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A home network server is pictured at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images)
At the heart of the adage, necessity breeds innovation, serial entrepreneur Lance Tracey, with Mark Teolis, founded PEER 1 Hosting in 1999, along with its corporate identity, spirit, and philosophy: be resourceful and serve clients large and small in unique ways.
Handcuffed back then with zero leverage on the obligatory 90-day lead times by the telecoms to install T-1 lines, the duo launched PEER 1 as the antithesis to big phone companies. They saw themselves as the “indie filmmaker” for data services on the Internet. In that spirit, they exemplified being nimble, while adapting and moving quickly with a mission to strive to be helpful.
At the Cloud Expo West dinner launch for PEER 1’s new public cloud Zunicore, Robert Miggins, Senior VP of Business Development, told me, “We handle the problems, so you can realize your possibilities.”
Such a philosophy was evident that night. Seeing the explosion of social media data and the growth of cloud computing last spring, PEER 1 decided to move rapidly and decisively. The company is competing directly with Rackspace and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Realizing it would take too long to code and deploy Zunicore in-house, PEER 1 licensed cloud enablement software from UK software firm OnApp.com.
“In 110 days,” Miggins announced, “we successfully launched Zunicore datacenters in three locations in North America.” He then went on to introduce and thank OnApp’s founder and CEO Ditlev Bredahl and his engineering team for such focused execution and delivery.
PEER 1 Spirit in 2003 Blackout
In a follow-up phone interview with Robert Miggins, who’s traveling a lot these days between PEER 1’s office in San Antonio, TX, and its headquarters in Vancouver, BC, he recalled a timeless PEER 1 story.
“The 2003 Northeastern Blackout affected 50 million people, large corporations, and thousands of SMBs, resulting in an estimated $6 billion in losses. PEER 1 shared an office with the Toronto Star newspaper.”
He went on: “In fact, our datacenter was in their building. When the power shut down, it affected their newspaper. But we ran on generator power. Our network stayed up. It was important for them to get their operations running again, so we created emergency server space for our friends upstairs. We felt we could help and get through this together.”
And they did. The Toronto Star carried on during the outage.
It’s All In the Name
Wondering where the name Zunicore came from?
Miggins said that “cloud” is a bit overused nowadays, so they searched a bunch of names. They came up with the word core, “because it comes up a lot as a unit of measurement, such as scoping a project,” he explained. “I need 256 cores, five or ten servers. It’s increasingly the new unit of measure for many cloud projects.”
He continues: “Zuni is a Native American tribe in New Mexico. The word means ‘rain dance.’ We saw the affiliation between cloud and rain and the name stuck. Zunicore is a strong three-syllable word.”
With delineation between PEER 1’s 18 hosting locations and Zunicore’s three public clouds, the difference between the terms web hosting and pure cloud-based storage is more nuanced. But the cloud is clearly not Internet 1.0 of the dot.com ‘90s. In Miggins’ view, he sees the difference in technology as two-fold: Multi-tenancy and virtualization with the new pricing model of utility-based billing.
“The two terms might share ‘hosting,’ but web hosting doesn’t traditionally stretch beyond one server. The cloud has lots of customers to lots of machines. It leverages virtualization. You can turn up and turn down, short 48-hour projects. Cloud is more responsive,” he said.
Next … Interview With Zunicore
