network service.Netgain Technology Inc. is among almost 20 tech companies that have clustered around what is now Qwest’s central office.“It’s almost a high-tech industrial park,” said Tom Moore, president of the St. Cloud Area Economic Development Partnership.This tech cluster — or tech village, as some call it — recently grabbed the attention of local economic development and business leaders. They want to learn more about why these high-tech firms locate in downtown St. Cloud, but more importantly, what they can do to leverage this cluster to foster more development downtown.“We have a competitive edge, and we’d be pretty remiss if we didn’t take advantage of that,” said Pegg A.K. Gustafson, executive director of the Downtown Council.Leaders plan to meet with representatives from Qwest, Xcel and local tech firms to evaluate the services and develop a recruitment plan that they hope will help drive the resurgence of retail downtown.“It’s building more on what’s already been started,” Gustafson said. “It’s getting that vitality back into downtown.”

A series of empty storefronts several years ago led community leaders to try to define a vision for downtown. St. Cloud businessman Chuck Rau remembers being involved in one of those community groups working to drive the regeneration.

“That vision right now is being created for us,” he said, sitting in the Federal Building that now houses primarily tech businesses, including Netgain and its software company, IntelliSoft.

Rau is the general manager of IntelliSoft and chief executive of 401k Loans LLC, also located in the Federal Building.

Creating a cluster
Tom Grones, co-founder of GeoComm Inc., said the loss of retail downtown created a vacuum that led to affordable lease rates. Those rates initially led him to locate his 911 mapping business downtown in 1995. The business has expanded to create customized software for mapping wireless and wired emergency calls.

Access to high-speed bandwidth is becoming more critical to GeoComm as it explores marketing its services to a worldwide audience.

The cost-effectiveness of locating close to Qwest drives most tech companies downtown. Each block they locate away from that central office costs them an additional $100,000 to connect fiber-optic cables from Qwest to their companies.

Gustafson expects the future extension of the main pipeline to the new library and law enforcement center to further fuel growth.

A demand for reliable and continuous service leads firms to locate in the downtown district known as Grid 1 — the first part of the city to receive electrical service after an outage because of the public sector presence.

W3i, the parent company of Freeze.com, moved to a larger facility in Sartell last summer but kept its data center of 120 servers downtown to remain close to the central office and have the most reliable power for its worldwide customers, said Kyle Ohme, director of information technology for W3i.

The Internet marketing company is working with Xcel and the Downtown Council to expand gas lines and provide the infrastructure the company needs to run its generators, Ohme said.

Tech culture
The look and feel of a former opera house, situated next to the Metro Transit Station, led Brain Magnet and its parent company, Cloud Cartographics Inc., to move into the three-story building downtown.

“It’s hard to build this atmosphere,” said Aaron Brossoit, vice president of Brain Magnet.

The culture created by the arts, entertainment and restaurant scene and several tech companies help drive these firms downtown.

Tech businesses have become more specialized as the technology industry has matured. It started in larger metropolitan areas like Minneapolis-St. Paul and now is spreading to smaller communities.

“(Before,) you had to do a little of everything to get some critical mass,” said Warzecha, chief executive of Netgain.

As tech companies find their niche, they recognize that other tech firms offer services that complement theirs and could help their clients.

Syvantis Technologies LLC, a provider of Great Plains accounting software and Microsoft CRM based in Brainerd, opened an office in the Federal Building this month because of the other tech companies located there, Syvantis President Janelle Riley said.

“We can leverage off of one another’s skill sets very well,” she said.

A large publicly traded information technology company based in Minneapolis has shown interest in opening a sales office in the Federal Building because of its proximity to tech companies — specifically Netgain, said Scott Privatsky, sales and leasing agent for INH Property Management in St. Cloud.

“They can bounce business off each other,” Privatsky said.

Marketing efforts
Economic development leaders once attracted companies by highlighting the road system, airport, and water and sewer, but the Internet’s stronghold on business has shifted emphasis to fiber-optic cables and other technology-related infrastructure, Moore said.

Companies such as ING Direct, an Internet-based bank headquartered in Delaware, would not have located and expanded in downtown St. Cloud without that infrastructure, he said.

By marketing the cluster, leaders expect to attract more businesses that rely on technology as well as more restaurants and retailers that cater to the growing IT staff.

The Federal Building’s history and proximity to Netgain led Rau to move 401k Loans into an office on the first floor. Netgain is the service provider for 401k Loans, which supports the lending process for retirement plans.

Teresa Bohnen and other leaders of the Science Initiative of Central Minnesota have begun to market access to the fiber-optic cable trunk and speed of delivery to science-based businesses.

