Voxel An Internap Company

Here at Voxel, we’ve always wanted a California datacenter -- something close to the Silicon Valley tech hub where so many of our startup and web 2.0 customers live, work and sell.  But as a New York-based infrastructure company, with only 50 employees and a lot going on, we were never able to cost-justify deploying enough gear and staffing enough smart guys and gals in California to make the jump.  All that changed a few months ago when we became part of the Internap team -- suddenly a West Coast hosting facility was an eminent reality.  Internap has a company owned, top tier data center in the heart of Santa Clara, CA and a good portion of the cloud engineering and managed hosting support teams work out of the office space.

About Mission Road

The Internap Santa Clara facility is located strategically in the heart of Silicon Valley, a few shorts miles away from the original “super” datacenters.  This hyper-connected silicon valley datacenter building has been built to the highest standards of availability and safety by an Internap “DC Ops” team that is truly second to none. The facility boasts:

• Utility power via 2 discrete electrical grids and substations (PSE&G and Silicon Valley Power)
• 3 x 1.5 Megawatt Caterpillar generators, 4 x Liebert 750kVa UPS systems and true A/B power redundancy
• 2 x 1100 ton cooling towers and redundant, N+1 condensed water cooling systems
• 36,000 square feet of raised datacenter floor space

Overall, the Voxel team couldn’t ask for a better place to rack and stack a few thousand servers and power our cloud and on-demand dedicated server offerings.

The Internap Crew

When you work in data centers all day long like I do, you really start to appreciate the people who build and maintain these huge, always-on, “never-can-fail” facilities.  It takes a special breed of engineer to spend a majority of their waking hours inside a temperature controlled box of power circuits, fiber connections and whirling fans -- and like it!  But I can tell you from experience that it makes all the difference in the world when you, as a customer, show up to install your equipment.  

Lucky for me, the Internap Santa Clara team is a truly dedicated group of professional site operators -- the facility is immaculate, the pride in each installed cabinet, cross connect or power receptacle is clear, and the Voxel crew always had extra hands on deck from the data center site crew to help us deploy our West Coast dedicated server and cloud hosting installation.   A special shout out to Matt Brown and his DC ops crew in Santa Clara for all of their help -- it looks nice to see you standing next to so many Voxel servers!

Why Geography Matters

A great advantage of having hosting and cloud services around the world, is that we can situate a customer’s hosting installation strategic to their core audience or user group or even data partner (think, financial services for trading apps or latency sensitive applications).  With the addition of Santa Clara and Dallas to our existing sites in New York, Amsterdam and Singapore, Voxel provides one of the best hosting footprints available in the marketplace.   What’s unique about the Voxel offering is that you can spin up dedicated or cloud hosting environments in all of these global hosting facilities using our desktop tool or online configurator and get the same server specs, performance baselines and pricing model, regardless of location.

A few quick and dirty tests show that hosting in Voxel’s Santa Clara center (powered by Voxel’s peering rich IP backbone and Internap’s Managed Intelligent Route Optimizer™ (MIRO) technology) offers excellent ping times to Internet destinations not only in the Western US, but all the way over to Asia and Australia:

• 110ms to Tokyo (sony.co.jp)
• 145ms to Australia (australia.gov.au)
• 180ms to Singapore (starhub.com)
• 70ms to New York (nyse.com)
• 40ms to Texas (texas.gov)
• 20ms to Seattle (washington.gov)
• 4.5ms to San Francisco (berkeley.edu

And with California being the top Internet using state in the US (which is itself, the top Internet using country in the world) it's good to be so close to so many eyeballs.

5 Global Locations Now Online

It’s an exciting time for the guys and gals over at here Voxel.  In the past 90 days, we’ve accomplished more infrastructure building than we ever had the chance to do before joining forces with Internap.  It feels like only yesterday that we were talking about how cool it’d be to open up a hosting center in Texas -- sure enough, a few months later we’re off to the races and selling some awesome new configurations of our instant and customized servers in the Lone Star state (and a few other locations to boot!).

As of last week, you can now order Voxel’s VoxSERVER dedicated servers and VoxCLOUD virtual compute instances in 5 global locations:

• New York, NY
• Dallas, TX
• Santa Clara, CA
• Amsterdam, NL
• Singapore, SG

With these locations, Voxel now covers the globe with a consistent set of infrastructure offerings -- available via either monthly or hourly pricing plans -- and a global, top-notch hosting support team to back them up.

Now with Internap’s Performance IP™ Technology

Voxel has always been a believer in the power of the network -- in that an incredible hosting environment is only as good as the network that it’s built upon.  That is why we’ve invested millions over the years building one of the largest Tier-2 backbone and peering networks in the hosting industry.  With these new locations, we’ve upped the ante on that by successfully integrating Internap’s Managed Internet Route Optimizer™ (MIRO) technology (the secret sauce behind their Performance IP™ product) into the Voxel network.  The results are awesome -- faster paths than ever along with 2 x Gigabit uplinks per server, 100% burstable connections and Voxel’s industry leading SLA.  

New Configurations!

