May 7, 2002 -- The Internet Data Center is an impressive technological feat, consolidating the most important elements of advanced technology in a single building.
Although the technology used inside an IDC is often considered cutting edge, many companies have been forced to develop their own solutions within the data center because of a lack of options. This often drives companies away from their core competencies and into the unfamiliar territory of data center management.
Two companies, however, have recently unveiled products designed to help companies that operate IDCs get maximum value from their staff and facilities. Fremont, California-based Inkra Networks recently unveiled a new product offering that streamlines hardware operations within an IDC, while San Francisco-based Moonlight Systems recently came to market with a software suite that automates data center processes.
Inkra co-founder Dave Roberts says the idea for the company's Virtual Service Architecture, which consolidates functions like firewalls and load balancing in to a single redundant machine, was largely for economic reasons.
The company spoke to a number of firms with IDCs, and "what was coming back consistently was economic answers," Roberts says. "Everybody was talking about the overall economics, especially in the service provider side of things, of delivering service to customers."
Roberts' team then analyzed the balance sheets of some of the industry's biggest hosting firms, including Exodus, Digex and Data Return, and found an interesting consistency in all of their financials.
"Everybody's op-ex (operating expenditures) was greater than their revenue," he says. While that didn't necessarily come as a shock to Roberts, "the magnitude of op-ex to revenue was almost two-to-one in each case. That was consistent across whatever revenue size (companies) had," he says. "It didn't seem to matter whether you were big or small, everybody was finding that their operational expenses were just a lot larger than their overall revenues."
Roberts says part of the problem was that companies were often in a rush to put things in to place, resulting in a lot of what Inkra calls "Perl script and sticky note" solutions. The ad hoc solutions not only wasted the valuable time of technical staff, but also limited the ability of sales forces to upsell products and services.
Inkra officially unveiled its Virtual Service Architecture last week. The company hopes it will eliminate both the problems of revenue and scale for companies that operate data centers.
"This is the first system really designed expressly to deliver data center IP services," Roberts says.
Up the highway at Moonlight Systems, CEO Bobby Mukherjee shares a view similar to Roberts'. Firms that should have stepped up and provided automation and streamlining solutions simply haven't, forcing companies to develop their own.
"The notion of clusters of rack-mountable servers has come about very quickly," he says, making it difficult for behemoth companies like IBM to quickly develop data center solutions. "It's like a racing car speeding down the freeway... and trying to change the tires," he says. "It's tough for these guys to change mid-direction."
As a result, Mukherjee founded Moonlight Systems, which provides data center management software for companies with enterprise-level IDCs. The goal of Moonlight3, the company's flagship product, is to allow companies to "offset headcount to do more cerebral tasks," Mukherjee says.
Moonlight officially unveiled its software solution last month, and it has already been put to use by numerous enterprises and hosting companies, including Yahoo! and Digex. Mukherjee says part of the company's value proposition is that companies that implement Moonlight3 see a return on their investment almost immediately.
"We can walk in to a complicated environment like a WorldCom/Digex on a Monday, and by Thursday we're able to show value in a very immediate way for their existing environment," he says. "We don't require that our customers re-tool our entire infrastructure to fit our needs."
Mukherjee says economic conditions have created a demand for quick solutions that provide immediate returns, and have therefore created a new market for data center solutions.
"The pressure to optimize IT budgets and find cheaper and more streamlined ways to operate your servers has all of a sudden become very important because of the recession," he says. "As a result of that, I think there's a great opportunity for companies ... to come in and help enterprises improve reliability, and streamline the costs of maintaining a certain number of boxes."
Adam Eisner is a Managing Editor at The Web Host Industry Review, a leading Web hosting resource that provides industry news, research and consumer resources.