A friend of mine just called me to tell me that QTS's Sunnyvale had a major power event today. Details are slim, but apparently it was an entire site outage. He told me that he's about 50th in line to get access to the facility right now. Due to this outage, Friendster is offline right now.

Joan Levy over at Oracle was awesome enough to put me on the press list for OpenWorld this week. I'm not sure how much time I'm going to have to attend the sessions, but will try to walk the expo floor once or twice, and hit as many of the 7 after parties I've been told about so far.

I made it down to registration today at about 5:40 and was blown away by the enormity of it. Howard St. is shut off between 4th and 5th, covered with tents for parties. It appears bot Moscone East and Moscone West have been rented out solely for OpenWorld this week.

Oracle's press put out a caution that most hotels in downtown are booked up this week with conference attendees. Attendance is expected to peak 43,000 and there are over 1,800 sessions happening. Somebody tweeted earlier that on Thursday there are over 80 concurrent tracks going on at the same time.

Apparently Oracle is big business? I'm mainly interested to hear what Oracle's plans for the cloud are, and if the rumors are true that they're working with somebody to build a massive cloud of Oracle Database servers as a service.

I've heard rumors that LayeredTech has a rich history, you certainly came out of left-field pretty recently. Can you describe LayeredTech's evolution for me?

John Pozadzides LayeredTech started in 2003 as a spin-off of Aldor Solutions. Aldor is a software provider to funeral homes and death-care certificates. We provided hosted ASP solutions to funeral homes. Since we were doing a lot of hosting, we receive
d the inevitable requests from friends and family to host a website here, or a server there. Eventually the webhosting side started getting interesting enough that we decided to see where we could take it. We built 20 servers and posted on WebHostingTalk that we'd lease them out for $35/month. We sold out of our inventory within a couple of days and realized that we had something here.

With this encouragement we setup a new brand called LayeredTech and moved our datacenter into ThePlanet. Before the move we had been using Intel processors, but decided to move into low-end AMD processors and were willing to install any Linux distribution or Control Panel that customer went. Within 9 months we had 2,000 servers hosted at ThePlanet.

Day one began with a bad omen. The wireless began failing with only about 100 members of the press in the concourse. Throughout the day, the network team was clearly just under a massive amount of pressure, with about 1,000 laptops constantly trying to get a wireless link they just didn't stand a chance.

Understandably this is a very young conference, and the execution has been fantastic.

My recap is brief, very brief because I had to leave not too long after the opening sessions.

To begin with, the conference started about 35 minutes late as they struggled to get the concourse wireless working. Then they opened the event with an unexpected rendition of the National Anthem. I'm not quite sure why, but I'm writing it off to dimensional stability failure.

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Later on today I'll post my recap from yesterday's conference. I will try to do some regular updates today, but all bets are off. The conference internet access was non-existant yesterday. According to Jason Calcanis they were up all night throwing together a makeshift LAN so perhaps today will be better.

Here's the list of today's participants, I hope they're a bit less frightening than some of yesterday's startups.

TechCrunch50 Begins in San Francisco, Day Two Launch Schedule Released

Session Themes Include Collaboration, Finance and Statistics, Mobile, and Language and Platform Tools
TechCrunch50 Conference 2008

--(BUSINESS WIRE)--TechCrunch:

WHO:

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Following the press coordinator's advice for once, I arrived just after the door opened. For the expense of this conference, it has a very deliberate low-budget feel. All of the booths are tiny, each consisting of a couple of 2' diameter round tables with black table cloths, and a modest display.

There are about 50 exhibitors, mostly unknown start-ups, and a couple of larger players.

So far I've run into some fun guys from GoGrid, Zivity, and OtherInbox, and ShopZilla. I've got an interview setup with GoGrid (and I said I wouldn't be covering infrastructure here!) and am trying to set a few other ones up right now.

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As you know, this blog is entitled DatacenterJunkie, not StartupJunkie. This week, however, I have the pleasure of having been invited to cover TechCrunch50 for NetworkWorld. So for the next three days, instead of Datacenters and ISPs, it'll be Start-ups and Venture Capitalists.

Look forward to liveblogging, snarky comments about start-ups, and interviews with entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and homeless programmers on the streets of San Francisco who Will Code For Food!

TechCrunch50's early morning press release:

September 08, 2008 09:30 AM Eastern Daylight Time
TechCrunch50 Begins in San Francisco, Day One Launch Schedule Released

Session Themes Include Youth and Entertainment, Memes and News, Enterprise, and Advertising and Commerce

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Softlayer just announced that they've deployed a new IPv4 Anycast based DNS service. This is particularly fun for me, because I've been running a large (200,000+ domains) authoritative DNS service using Anycast out of two datacenters for over three years now. I've also set this up for a few smaller ISPs and web startups in the past two years.

