It was the shot heard round the hosting world. Last month, my good friends at RagingWire announced their latest offering, IronScale, which has the potential to fundamentally change the hosting business. At least, that’s what the press release and the voice mail I received from Doug Adams, their head of sales claimed. Now, I’ve been doing business with RagingWire for almost 8 years, and I often tell people they have the best designed/built/run data center in Northern California, so I know they offer great services. I’m one of their only three-peat customers (I’ve put three different companies into their facility) and I’ve never been disappointed. Still, I tend to discount terms like “game-changing” as marketing fluff. I’m a “show-me” kind of guy. So they did.

Today I had the pleasure of an on-site demonstration and walk through of the IronScale service. I am impressed. On the surface, it is a typical managed server hosting offering. You rent one or more dedicated servers in their data center and they provide the operating system, network, internet bandwidth, security, etc. Pretty common stuff, and pretty boring. Why did I drive to Sacramento on one of the hottest days of the year for this (110F)? Well, you have to look beneath the surface, which I did, to see what they are really offering. At what I saw was awesome.

IronScale makes some bold claims for their services. Among them:

• Dedicated physical hardware (Not VMWare or Zen virtualization)
• Less than 5 minute server deployment
• Instant reconfiguration of servers
• Instant backups
• No cost to reload the operating system
• Everything easily manageable through a web portal, including provisioning, console access, network configuration, firewall rules, backups, and bandwidth provisioning
• On demand Raid 50 storage
• Enterprise class network security

The first two bullet points are what instantly sets IronScale apart from the competition. Most hosting provides focus either on rapid deployment or dedicated hardware, but not both. If you want dedicated hardware, then provisioning time takes 24-48 hours, because it takes time for an engineer to Ghost/JumpStart a server and put it on the network. If you want rapid deployment, you use virtualization technologies like VMWare. RagingWire figured out a Door #3.

Some of what I learned today is under NDA, and the product is in Beta and patent pending, so I need to tread carefully, but here is my best explanation of what they are doing. The core of the product offering is commodity servers connected to an enterprise-class storage area network. Rather that laying an OS down on the physical server, they SAN-boot it. Provisioning a new server is as simple as taking a SAN snapshot of an existing server image, and assigning it to a new server. Each server is connected to a high-end Cisco switch with integrated firewall that provides security and isolation from every other server at the port level.

Simple concepts. The special sauce here is not the mix of technologies, but the software they’ve written to control it all, and do so simply and securely. Want to provision a new server? Grab one out of the pool assigned to you, pick the OS baseline image you want on it, name it, give it an IP address from the available pool, and boot it. Click the next tab and you can write firewall rules in an easy to understand format. The IronScale software translates into the appropriate Cisco commands and applies the configs to the firewall. Need more storage? Pick the server, assign more space, and the software updates the SAN to allocate space to that image. The running OS instantly recognizes it as new available space (no reboot required).

Need a bigger server? Shut down the running server. Assign the image to a bigger box, and reboot. Want to backup your servers before applying the latest updates from Microsoft on Patch Tuesday (you know, just in case…)? Take an instant SAN snapshot. If something goes wrong, revert back. No calls to customer service. No waiting for days or weeks. It is fast, and it is easy.

Basically, this IS virtualization but not like what you’ve seen before. Instead of VMWare, Zen, Cloud, Grid, pick your buzz word virtualization, this is storage-based virtualization combined with some really kick butt management software. The servers are dedicated but the storage is not. The beauty of this is, among other things, it isn’t OS restricted. Although the initial offering is based on Windows and RedHat, there is no reason they can’t support Solaris (x86), BSD, or other flavors of Linux in the future. They don’t need to hook into the OS to perform their services, so any OS that will run natively on the hardware will work. And because the servers they are running are very generic, driver support should not be much of an issue. All you need is the 1st OS image, and the SAN snapshots do the rest.

This service is clearly designed for the mid market. I would say their sweet spot is customers wanting 5 – 50 servers, but the service can scale up to hundreds, if not thousands of servers. For bigger companies, it would make a good platform for proof-of-concepts, development environments, or any situation where you need to be able scale capacity up or down rapidly and make frequent changes. What would push this into uber-cool status is if IronScale works out billing based on time-slices. So, if I want a pool of 50 servers to generate load for testing purposes, but I only need them 1 hour per night, or I need a compute farm for end-of-month processing, I could pay just for the time I use the servers and shut them down the rest of the time. Other companies are offering capacity on demand, but most of those are grid-based, and you need to modify your applications to take advantage. IronScale could do capacity on demand with zero customer modifications.

