A friend of mine at Google asked me to put together a talk on on how BitPusher works, and in particular how a small company provides a managed services offering that competes effectively with huge companies. Here’s the description of the resulting talk:

Economies of Focus: How Little Guys Compete in Big Spaces

BitPusher is a small company that provides outsourced web operations and hosting for customer web applications. CEO Daniel Lieberman will discuss the philosophies, techniques and compromises that allow a very small team to deploy new, diverse applications rapidly while keeping their ops environment manageable. In particular, Daniel will describe how BitPusher achieves economies of scale in a diverse environment by choosing their focus areas carefully, making BitPusher efficient enough to complete with big IT consultancies and the services arms of telecom companies.

I’ll be giving this talk at Google this Thursday and then again (open to the public) on August 7 at 7PM at SASAG in Seattle. (I may present it again elsewhere if there’s interest.) The plan is for a video of the talk at Google to be made available on-line as well.

Technorati Tags: bitpusher, sasag, google, tech talk

As expensive as it was, it was absolutely the right system to move BitPusher’s critical infrastructure off of California’s over-burdened power grid.

Apparently a transformer exploded under the 560 Mission PG&E Substation in San Francisco, knocking out part of the grid for about 24,000 people. Unfortunately, this happened in the SoMA neighborhood, otherwise known as datacenter alley where 365main, JMA Wired, ServePath, 650 Townsend, and Level3 (amongst others) have datacenters. Apparently the datacenter we moved out of, 365main, had some problems dealing with this power outage.

• Power Outages In San Francisco
• 365Main datacenter power outage
  
• At least 20,000 without power in San Francisco

Technorati Tags: 365main, pg&e, pge, datacenters, colo, power outage