“It makes the community easier to sell to companies that want to come in,” said Bohnen, president of the St. Cloud Area Chamber or Commerce.

But leaders agree that more needs to be done to capitalize on this opportunity and bring more high-paying technology jobs to the area. Computer specialists earn about $27 an hour — almost twice the area’s average wage of $14 an hour, according to the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development.

John Kaliszewski, vice president of economic development for the Initiative Foundation, called on the expertise of Brain Magnet to create an interactive map that identifies technology-based businesses in downtown St. Cloud and help explain the advantages of locating there.

The Little Falls-based foundation plans to finalize an agreement with Brain Magnet this week to create a map that local leaders will use to set a strategic marketing direction.

St. Cloud leaders already have begun to create a list of prospects, primarily located in the Twin Cities.

Leaders also plan to create specs that outline the area’s pipeline and fiber-optic cables to show to prospects, said Stan Weinberger, chairman of the Downtown Council’s Economic Development Committee.

“It really has legs and people are really embracing it,” she said. “Everybody wants to get on board and work toward this common cause.”

(Article from http://www.sctimes.com By Dawn Peake, News Writer, March 19, 2007)
To view the full article on the Saint Cloud Times website, click here.

Tags: tech companies, technology, information technology, freeze.com, w3i.com, w3i, kyle ohme

A year ago, fast-growing Freeze.com, a global online media and marketing solutions company, redesigned its storage architecture to meet its growing storage needs and seasonal fluctuations. Today, the company uses a mix of storage solutions from BlueArc, Sun StorageTek and FalconStor Software. In business since 2000, Freeze.com says its mission is to be on every computer screen in the world. A big part of the company’s business is the promotion of screensavers through its Web sites, Freeze.com, Screensaver.com, Wallpapers.com and Ringtone.com, as well as thousands of sites throughout the Internet.

“We do a lot of changing within our IT infrastructure on a day-to-day basis, depending on what we’re promoting,” says Kyle Ohme, director of IT at Freeze.com.

For example, over Halloween, screensaver page hits for one product accounted for about 1.1 million page views per day. On a monthly basis, the company’s Screensaver.com site gets about 650 million hits. In the last month or so of 2006, the company increased traffic by about 50 percent. Freeze.com expects to increase the storage capacity across its NAS and SAN from 28 terabytes to 100 terabytes by mid-2007.

“We need to be able to shift but grow our resources as needed,” says Ohme.

Last November, the company implemented a NAS and Fibre Channel SAN redesign using solutions from BlueArc, StorageTek and FalconStor.>

On the Move
Since the company’s founding, St. Cloud, Minn.-based Freeze.com has gone through several changes to its storage architecture. The company moved from an EMC Symmetrix to a Xiotech solution to, most recently, a Sun StorageTek Flex 380 SAN, a Titan 2000 NAS from BlueArc, and IPStor Version 4 from FalconStor.

“We were looking at virtualization and utilizing disk space so that it was modular and easy to grow,” says Ohme. “We don’t want to have to buy 15 servers to address our needs for short periods of time.”

The company is also a user of the Data Center Edition of the Ardence Software Streaming Platform to streamline day-to-day operations, maximize deployment of its IBM BladeCenter and support scaling of its IT operations to support growth.

Freeze.com uses a mix of IBM Blade servers: four processor blades to run SQL Server and dual processor blades for application and Web servers, according to Ohme.

“We designed something akin to virtualization using Ardence that basically allows us to scale fast, in about five minutes, when we need to address spikes in usage,” says Ohme.

The Ardence software allows the company to reduce failure points in the IT environment, namely the OS and local hard disks on the servers, he says. The Ardence product does this by enabling Freeze.com to re-provision back office blades to the front end Web farm to handle peak load periods.

When Freeze.com set out last year to redesign its storage, the company had several objectives: greater capacity and performance; to be able to recover from errors using snapshot technology and virtualization; and easier use of overall technology, according to Ohme.

“I was looking for a way to better manage storage and IT staff,” he says, noting that he also wanted to have more ability to respond to future use.

The company looked at storage products from vendors such as EMC, Xiotech, Sun StorageTek, Hitachi, Network Appliance and IBM. “We also considered iSCSI, but we found that we wouldn’t be able to get the Fibre Channel hit performance that we needed,” says Ohme.

Working with a VAR, the company researched and met with both BlueArc for NAS and StorageTek and FalconStor for SANs.

