PEER 1 Hosting Business Social event. Next one is Feb. 9th in Austin, Texas, 6-8pm at Cover 3 Restaurant.

We’ve teamed up with Microsoft and their WebMatrix experts to host a Business Social event on Thursday, Feb. 9th in Austin, TX at the Cover 3 Restaurant from 6-8pm. Eat, drink and mingle with some of Austin’s brightest business minds. Discover how WebMatrix’s robust development tools allow you to create and publish killer websites and apps for your customers. RSVP is required as we have limited capacity. RSVP Here and guarantee your attendance.

More About WebMatrix

The features and benefits of the revolutionary WebMatrix development tool allows you to start from dozens of open source applications and build sites in matter of minutes. And the new Microsoft Web Platform Installer walks you through installing and configuring OSS applications and generates your database credentials automatically so you can get up and running faster.

RSVP Here

In case you’re unfamiliar, True Blood is a hugely popular HBO series that will be entering it’s fifth season in 2012. With over nine million fans on Facebook, social media engagement has been vital to the show’s success.

Set in small town Louisiana, the show features all sorts of supernaturals such as telepaths, shape-shifters and you guessed it – vampires. One of the reoccurring aspects of the show is the vampires’ ability to “glamour” someone, or put them into a hypnotic, trance-like state. Haus and BBDO wanted to create an app that would give fans the ability to glamour their friends, keeping them engaged while they eagerly await the launch of the fifth season next spring.

How it Works

The Glamour Your Friends app is simple: fans upload a photo of themselves via their webcam, hard drive or Facebook photos. The app then turns them into a Glamouring vampire, complete with fangs and a sultry southern drawl. Fans can customize the audio and location specific to the recipient, and then they can share their creations with each other on Facebook and Twitter.

Glamour Your Friends uses software licensed from Motion Portrait to create a 3D avatar.  Facial recognition is used to place bitmap data that the user uploads onto a 3D mesh. The Flash client communicates with Motion Portrait’s software through web and Flash APIs. To ensure the demand of such a large and devoted fan base could be met, HAUS worked with PEER 1 Hosting to create a load-balanced GPU hosting solution.

Feeling Glamorous? Go ahead and try it for yourself.

Nasuni recently published their Cloud Storage Benchmark Study Report which had only six of the leading 16 cloud storage providers pass their rigorous test for performance, stability and  scalability. PEER 1 Hosting, along with Microsoft Azure and Amazon S3 made the final six.

The company’s research began in April 2009, and evaluated cloud storage providers in a specific use case – how providers perform for mid-sized organizations that want to take advantage of the cloud for primary storage, data protection and disaster recovery. The five testing stages used for the study were API Integration, Unit Testing, Performance Testing, Stability Testing, and Scalability Testing.

To download the full report, click here.

“Early attempts at sharing frameworks, followed by the emergence of social networks, and the current growth of streaming services all point to the massive unmet demand among consumers for interacting with media and social networks – cloud computing offers an elegant aggregation of secured collaboration and publishing.”

Click here to read the rest of this exclusive Q&A between Greg and Jeremy Geelan, Conference Chair of Cloud Expo.

Where exactly is Bulgaria?  Before we opened shop there last year I could only point in Europe’s direction, but now I know that Bulgaria is a country situated in South-Eastern Europe, bordering Romania, Serbia, the Republic of Macedonia, Greece and Turkey. Summers are hot and dry, and winters are cold and wet – often with heavy snowfall. Weather permitting, residents and tourists get to splash about in the Black Sea! I have also heard from a couple of sources that there are harmless wild dogs roaming the streets. However, no one seems to want to talk about the über threatening Bulgarian nyan cats.

Depending on where you live, our newest office may seem like a world away, but members of the Bulgarian monitoring team stay linked to their PEERs in Canada, the US and the UK by actively participating in wellness challenges, engaging in employee forums and tuning in to company-wide webcasts. The integration of the monitoring team into the PEER 1 Hosting family is exactly why I love working here – Our company gives opportunity for so many different cultures to thrive. Each office has a unique personality; every department has its quirks and every single PEER brings something to the table.