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A few weeks ago I sat down with Gary Kendall, CEO of Limestone
Networks while attending HostingCon 2008 in Chicago. I spoke to the CEOs of quite a few dedicated server providers, and this was conversation really stuck out.

It's been a quiet couple of weeks here, but that's about to change. My break-neck conference tour has come to a close. I'm sitting in SFO waiting for my Virgin flight back to Seattle and am writing up my interviews and recaps of the past three weeks. Stay-tuned for some action-packed conference reports.

Click here for HostingCon 2008 Pictures.

DatacenterJunkie is attending LinuxWorld Expo and Next Generation Datacenter at Moscone in San Francisco this week. Most of my coverage should appear late next week, as I'm trying to catch up on HostingCon last week.

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I'm sitting here with Serguei Beloussov Beloussov and Kate Lannan of Parallels.

Tell me about Parallels. What's the story between SWSoft and the rebranding?

Serguei Beloussov: SWSoft and Parallels were always the same company and different business units. Parallels was a 90% owned subsidiary of SWSoft. We re branded earlier this year, and they are now the same corporate entity. I founded it, and I now own 60% of the company.

9:33 Today began with an awesome mile walk in the sun. The navy pier is a huge tourist trap that we found ourselves happily lost-in. The directions to HostingCon weren't entirely clear, but we eventually found our way here.

Groggily finding cold water was complex. There was plenty of hot coffee and donuts, though. Decided to go to the Social Marketing Track for the first session. I'm cutting it short at 10:00 AM to interview Serguei Beloussov, CEO of Parallels.

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I've been in Chicago for exactly 9.5 hours, and HostingCon is already better than I had hoped for. I landed at 2:30PM, and was checked into my hotel by 3:30. Daniel, BitPusher's CEO arrived at about 7:15. We mostly relaxed until 8:30, enjoying room service and the view, the we headed out to an informal get together at the W.

We met up with some of the guys from MessageWire, and DedicatedNOW in the lobby, and spent some time with the owner of FortressITX. Once we realized that drinks were on SoftLayer, we chatted up their CEO Lance Crosby, and spent a couple of hours enjoying Macallan, and talking about SoftLayer's rapid ascent. I'm going to meet up with Lance later on during the conference to do a quick interview about where he started, where they are today, and where they're going.

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For a while now, I've been wondering when the hosting industry would start working with each other. Today I stumbled upon a new group named AIHSP (Association of Internet and Hosting Service Providers). This new group might be a sign that this, an industry on the precipice of massive change, is finally starting to mature.

From http://www.aihsp.org/News/Article.php?article=2:

INDUSTRY LEADERS LAUNCH FIRST-EVER TRADE ASSOCIATION FOR INTERNET AND HOSTING SERVICE PROVIDERS

Dan Garon
AIHSP Founding Committee
612-501-1586
contact@pressadvance.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
07/25/08

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It turns out that OSCON isn't a great venue to talk to people about datacenters :(

Given this, I decided to deviate from my standard beat and attend a session that my friends Selena and Gabrielle were doing aon "How to run a user group". There's a good crowd here, about 40 people plus Selena and Gabrielle.

Selena and Gabrielle began by discussing how important introductions are for the effectiveness of any social group. They then asked everybody to introduce themselves by saying their name, and giving three "tags" that describe themselves. Introductions began rather serious and got comfortable and comical around half-way through the audience.

My name is Michael Halligan and my tags are datacenters, outsourcing, and infrastructure.

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Here's a small batch of photos from the expo floor today at OSCON in Portland.

Since I don't really cover software here, I had to cherry pick the sessions I'll be going to this week. I only expect to make about half of the sessions that on my personal schedule. The rest of the time I hope to be doing interviews and milling about the hallway track.

Here's my OSCON schedule if you'd like to have a chat.

I'm having a conference call with HPers Erin Collopy and Steve Cumings about HP's sexy new Datacenter In a Box, the HP POD. Erin is PR/AR Manager at HP Enterprise Storage & Servers, Steve is Director of Scalable Computing & Infrastructure (SCI).

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Friday I toured Internap's new facility in Tukwila, WA (just south of Seattle). Hands down it's the best commercial datacenter in the greater Seattle region. 30" raised floors, built out to 200 watts per square foot, lots of expansion room, and a staff who knows their facility.

Internap's security was decent, but I mostly laugh at the ridiculousness of some security measures.

For example, it's a well publicized fact that SoftLayer's shiny new Seattle datacenter is in Internap's Tukwila facility. While touring the facility, I asked where SoftLayer was hosted, and was told they couldn't confirm or deny that SoftLayer was hosted in that building.

Five minutes later, we got into an elevator with a gentleman wearing a SoftLayer polo shirt.

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