One of the cooler aspects of building a new hosting center from scratch is that you can get the “latest and greatest”.  For the gadget guys over here at Voxel, that’s pretty much like having Christmas come early -- trying out new server motherboards, checking out the latest chipsets and benchmarking new memory configurations is all part of the fun. In the end, we have started with two new server lines, in 1U and 2U configurations, that leverage the latest Intel chipsets:

Dual Processor Configurations are built on the Intel E5-2600 series, LGA2011 chipset configuration

• Up to 256GB of ECC DDR3 RAM
• 8 x SATA, SAS or SSD Hard Drives OR 24 x SAS Hard Drives
• Hardware LSI RAID or SAS Controller Support
• Dual Power Supply for full power redundancy (A/B Power)

Single Processor Configurations are built on the Intel E3-1200 series, LGA1155 chipset configuration

• Up to 32GB of ECC DDR3 RAM
• 4 x SATA, SAS or SSD Hard Drives
• Hardware LSI RAID or SAS Controller Support
• Single Power Supply

We’ll be adding more configs in the coming months and looking forward to bringing even more flexible and powerful servers to our customers.

On Sale Now

These machines are on sale now through our brand new web-based configurator and start at $179/mo.  We encourage you to kick the tires, price out some of our new machines and give us any feedback via live chat or to sales@voxel.net.  We’ll be running some specials in the coming weeks, so make sure to follow us on twitter via @voxeldotnet or keep subscribed to our blog!  

A recent security vulnerability announcement has caused quite a stir at Voxel dot Net this week and poses as a serious threat to our Windows Server users.

Yesterday, the Apache Foundation let loose it's first major release of the apache web server since 2.2 was put out in 2005.  I think it's pretty fair to say that the Internet has changed a bit since 2005 -- and it was time for a major refresh of the world's most popular http server.   You can see Apache's announcement here.

At Voxel, we support, tune and scale some of the web's largest Internet sites.  In doing so, we've found an increasing need to replace or augment Apache's HTTP with a web or proxy server more purpose-built for speed of delivery of simple HTTP connections.  We've often implemented NGINX or Varnish to service end-user HTTP connections and relegated Apache to backend functions or more generic workloads.  These alternative HTTP servers bring with them a host of features around caching and proxy management that Apache hasn't, until now, been able to support.

Apache has been known as the "gold standard" in stability and compatability in web servers since I started in the web hosting world in 2001 -- but the demands of increased traffic, faster end user experience and more complex web pages have pushed the envelope of what Apache could do compared to newer entrants in the market.  In fact, as of January 2012, NGINX overtook IIS as the #2 web server for active sites on the Internet - clocking in at about 10% of active websites.  With that said, Apache is still king, commanding an impressive 65% of all active sites and looking through the new feature list, I'm pretty excited to see Apache gain ground on some of the most wanted additional bells and whistles for performance.

We'll be testing out this latest build of Apache in our lab and looking for inclusion in the Voxel Server Environment (VSE) OS build.  We'll keep you posted.

It's been a few weeks now since Voxel was acquired by Internap and now is a good point in time for some reflection.  Much of the "post deal" craziness has started to die down and we're back to our day-to-day jobs.   A few high level points for those of you that don't want to wait for my take on things:

• Internap is full of seriously smart, hard working people.  15 hours a day style work ethics.
• MIRO and XIP are hot stuff, we can't wait to use them.
• The company owned facilities in major cities like New York, Dallas, Santa Clara, etc are run really nicely (and they look good too).
• The Voxel brain trust and product set really 'clinks' into the IT Platform Internap has developed.
• There is huge excitement within the company about automation, intelligent software and scalability solutions.  Basically the engineers at both Voxel and Internap seem to have alot to talk about over lunch.

One personal journey that I'm starting on is that this is the first time in 11 years that I've got a day-to-day boss.  I'm sure I'll have some adjustments and mis-steps in the process of working with a larger team, but Steve Orchard, who heads up the entire Operations and Service org at Internap, is making it pretty easy so far for the guys and gals on the Voxel ops team.  His team has a culture of service that I've found throughout Internap -- one in which C-level execs all the way down to new engineers are willing and excited to roll up their sleeves, hop onto an SSH session and fix a problem or improve the experience for a customer.  Internap has an engineering-based culture similar to what we've grown up with at Voxel and one I know our clients will appreciate.  Plus, as soon I saw Steve load up PINE and rapid-fire respond to a couple dozen emails over horrendous airport WiFi in the time it took me to load up my Outlook client, I knew the guy had the street cred and could relate nicely to the customers and partners that make up Voxel's client base.

As VP, Hosting Operations and Support, I've got the task of scaling up the team that provides 24 x 7 x 365 support for hosting and cloud customers.  It's somewhat familiar territory for me -- growing a highly technical team of global engineers that help make our customers raving fans -- but at a whole new scale.  You can count I'll be taking pro-tips and leveraging the experience of the top notch NOC and customer service team that Internap has built over the years.  I've seen the calls logs and ticket reports from their NOC, and it's pretty impressive to see how pro-active and professional these guys are.

Overall it's been a great experience getting to know this new, much larger team over the past weeks.  I'm excited for what we'll be able to accomplished with our combined resources -- essentially we've strapped on a rocket to many of the Voxel projects that were always hampered by resources, budget or hours in the day -- and we're ready to bring even more market leading hosting and cloud solutions to our customers at an accelerated pace.  As we do so, make sure to keep in touch with us and let us know what we're doing wrong, doing right or not doing at all -- we'll be anxious to hear your feedback.