I learn from the people I work with everyday, and everyday I see the people around me learning from one another. Take Kevin Lee, for example, who manages the monitoring team in Bulgaria all the way from Atlanta, GA. When Kevin visits Sofia, the team takes him hiking up Mount Vitosha, teaching him about the city’s history while taking in its stunning views, and then helping him expand his beer-drinking horizons over Bulgaria’s native beer, ариана.

Seeing how well this medley of PEERs work together always gets me excited about what’s next. We’re already a global company and yet each day we expand our horizons a little bit more. For this reason, my inner-geographer has been stirred up. How incredible would it be to travel to one of our other PEER 1 Hosting locations? Sofia fits the bill – the city is chock-full of parks to get lost in, sociable alfresco bars, fascinating museums and gorgeous old churches set beside modern architecture. I’m crossing my fingers that I’ll get to jet off before too long as part of our employee exchange program, which sends staff members to visit an office in a different city and often even a different country.

Maybe I could teach them a thing or two about how to drink a maple latte, knock someone’s teeth out with a hockey puck and use the word “eh” an unnatural number of times in a sentence?

With lists, groups, and now Google+’s circles, the tangle of ever-changing terminology around the social web can be exasperating. But one thing is for certain, social networks are a way of life for most people on the planet – there are 750 million registered users on Facebook, 600 million of them are active monthly, and over half on a daily basis. With all these users, comes a massive amount of sharing. But do you know what you are actually sharing? And more importantly, who is seeing the information and what is being done with it?

Some people say we are moving toward a post-privacy society. That may be true, but I still think many of you aren’t quite ready to share all your personal information to the world – the type of information you can find on our latest infographic, Google+ vs. Facebook Privacy: What You Need to Know. The infographic also includes tips to protecting yourself using the new privacy control features.

Created by PEER 1 Hosting Colocation Facilities
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Last month we launched our new Direct Internet Access bandwidth service – bringing the power of our rock solid 10 Gb FastFiber™ backbone network straight from us to your office door.

We don’t like to use the blog to push our wares at you, lovely readers, but we wanted to take a second to explain this one, because DIA is a bit different than anything we’ve offered before.

So Much Bandwidth, Such Little Latency

Previously we were only able to provide bandwidth to those hosted within a facility where we had presence, via a cross connect within the building. But now, thanks to new partnerships with local fiber and metro ethernet providers, we’re able to bring the FastFiber Network out of the datacenter and directly into your office.

As long as your office is located in a city where we have network presence, you’re just a single hop away from a dedicated 10Mb, 100Mb or 1Gb pipe directly into the PEER 1 Hosting backbone, and the Internet at large.

Business Class Internet Stays Classy

Gone are the days of dealing with your local provider’s “business” class Internet, where “support” loosely translates to “call and wait for hours on end to talk to a ‘tech’ who will read from a script and ask you to reboot your router before transferring you to a second tier who might actually have authority to troubleshoot your issue.”

DIA is backed by the same FirstCall Support that comes standard whenever you host with us. We stand behind our 100% uptime SLAs, so that means no more office downtime due to Internet problems – but if trouble ever arises you know our expert, on-shore techs are on your side and our 24/7/365 NOC has got your back.

This is an exciting step for our Network, and we’re glad to share it with you! Want to know more? Check out the data sheet and more.

Before heading to your meeting, you let the NOC (Network Operations Center) know to call the conference room instead of the regular group extension for the next hour. Any time you’re away from your desk for an extended period of time, it’s good practice to ensure the NOC knows how to reach you. Of course, lunches are ok since the group staggers them to ensure someone is always in the Engineering department during business hours. Well, usually that means that when you see someone eating at their desk you answer the calls for a while.

“So, does that work for you?” The question was directed at you. You stumble for a second to remember what the initial question was. That’s right, the NOC discovered a link running with errors on it. No customer impact as of yet, but you need to act quickly on those before they crop up into dozens of clients calling in at once. Most likely it will amount to some prep work, a network optic swap, some testing, then packing up. Worst case it’s not the optic and the troubleshooting and testing change from 30 minutes to 2 hours. Pretty standard stuff.