This is a Beta product, because they are still adding features and I’m sure fixing bugs in the management software, but the core offering is fully baked and ready for prime time. I expect in the future, they will layer on a plethora of additional services, such as advanced security scanning, server virtualization to increase utilization of the hardware, and database server clustering. I sincerely hope they also package their management software and start selling it to enterprises in the future. Based on what I saw today, I would buy it with some minor tweaks.

I am planning to beta test this offering in the next few weeks, so hopefully I’ll have more information, and some screen shots soon. In the mean time, I encourage you to check out the online demo and give IronScale a serious look. http://www.ironscale.com/videos/demo

Upgrading your phone is a smooth process, if follow the steps Samsung lists here, with a few caveats. First, backup all your data. This upgrade will wipe your phone, so you will lose all data and installed programs. Second, make sure you have links and license keys for any software you have added to your phone. You will need these to reload your software. Third, remove your SIM card before starting the process. You risk losing data on the card if you do not. After that, the upgrade is incredibly straight forward.

There are many differences between Windows Mobile 5 & Mobile 6. The Microsoft Mobile 6 Comparison Guide highlights the main differences. The upgrade will install Mobile 6 Standard edition on your phone. This is still not as feature rich as the OS you’ll find on Windows Mobile touchscreen devices, because it is optimized for 1-handed operation. Even so, I’ve found many improvements that make the upgrade worthwhile.

Top 10 Reasons to Upgrade to WM6:

1. Office Mobile – We finally can open and edit Word, Excel & PowerPoint files! Mobile 5 could view files with Picsel Viewer, which sucked, but Office Mobile lets you edit on the phone.
2. Improved Internet Explorer – The new version of Mobile IE is much improved. Modern web pages now look normal! Mobile IE5 had poor support for CSS and web pages rarely ever looked right.
3. New Instant Messenger Client – The AT&T IM client now supports AIM, Windows Live, and Yahoo! Messenger. You can also download the Skype 2.2 client here. Make sure you choose the SmartPhone version.
4. Smartfilter – WM6 makes it easier to find messages in your inbox, using smartfilter. Simply type in the word or phase you are searching for, and the message list is filtered for you. Makes it much easier to find a message from your boss! Smartfilter also works in the new Media Player, to help you find a specific song.
5. Company Directory – The new Company Directory feature lets you find contacts quickly from your Exchange Global Address List. In WM5, these searches could take 45 -90 seconds. In WM6, the searches seem much faster, taking 3 -5 seconds.
6. Calendar – The updated calendar rocks! You can finally see invited attendees, and propose new times for meetings. There is also a slick ribbon interface that improves how you visualize your day. You can easily see where you have free time, and where you are triple booked.
7. Information Rights Management – WM6 supports IRM functions, including controlling who can read or forward e-mails and documents. More importantly to me, WM6 can read IRM protected e-mails and attachments. This was a huge problem under WM5. IRM e-mails could not be read at all.
8. Storage Card Encryption – You can automatically encrypt documents stored on your SD card, so they can only be read on your phone.
9. MobiTV & XM Mobile – The new MobiTV and XM Radio Mobile clients make streaming audio and video over 3G useful and practical. I played with the MobiTV demo and I’m hooked. Finally, Fox News anywhere!!!
10. Dozens of minor tweaks and improvements – I am constantly finding minor changes that improve the experience. When reading e-mail, deleting has been bound to the left-function key. This allows for 1-button deletes, which is a huge improvement. Categories now sync from Outlook to the device, rather than maintaining a separate category list on the phone. There is now a Windows Update function, for obtaining WM6 patches from Microsoft.

There are also some features that seem missing in the the Samsung WM6 image. Most notably, WM6 is supposed to support HTML formated e-mails, but in my experience, messages are still rendered as plain text. It is not clear to me if this is a limit of WM6 standard, the Samsung version of WM6, or if I am missing a configuration tweak.

It should also be noted that while it seems to take longer for WM6 to load at boot, I have not found any other performance problems. All-in-all, this is a great upgrade, even if it is a year late.

Update 01/25/2008 – HTML e-mail is working for me on my POP3 account, but not on e-mail sync’d with my corporate Exchange server. This may be a setting in Exchange that is reformatting the messages before I get them, rather than a WM6 issue. HTML e-mail for POP3 works great and renders well, using the new mobile IE engine.

Don’t forget to backup your data first and remove your sim card!!!