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Originally uploaded by bitpusher

Everybody, meet Ben. Ben, meet everybody!

Ben is BitPusher’s newest Sr. Systems Engineer. I just stole him from ClearWire and he starts this coming Monday. We’re all very excited to have him!

Pusher of Bits Needed (Senior Linux Administrator)

BitPusher manages web servers, networks and other IT infrastructure, both owned by BitPusher and hosted elsewhere. We build long-term relationships with our customers and take the time to understand their applications, their technical needs and their business needs. We customize things as required to meet those needs, but we also keep things as standard as we can for reasons that we’re sure you already understand.

Do you like making order out of chaos? Are you effective when managing lots of little projects, but also have a tendency to make improvements that you didn’t originally have in mind? Are you always looking for ways to manage servers more efficiently? If so, let’s talk.

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

To the extent that things at BitPusher ever settle down, things have settled down after the move to Seattle.

We’re already seeing benefits from move. One big networking snafu notwithstanding, the combination of better and beefier shared infrastructure with the opportunity to rebuild our customer servers has noticeably reduced the frequency of operational incidents. In practical terms, this has meant fewer pages for our operations team and fewer process restarts — things that most people don’t notice, but they take up our time and can cause brief downtimes or cause end user sessions to be lost.

But perhaps the biggest difference is in the little ways we’ve made the infrastructure simpler and tidier. It may sound silly to dictate that the server in slot 13 in cabinet 2 will be known as sea-c02-s13 and be must be plugged in to port 13 on the both the remote-control power system and each of the three network switches to which it is connected (two redundant data connections plus one for the lights-out management), but in the end it saves time and avoids confusion, as well as eliminating the need to maintain much of a cable map.

Rebuilding customer servers, as we did during the move, has meant that everything (well, almost everything) is now set up according to our latest best practices. While we always kept the servers up to date in terms of patches and such that affect security and stability, many of the details of how we configure networking, choose file paths, etc. have changed in the three years since we moved in to our previous data center, and some of those are harder to update. Rebuilding gave us a chance to update them. (We’ve also learned a lot about what to do and not do when rebuilding customer environments, so it will be easier to do limited rebuilds to keep things up to the latest spec in the future.)

Improvements in the physical data center space make a big difference, too. In addition to better power and cooling and having plenty of room to expand, it helps a great deal to have better cable management, a simplified and easier-to-manage scheme for labeling servers, and more storage space for easier management of spare parts.

When trying to keep a complicated environment running smoothly, the little things make a big difference.

Pati became a BitPusher on June 4th, 2007. Here she is sporting the latest in BitPusher’s line of blue fedoras. Pati is BitPusher’s first Executive Assistant, and will be wearing more hats than they have at The Hat Guys in Oakland, CA.

I appear to have moved to Seattle. Suddenly, my surroundings are different, and my bed 99% closer to the datacenter.

The house is old, but still standing (actually, it’s quite nice) at it’s centenial year. It’s big, red, and has a commanding view, not to mention $4 cheaper than my 20% smaller apartment in San Jose. Big apartment versus bigger house for a frapaccino less in cash. You do the math.

The story is this: Michael flew me up here to Seattle to do some work for him. Then he moved up here, moved the datacenter up here, and flew me up here to do work for him a few more times. It went on like this for months, when suddenly, I’m unloading a truck into the new house.

It’s nice up here, and it’s good to be able to get to the datacenter in under 4 hours. The food in SJ is better, but the people up here seem nicer, in general. Nice people are often unsuspecting.

In the meantime, I’ll post again in a week, after I get all those machines I lugged with me installed and ready for new or expanding customers.

TTFN-

Dirk R

As of 9:00 PM on May 17th, BitPusher has finally moved 100% of it’s infrastructure out of 365 Main in San Francisco. It’s funny, we still have access to 1/2 of the colocation rooms in 365, since we still manage a handful of customers there, but we no longer maintain any of our own equipment there.

It’s good to be completed with this project. Our new environment is a well-oiled machine. Essentially, we started with a green-field environment, and put together a long list of gripes about our old infrastructure in San Francisco. Everything from cabling standards to setting up BGP, and building better systems management tools was addressed.

More to come in the next week, but after such a lull in blogging activity, I thought I’d make this exclamation. We’re open, and doing business in Seattle!

Jr. Admin CONTRACT (Seattle, WA) January 9th through January 12th

BitPusher, LLC is seeking a contractor to assist in the build-out of our new datacenter in Tukwila.

This is a short-term contract from January 9th, 2007 through January 12th, 2007 (around 25 hours), which may lead into an ongoing part-time NOC technician position.

Responsibilities will include:

* Installing rack-mount equipment including servers, switches, routers
* Installing ethernet cables
* Documenting cabling infrastructure
* Upgrading BIOS & Firmware on servers
Qualifications:

Requirements:

* 1-2 years Linux Administration Experience
* Able to work up to 4x 10 hour shiftts from 8am - 6pm
* Ability to lift 60lbs overhead; may require awkward or straining position to be assumed for short periods of time in lifting or han
dling objects
* Experience running ethernet cable
* Familiarty with Linux
* Strong work ethic
* Reliable transportation
* Experience working in datacenters

Compensation: DOE, 1099

BitPusher, LLC is a rapidly growing IT managed services startup. Please contact us by e-mail only. Please send a resume and cover letter to hr@bitpusher.com.

Our hardware order has finally been placed! It’s been a good solid month of price competition, quote modification, and lease arrangements. As of about an hour ago the purchase orders have been issued from our leasing companies to our hardware vendors. The bulk of our hardware order is being placed through CDW thanks to their cut-rate pricing. The rest of our hardware is a couple of Cisco 6506s from Recurrent, a Cisco reseller based out of Santa Clara.

Dirk & I are heading out to Seattle from January 8th -> January 15th, so if anybody would like to get together during that period, let us know. We’ll be working furiously racking hardware, running cables, and building our new network, but we’re trying to set our evenings aside for dinners with friends, colleagues & customers, plus we’re going to spend Saturday & Sunday exploring if we make enough progress.

We began our datacenter deployment “officially” three weeks ago by signing with Fortress in Seattle. A week later, Dirk & I flew to Seattle to survey our new space and meetup with a sales lead. For posterity’s sake, I photoblogged our journey.

Our day began with taking off from Oakland Airport at 7:20 AM, arriving into SEATAC at around 9:30 AM. We picked up our Cadillac DTS at about 10:15 (we figured if we’d be driving around a wet, cold, rainy, unfamiliar city all day we might as well be in something huge, unwieldy, and comfortable) and headed to the datacenter.

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