Ben solving more problems while he's taking a break

“Yup. Tomorrow night at eleven o’clock PM pacific time works for me. I’ll take care of the emergency change control when I get back to my desk”. You are glad it is tomorrow night. Tonight you have a hockey game and you’ve already missed a few this season while out of town for work. That’s the same reason you’re glad it’s not the night after next. You don’t want to miss another Thursday night date night with your significant other. It’s tough enough making the date nights work when you’re on call. Having to rush home to allow ample prep time for a late night maintenance just isn’t going to cut it. Yes, Wednesday night would do just fine.

“You’re sure you don’t want to pass this one off? This morning was a long one for you.” Your manager always offers to take these emergency changes, even if he’s already got a maintenance that same night. It’s good to work with someone who has your back.

“Nah. You guys all have a maintenance this week. And you have two.” You gesture with a nod of your head right back to your manager to acknowledge that you’re well aware of what his work load is like.

“Good. Because we wouldn’t have helped you anyways” one of the other Engineers says with a smirk. You grunt to acknowledge the light-hearted humour. Sometimes it’s tough love on this team, but not without a healthy level of respect among the group. Being a small team that juggles large scale projects, tight dead lines, and daily fire fighting, respect is of the utmost importance to ensure all resources are working perfectly in unison.

“Anyways,” your manager interjects. “Let me know if you change your mind.” Just another reminder that that door is always open.

By the end of the meeting you have a note to create an emergency change control to correct some link errors as well as another late night maintenance that you have to do next week to increase some link capacity in one of the other datacenters. Again, technically someone else could take care of this one, like the on call engineer, but he’ll be busy enough with the day to day work of being on call. But the main reason is that each of the Network Engineers on the team have their own projects and specialties. Each knows the ins and outs of certain datacenters more than any of the other members of the team. This works needs to be done on your turf, so you’re the one that takes care of it.

One thing people don’t realize is what each datacenter network means to you. Each one is a unique thing of beauty that you have either built or inherited. Even the inherited networks are eventually looked upon as your adopted creations. Over the years you have shaped, sculpted, and moulded these networks with your hands and knowledge, and each reflects the intense pride you take in your work. You won’t let these pieces of art fall to ruin – not because you are paid to take care of them, but because you could never mentally, emotionally, or physically bring yourself to neglect that which you have created.

So yes, you’ll do the maintenance next week.

It’s 5:30pm. You begin to pack up and make a mental list of what you’ve accomplished during the day. Doing this helps you make your to do list of the following day. You:

1) Took some traffic off a transit link that was running above your commit rates. You did a quick calculation and if that traffic had run for more than 36 hours of the month then the 95th percentile bill would have kicked up about $5,000. Not a nice number when technically that traffic had already been running somewhere else, so we’d already committed to pay for it on that link. Essentially double billing you for the traffic. Good thing the NOC had caught it and called down to alert you.

2) The usual calls from the NOC to help out with client requests. You cleared the ARP for a colocation client who had swapped out a switch and didn’t realize that they needed to let us know about it. Another colocation client needed a static route changed at a specific time during the day.

3) You had a quick call with a client and their client relations manager to help them on configuration tips of their network gear. The client was very nice and appreciative, a good combination.

4) You wrote and replied to countless e-mails. Some were about new network gear that is being tested and you needed clarification on some specifications from the Vendor’s rep. You can’t make any assumptions on gear you haven’t used before. If something goes wrong with that gear in production guess who’s on the hook, you. Another e-mail was to answer a question from one of the members of the sales department. A customer was wanting to try something a little funky and weren’t sure if Peer1 was the right fit. So some questions needed to be answered. Another e-mail was an update to a large e-mail trail updating the group about your progress on a release for a new product. Without the network piece in place the product is non-existent as well as being off the deadline. So you need to make sure you get everything in place for that. Having network hold up the release of a product does not look good.