Today, Freeze.com utilizes the FalconStor SAN for virtualization of front-end SQL servers to back-end SQL servers within the SAN. The company has seven Microsoft SQL servers, an Exchange server, some file servers and a MySQL server. Ohme notes that the company moves about 350 gigabytes worth of storage back and forth every hour.

The StorageTek Fibre Channel SAN is responsible primarily for eight SQL dual and quad processor servers and messaging services for Exchange. The BlueArc Titan serves the virtualization platform and content to all Web sites, which Ohme says “Is the heart and soul of our IT organization.”

“BlueArc can also take care of our servers as one point for disaster recovery,” he adds.

BlueArc Gets NAS Nod
At the time Freeze.com was shopping around for its storage solutions, NetApp was being considered along side of BlueArc, but according to Ohme, NetApp’s SATA drives couldn’t deliver what the company needed.

Freeze.com brought in BlueArc’s Titan storage configured with approximately 2.5 terabytes of Fibre Channel storage on 28 drives, and about 32 SATA drives with about 8 terabytes. The company plans an increase to 80 Fibre Channel drives and has ordered an additional five terabytes of storage. The company recently added four Fibre Channel trays, with four drives in each tray.

“We use the Titan storage for virtualization of all images, operating systems and all content for the Web servers,” says Ohme, noting that there’s no OS or local hard drives on the servers. The Titan also serves as storage for the Ardence Software.

“This configuration allows us a single boot off of the NAS,” he says.

(Article from Enterprisestorageforum.com, Lynn Haber (author), January 11, 2007)

Tags: w3i, freeze.com, screensaver.com, wallpapers.com, ringtone.com, screensavers, ringtones, falconstor, bluearc, titan, sun storagetek, storage architecture, san, nas, Fibre Channel, ibm blade servers, kyle ohme

Right click here, then select “Save Target As..” to save the video, or click here to view the video.

Click here to download the podcast of this video.

Tags: ibm blade servers, kyle ohme

Sun continues OpenSparc push
OpenSparc, Sun Microsystems Inc.’s initiative to rally support around the UltraSparc T1 chip by releasing its architecture to the open source community, has seen 3,500 downloads since starting last year, according to Sun. The company is giving away software tools to help developers create derivatives of the chip.

Open source communities are usually formed around software, though there are examples of vendors sharing the architecture of their processors. IBM has Power.org that is meant to build support for its Power processors, which are part of its System p and System i machines. Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) has a Torrenza program that aims to encourage other companies to build coprocessors to improve performance of AMD’s Opteron chip.An Italian company, called Simply RISC, has created a single-core derivative of the eight-core UltraSparc chip that is meant for mobile devices, such as PDAs and digital cameras. Tom Kucharvy, president of Boston-based research firm Summit Strategies Inc., said he doesn’t anticipate many UltraSparc derivatives outside of the embedded space.

The company also announced today that another Linux distribution, called Gentoo Linux, will support the UltraSparc T1 processor on the T1000 and T2000, and has an install CD to help users with the process. Earlier this year, another Linux distribution called Ubuntu became available on Sun’s UltraSparc T1 processor-based servers. It was Ubuntu’s first jump into the server market.

Ardence updates OS and application streaming software
Ardence Inc. has updated its operating system (OS) and application streaming software to include a Linux and Windows reboot and personalities that can be injected into servers to let them deviate from a common image. The feature allows a certain level of uniqueness to each server using a common image, much in the same way different people in an office environment have similar software on their desktop computers but have settings that allow them to send documents to local printers.

The Waltham, Mass.-based company allows users to provision their servers depending on what workloads are busy for that moment. For example, one of Ardence’s customers, Freeze.com, is able to stream its OS and applications over the network to its blade servers. When traffic is heavy to its Web site, it can provision servers with the OS and applications that deal with Web-facing traffic. At other times, those same blades can be used for billing or payroll applications.

The software supports applications on Linux and Windows platforms. New features of Ardence 4.0 include:
* Allowing a common software image for different hardware types
* Blocking data to or from USB ports
* Redesigning of the system administration

The software costs $600 per server and is available this week.

Hoffman releases server and network equipment cabinets

Hoffman has new cabinets meant to hold LAN and WAN equipment, as well as servers and telephone equipment. The Akona, Minn., company said the cabinets are made of heavy gauge steel that can protect the equipment inside from impact and the effects of heat.

It said the cabinets have more cabling space on the side panels and a thermal design meant to dissipate heat from networking equipment quickly.

(Article from http://www.searchdatacenter.com By Mark Fontecchio, News Writer, October 3, 2006)

Tags: opensparc, ultrasparc, ardence, freeze.com,