– Won’t be going at DEFCON this year. Friend wedding planned on the same date.
– Won’t be going to Linux Symposium this year. Got MY wedding planned very near the date.
– I’ve received a letter from local court… unpaid parking ticket (which they never left, and they issued 25 days after they took my plate number)
– (…) and the day is still very young.

Considering I’ve had to prepare the slide in OmniGraffle (no Microsoft product on my laptops in Montreal, Open Office Presenter isn’t really production ready and I’m not into KeyNote), 12 hours before my talk (yeah, heard about something called ‘Real-Life Work’?), and that I didn’t even know who would be present (some big name in the rooms) – I think I’ve managed quite well. I mean, I didn’t died.

Then, my life got strange. Again.

I’m back in Montreal for consulting contracts. The opportunity was just too great – My company is growing at an alarming (lets say interesting?) rate. But that isn’t really surprising, I’m putting lots of time in my projects ; they very rarely fail.

So I’m back in my old place, which I’ve never really left. My plant are still here. They, however, didn’t survived. But still, as loyal subjects, they didn’t even try to run away. My old habit were also waiting for me.

Working freak hours, jumping from coffee shack to tea lounge, then to unnamed lounge..

I’m now full of crispy stories.
– I’ve learn the code to the back room of a Second Cup.
– I’ve saw a guy pitch to a VC (same second cup). Laugh at the ridiculous attempt, he asked me to do better, I’ve pitched LabsPhoenix. He asked me if I wanted to meet one of his partner… guess I wasn’t that bad, but then, I have a running business & the other guy was trying to sell a Ponzi scheme.
– Saw the lowest of human nature (guy buying an hooker service – didn’t know people actually bought those services) and the prettiest (guy was asking a girl if she loved him).
– Domino’s Pizza seem to be aware of my return – they sent me a letter saying that they missed me and gave me a good rebate. When I’ve left, they must have had to fired an employee… lost of income from this strange benefactor that was buying 2-3 pizza a week. Something like that – I’ve always felt a responsibility over the well faring of that business ;-)
– Now that guy that asked the girl if she liked him is crying behind me, while I’m writing this. Come-on, how do you want me to finish a post if you keep changing your story. YOU OWE ME!

And I’ve got a big back log of pictures I was planning to publish. So you can expect them in the next couple of days. At least one a day – for at least one day.

And now that I have a car (due thanks to the ‘big’ sister, which GAVE me the car!), I’m seeing a new world of opportunities : I can get to work faster, work longer and get back home after the close of public transit. You see, sister, you are my enabler ;-).

I’m having fun writing this. Been a long time, I’ve had fun writing on this blog. It did also died waiting for me to come back. Went from those 3k/months viewer to about 200. Nice drop, but then, Ive got around 100 souls linked to my RSS-feed. In the next weeks, I’ll be spamming you guys ;-)

Anyway, in the top of the list, I’ll be going to a ‘wine & cheese‘, to Montreal to meet my family, to the church to meet the priest. But, as always, I also need to work. So Sphinx, Chef & Puppet, MySQL Multi-master replication, MySQL snapshot + recovery….

… not counting the fact that a new website is underway for my enterprise (Les Laboratoires Phoenix), that I’m dealing with a designer for new logo and business cards, that my accounting is being entirely re-done to ‘account’ for my migration to a corporation, that I need to finish 3 projects drafts by Monday morning (for the R&D papers), and that I need to complete my invoicing for November.

.Don’t know how others does it, but I guess they just do. Like I’ll be doing this week-end.

The next few hours will see little sleep and lots of action ; More precisely I’ll be deploying lots of hardware (2 IBM SAN, 2 core servers, 2 switchs, 2 APC, 5 branchs servers – supporting up to 20 ‘leaf’/virtual servers), and then somes (3 couples of 2 systems in high redundancy (wackamole IP ‘fencing’, shared-storage through DRBD). All that will go in ‘my’ new 48U cage @Hypertec (old nortel building) to act as a demo for some clients.

Once that’s completed, the true fun start: A very big part of this infrastructure is going to be self-healing, failure resitant and high performance. We are speaking of :

This is going to be solid, scalable, fast : the holy grail of a lot of service provider that are aiming at automatization of their ‘hosting’ business. The result of a lot of planning and testing ; the cutting-edge of cloud-computing.

About Hypertec

As a rule, never visit somewhere without background info : Hypertec-BCDR (Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery) (they also use the name Hypertec-AS for the french version) is the hosting, datacenter & high availability services division of the Hypertec Group. The group look like an umbrella corporation which also hold the Hypertec Systems division (kind of a computer retail shop). The exact financial details are private (the group is private / NOT available in the stock market), but from what I’ve heard, the whole group have about 120+ employee and a sales figure of about 20M$/years. Those are very rough numbers, I could be totally off the track, and include all their activities (don’t know for the data center aspect only). There seems to be office in a couple locations (Montreal, Quebec, Ottawa, Toronto… ).