5) You updated a few tickets to let the NOC and the rest of the department know what the progress is. The few tickets that are on your plate are lower priority ones, so you can take a little while to get all the pieces in place. Which means it’s ok if you work on them a bit here and a bit there.

6) You created a couple change controls for a couple important late night maintenances that needed to be done. During the change control creation you double then triple check your logic behind the procedures you’ve outlined so that you can be confident in what you predict the impact will be. That’s a big part of working on service impacting maintenances. If you tell the client base that all they will see is momentary slowness, then you’d better be sure that that’s the worst that they see. Anything more than that is very bad.

7) You had a talk with the team about some upcoming upgrades. A discussion needed to be had on what different scenarios we could come up with to complete the upgrades. Future talks will be needed to work out what each scenario will cost, and which is the best idea, taking costs and benefits into account.

It’s 5:45pm get a call from the NOC – they have a misguided client requesting things that the Internet isn’t capable of. It’s not a big deal though. The internet is a complicated beast, and not one that is easily tamed. You put on your teaching cap and do your best to break things down into bite size pieces that are easy for the client to digest. In the end the initial request was actually spawned from something else entirely. Once you dissect and explain all the options you drop off and let the NOC handle the rest.
They’ll go on to explain common tools to use and the best way to approach troubleshooting a network issue, which, they remind the client, can always be brought to the attention of the NOC. You know if they encounter any issues, or even if they just have a question, they’ll call you up later. That’s what you’re there for – to ensure the NOC has access to as much knowledge as possible. This sometimes means you get a call while you’re out for dinner to explain the nuances between iBGP and eBGP. But you know knowledge is power. The more you pass on to your front line soldiers, the more time you can spend strategizing your army’s next move as opposed to fighting small skirmishes.

Guest Author Ben Kennedy shares more tales of his adventures as a Network Engineer. Watch for part two next week!

“Ring, Ring”

“Ring, Ring”

It’s 2:13am and your cell phone is ringing. You’re on call. Those precious few weeks have passed, and it’s your turn again. You’re not surprised to be getting a call though, because you did a move for a customer at midnight, just before heading to bed. You could have pushed the move off a couple more days and still fell in line with standard turn around times, but the customer’s client relations manager used that magic word: “Please?” So how could you say “no” to that? Anyways, the customer probably just encountered a problem and needs to have the move reverted. Easy peasy.

“Hello?” Your voice is horse and barely audible.

“Hey, it’s Kevin. Sorry to bother you…” Kevin The NOC jock starts off the call with the typical late night greeting. “There’s something going on we need you to look into. We lost access to a bunch of switches. Looks like it could be a major.”

You clear your throat to try and not sound too disoriented before answering. “Okay. I’ll get on jabber”. You sigh after pressing the end button on the cell phone.

The bed creaks as you get up. From the bed, your better half looks up groggily, silently asking where you’re going. “Sorry, I gotta take a look at something.” You grumble apologetically.

From beneath the covers you hear, “I hate the NOC.” The statement is barely done before the sound of even breathing fills the room once again. Both of you know this statement is untrue, but it’s 2:14 in the morning and not the time to argue. Plus the clock is ticking.

You plod to the living room and turn on the computer monitor. You shield your eyes as the LCD flares to life. Squinting against the glare, you log in. Within moments you have a rundown of the situation; Which devices are effected, scope of customer impact, and a brief time line. You roll your chair back; rub your eyes to try to force your mind to speed up. You’ll need all of your resources to figure this one out.

One of the problems is that what the customers see is just symptom. The root cause could be almost anything. What you have to do is gather as much information, as quickly as possible, and determine the problem that cures those symptoms.

If you were a Network Engineer for an organization using a multi-tiered support system, things would be different. You would do an initial investigation and attempt to implement a solution. If you were unable to find a solution you would escalate up to a tier 3 engineer, while your clients watch the clock tick. A multi-tiered system can be extremely inefficient – not good when speed and flexibility are paramount. Of course, without additional tiers, you’re the last line of defense. You’re the one that solves all issues affecting the network. At times, it’s a heavy burden to bear, but it’s one you bear with pride. With this last thought you snort derisively at those other lazy so called “multi-tiered” Network Engineers, and get to work.

