Month: September 2011

The $16 muffin outrage!

While it’s last weeks news, it’s still making me laugh a week later, so I thought I’d blog about it…

There was outrage that the US Justice Department paid $16 a muffin (and $10 a cookie) as part of the catering for a legal conference held at a hotel near the White House.

Anyone involved in organising conferences knows that hotels want to make a certain amount of money from a conference, which you can pretty much express in this simultaneous equation:

Income = Meeting Room Hire + AV + Catering + Hotel Rooms

Thought of simplistically, the hotels income breaks down roughly as fixed costs, such as the hotel’s overheads, the cost of consumables for the event, such as coffee and food, the costs of hiring anything special in for the event (such as AV the hotel can’t provide in-house, or additional casual staff), and a chunk of profit.

So, you can end up with a situation whereby if someone doesn’t negotiate hard enough, and not enough people stay in the hotel, the coffee and muffins become very expensive.

Whither (UK) Regional Peering – Pt 2

It’s been a long while since I’ve blogged about this topic

Probably too long, as IXLeeds, something which inspired me to write Pt 1, is now a fully-fledged IX, not just a couple of networks plugged into a switch in a co-lo (all IXPs have to start somewhere!), but has formed a company, with directors, with about 12 active participants connected to its switch. Hurrah!

So, trying to pick up where I left off; in this post, I’m going to talk about shared fate, with respect to Internet Exchanges.

What do I mean by shared fate? Continue reading “Whither (UK) Regional Peering – Pt 2”

15 Years of INEX, me one year on

There were two anniversaries last week. The first was the 15th Birthday of INEX – the Internet Exchange Point in Dublin. To celebrate this, they organised a rather good event at Dublin’s history-steeped Mansion House (the first Dáil sat there in 1919) complete with distinguished speakers such as Dan Kaminsky and Geoff Huston, and a rather good dinner from the adjoining Fire Restaurant.

It was also Arthur’s Day, another excuse to drink copious quantities of the black stuff. Coincidence? You decide…

Dan spoke for over an hour, including Q&A, with no slides, no sheaf of notes, just this interesting stream of consciousness that made you want to sit up and listen.

Some things that Dan said got me thinking, not least the comment that “The world’s social life is being run from Silicon Valley”, and more to the point by a bunch of nerds (e.g. Facebook, G+, etc.), maybe some of the most anthrophobic people you might find! This linked up with some other stuff I’d been reading.

So I thought I’d try and make sense of what was going through my mind. Continue reading “15 Years of INEX, me one year on”

Telecity Dominance in Manchester continues?

It’s been a busy week for Manchester-based data centre UK Grid. Firstly, they announce a tie up with AMS-IX and IX Reach to provide a virtual blob of Dutch peering goodness in Manchester’s Science Park, then today, it’s announced that Telecity Group have acquired the UK Grid business, adding three further datacentres to their Manchester operations.

This certainly stays true to Telecity’s current form, which is to buy up competing data centre operators, having acquired Manchester’s IFL and Dublin’s DEG in fairly short order over the last 18 months, significantly increasing Telecity Group’s share, making them something of a dominant player in those markets.

Local (and privately-held) competitor M247 put their own slant on Telecity’s latest move in Manchester by announcing an acquisition of their own: a new building to enable further expansion.

Dell Acquisition Taking Hold at Force 10?

It seems the rDell/Force 10 combined logoecent acquisition of Force 10 by Dell is starting to make itself felt, and not only in a change of the logo on the website.

Eagle-eyed followers of the product information on their website will have noticed the complete disappearance of the product information for the chassis-based Zettascale switch, the Z9512, which was announced back in April. Continue reading “Dell Acquisition Taking Hold at Force 10?”