So, its quite strange that I haven’t heard about them… especially since they are located inside the old Nortel building in Saint-Laurent. I’ve also contact friends about them, and they were virtually unknown!

The visit

… and this is why I’m doing a blog post on them: because Jonathan Ahdoot, sales manager, walked me through their data center and I must say, he was able to impress me. The main surface is reserved for tier-4 dedicated cages to which you can add a small quantity of tier-2 rack (about 60) setup. As a reminder, in datacenter higher tier speak of better quality (scale from 1 to 4 – as defined by the uptime institute)(different from Internet peering tier).

The visit make clear quite fast why I hadn’t heard about them : they fish for the big ones and government (which can be considered a big one) contracts. They have rooms for rent that act as office away from office for couples of days, they have a 10 posts technical room, a cafeteria (which can become 24h) and … behold: a lounge. Yes ! a true lounge with satellite TV and couches. How many time would I have given everything (my clients own ;-)) for a nice couch while waiting for a file copy between the SAN and the server I’m restoring @ 2h AM. They also make their conference room available to clients (which is another nice feature, especially for office-less consultant (me!)).

I’m far from being a data center specialist: I build infrastructure and I rack them somewhere – this is mainly what I do. So I cannot go into big details about all the nice features the data center seemed to have or in the small point why it might not be as great as I think. However, there is one thing that did impress me: There is 5 flywheel energy storage system in the main engineering room, all being provided by electricity (Hydro) and hooked on a generator. This was also the first time I’ve heard about flywheel energy storage (FES), but I do find the idea quite neat. There must be a lot of energy lost through friction (even if they are in vaccum), but it does look like a system way more secure than batteries (UPS) for data center. Secure as in : I’ve already been screwed twice by “this was a planned maintenance and the ups didn’t turned on, or the tech turned off the wrong line”.

But the sky is not totally blue: Since they do seem to target tier-4 clients, they lack a bit of the standard facility we require in a tier-2: renting 48U racks rarely leave you the space for screen, mouse, keyboard, screwdriver… you expect them to be readily available on site. From what I’ve saw, they were either lacking or in bad shape (tier-2, again… the tier-4 look awesome). Anyway, if you got a cage (with multiple rack) and you don’t have space for tools, you have others problems.

Anyway, a couples contracts will require me to be in data center for the next few months (migrating 35U, deploying 20U, re-designing 24U…). So I guess I will be posting more reviews as time goes.

We are a Montreal based start-up looking for one or two developers to join the founding team and lead the development of a Web application built on the Software as a Service model, i.e. people will actually pay to use our product ;-)

Our ideal partner is someone who thrives in the creative, fast paced, get-things-done atmosphere of a start-up. You are easy to get along with and respectful of others. You are familiar with Ruby on Rails, Django or one of the popular PHP frameworks. You know your way around a database, write scripts in your sleep and have long since mastered Regular Expressions. Knowledge of Javascript and implementing AJAXy interfaces are definite assets.

We’re bootstrapping, so the ability to run lean for a while is a must. We want you to commit full-time to the project but, for the right person, we might consider part-time involvement. Lots of people talk about one day launching or joining a start-up but few actually ever do it. Which group do you want to belong to?

If you are interested, get in touch with us and we would be happy to tell you more.

So if you are interested (and I know you/can vouch for you), please get in touch with me and I’ll forward your contact info to those guys. Knowing them, should be quite a fun ride.

iWeb has been providing reliable and scalable Internet hosting infrastructure solutions with its shared web hosting, dedicated servers, managed hosting and colocation services for over a decade. [...] Today iWeb is one of the largest web hosts and Internet hosting infrastructures provider in Canada. iWeb’s operations centres shelter a total of more than 59 000 square feet of latest generation data center and office floor space in Montreal and offers a wide variety of first class web hosting and server management services.

[ more information available here ]

FOR iWeb:

- 2008 ; Goldman Sachs 20M$ investment. Part of the deal involve issuing stock @ 1.30$. This is 10% of current market capitalization (at 0.80$CAD)

- Reliable board of directors. Very low rate of change in the management structure.

- They can be trusted. They not only survived all the previous dot.com crash but they thrive in troubled time. Enterprise look to reduce/fix infrastructure cost and iWeb has proved to be a reliable player. They are one of the most reliable hosting company sites in april 2009: netcraft report. They were also recognized, in 2007, for their free speech respect.

- They are involved in the local communities and present in new media. They have a twitter account, they maintain a corporate blog and most of the director also have one.

Mitigating factors, iWeb:

- The main part of their income (and their financing) is at the international level (in $USD), which make them very dependent on the weakness/strength of the Canadian dollar.

- Very, very, low trading volume. Last transaction price @ 0.80$CAD, current buying price is at 0.85$CAD and selling at 1.10$CAD (which is the 52 weeks high). Be careful is you send a market order.

Note: they are releasing their Q2 Earning report tomorrow, before the market opening.