Time rolls on as you dive through various troubleshooting iterations. Each one turns up a dead end, but gives you more pieces to the puzzle. The question here is – how far do you go to fix the problem? Every time a customer calls in with a complaint you can’t just go ahead and replace the whole network. The scale of the fix must match the scale of the problem, hence the importance of gathering a lot of quality data. Right now in your mind you’ve created 5 different scenarios that could have caused the symptoms that you’re seeing. The tests for each all have varying degrees of impact. Can you do all at once? Of course not. Some theories require tests that can’t all be run simultaneously, while others would cause problems for customers that may not otherwise be impacted. You can’t justify jumping to drastic measures, such as replacing a major network device, without taking the time to test a few key links first. In the end you may have to replace that major network device, but you can’t fully justify it until you’ve ensured that all other causes have been accounted for.

Throughout each theory, test, and implementation, you are mentally documenting your steps and timelines. You know that when all is said and done tomorrow you’ll need to sit down and dissect how you dealt with this situation, bearing the process of your troubleshooting to a jury of your peers as well as superiors. You’re held accountable for the decisions you make, even in the heat of the moment in the middle of the night. And that’s just fine.

It’s 3:03am and three of your five theories haven’t panned out. You’re getting into more serious water. Plus that clock is still ticking in your mind, and it’s getting louder every second. You lean back for a moment to go over all the steps you’ve taken up until now before you jump into anything else. All your steps have been sound and logical. You’ve already replaced one network device. But it looks like it was a different device entirely that caused the failure in the other. A VERY rare occurrence, but when your kingdom consists of thousands of networking devices that span the globe, things are bound to fail. It’s a fact you deal with every day.

You’re at a point now where you have to act even though the next step will cause more serious customer impact. It’s something that you avoid at all costs, but right now it’s unavoidable. “Darn” you whisper out loud. If this was an episode of House it would cut to commercial and come back with the situation stabilized and the team sitting around drinking coffee discussing their options. Unfortunately it’s just you here in your living room and you have to play this one out. The clock ticks on and the thought of money disappearing and trust being lost runs through your mind as you mentally calculate the sum of the customer impact. You shake your head and make the call to move forward. Members from other departments scramble to get the pieces in place. You get prepped to replace another device, which is no easy thing. Making the call is only half the battle.

It’s 3:32am. The solution worked, and everything is back to normal. You log off jabber and disconnect from the conference call. As always, Kevin the NOC jock thanks you for helping out, even though you were just doing your job. You reply “My pleasure” none the less. You try to calm your breathing and slow your heart. Once again your fight or flight mechanism has kicked in – The adrenaline gives you that burst of energy you need to make it through those stressful situations, but it also means you’ll be jittery and restless for at least the next hour. After that you can head back to bed. No use waking up anyone else up because you had to save the world, right? You smile to yourself at the thought. You pull out your phone and check your schedule for the day that starts in a few hours. You might be able to swing coming in a bit late to catch up on the lost sleep. You sigh when you see the reminder about that 9am meeting and 10:30am conference call.

Sitting in the dark you start to go over the chronological events of your ordeal, preparing them for the post mortem with the team tomorrow.

To Be Continued…

From our friends at the ServerBeach Blog;

Being a Systems Administrator can be thankless work. They’re the ones who keep your data flowing, networks pinging and computers booting round the clock, and the cruel hallmark of a great Sysadmin is this:

If they’re doing a good job, you don’t even know they’re doing it.

In honour of SysAdmin appreciation day, we’ll be sharing a couple of “Day in the Life Of” stories over the next couple days, written by some of our very own most fearless network administrators. While they’re not quite BOFH material (I don’t think his commitment to customer service is quite up to par for us) – we hope you enjoy them.

Have you ever deployed a corporate firewall before getting out of bed or performed an exorcism on a possessed printer? Send us your craziest SysAdmin stories – we’ll share them here and thank you with some exciting PEER 1 Hosting gear!