Data Center Services by Zephyr Networks in Orange County with Marc Winger

Marc: We are now offering data center services. Full data center services, which means, in English, which is what I’m going to have to break down to you guys exactly what that means. Yes, please. Is that we… well, I guess maybe we’ll start off with a little bit of history. So when I first moved back up to Orange County, I was employed by Orange County Online, which is an internet service provider. It’s been here since 1994. They started off with, like, modems.

And the owner of Orange County Online and I became friends. And somewhere along the line there, he didn’t want to do the consulting side of the business, so he asked me, “Marc, would you like to do the consulting arm, and buy that off of me.” And I said, “Yes, I will.” And thus Zephyr Networks was founded, which was the next kind of iteration.

Now, a very good friend of mine who also worked at Orange County Online split off a couple years later from Orange County Online and started his own internet service provider. And what’s going on is MCIP Services, which is Monroe Consulting, who’s still a very good friend of mine, who maintains a data center right here in Santa Anna, is… effectively, I’m buying him out of his business. And so we will now be maintaining… well, we have… currently there’s 15 racks of servers in there we’re going to be taking care of, and we’ll be managing, maintaining those, and offering those services to you, your customers, your friends.

So what does… what do those things mean? Well, that means if you want to, instead of storing your server in your office… and I look around, and I know a lot of you, a lot of you have customers who have, you know, servers in your offices, or servers in your… you know, your customers’ offices. We can actually pick those up and put them in the data center, where they’re safe, secure, powered 24/7, all those type of things. And I’ll talk a little bit about that in just a moment.

The data center that we’re in is in Santa Anna. It’s right off of Grand Avenue, and right across from the high school over there. It’s this really nondescript building that you don’t know it’s there. But it’s been hardened. It’s owned by the County of Orange, so your taxes help pay for it. But then us being in there helps cover those costs for the Orange County official stuff that goes on there.

So it’s a huge, 65,000 square foot building. I don’t think there’s any real estate there at all. But it’s effectively what we’re doing… what Jean does… we’re in real estate now. We’re selling spaces and bandwidth and power in this data center. So in other words, if you want to rent space in our data center, now we can help you with that. And so that… basically, it’s open 24/7, 365 days. There’s some… there’s more than one person there. There’s a security person there, and two technicians on site 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. I actually had to go there on Christmas about three years ago, which kind of sucked. But anyway… anyway.

And then their power dock… I told… I’ve sold many of you universal power supplies. You know, little bricks of batteries. Well, they’ve got huge… like, you know, 10 refrigerators kind of tucked together UPS batteries. They’ve got generators that can power the whole data center for four days.

Audience: Wow.

Marc: So worst case scenario, you know, there’s an earthquake and Edison goes down, that data center’s still running. All the data that’s in there is still dishing out information to whoever happens to be on the internet and wants to pull that data in. It’s a great disaster recovery planning concept for a lot of people who… that data has to be safe, the data has to be accessible. It works. The data center is designed for computers. It’s designed for servers. And now we can operate at really reasonable rates.

We are competing now with companies like Amazon and, you know… who offer web services. But we are really competitive. And what we do offer that makes us really stand out compared to those other companies is our service. And it’s the same service we’ve been using. I have to take care of your service, take care of your computers. It comes down to having checklists. It comes down to monitoring and maintaining those devices. And so we’re now doing that in the data center as well. We’re not changing anything about still coming out to your offices. We’re still coming out to your homes. But we are now also offering data center services.

So I was going to mention something about the security at the… at the data center. So when I go to the data center, I have a little badge. I have to go in and wave the little thing over the magnetic thing, and it lets me in one door. And then I have to wait till that door’s closed before I go to the next one, open the next one. And then they walk me back into… into the actual room with the raised floors, and all the racks of servers, and everything like that.
If you want, like… it’s a terrible place to hang out.

It’s really cold on one side, and it’s really warm on the other side of each one of the racks, because they’re designed so that all the cool air gets pulled in one side and then all the warm air comes out of the other side. So I don’t really enjoy spending all my time in data centers. But it’s worthy of experiencing and seeing. And we can offer tours if anyone’s interested. I mean, I don’t know if we can set it up so we have a mixer over by the data center. But I’d be willing to give it a shot if you guys are interested. It’s…

Audience: Let’s put the wine on the cold side.

Marc: Yeah. We can go back and forth, too. Either way, we can do tours of the data center.

Audience: Hot coffees on one side, Mai Tais on the other.

Marc: I like that.

Audience: That’s a great idea.

Marc: So anyway, it’s really a… if no one’s ever been to or seen a data center… has anyone actually ever been in a data center before?

Audience: No.

Marc: Scott has. Okay.

Audience: Is that like the cloud?

Marc: It is the cloud. And that’s kind of what I’m getting at, ultimately, is we are the cloud. You know, we are now more of the cloud than we were before. And we are… we are offering all the same services that those cloud type of things are. Now, how do you sell that to your customers? Well, let’s just say somebody’s… I went to a doctor’s office the other day whose server… they’re in a building that doesn’t get air conditioning on Sunday. And so it works out that on their Sundays, every Sunday, their server just dies, because it gets too hot in their suite. It’s the way the sun shines in, or whatever it is. But it gets to the point where the server is, like, at 120 degrees, or something like that, just because of where it’s at.

We can take that whole server, put it in the data center, set it up so that their desktops can go into a virtual desktop, or some tool, so they can have a little tiny 19… I don’t know, 99 computer. As long as it can communicate to the internet, it can get into a virtual… into a desktop in the data center, and they can work all of the time. And they just shut down their systems, their old computers, over the weekend, and it doesn’t make a difference for them. It’s a real easy solution for a lot of people. And the data’s secure. The data’s backed up. And you don’t have to worry about power going down or anything like that, because it’s covered.

We’ve got it covered. The wiring’s taken care of. You can even rent the computer. You can lease the computer, whatever you want to, on the server side. Let’s see. So what is it exactly that we’re doing? There’s a term called colocation, which really means you’re just renting space in our data center. And we are very competitive, pricewise, on that. Managed services is you put it in there and we take care of it. So you can put it in there, we can offer you the actual hardware. We sell you the hardware and put it in there, or we can lease you the hardware, or you can just rent space on some of our servers.

And then virtual servers and desktops. Basically, that’s what I was describing before. I’ll just use Dr. Tran as an example. He’s got a server in his office, and he’s also got a number of workstations. Basically, what we would offer him is his server with his software in the data center, and he just uses… how many people have used remote desktop, or GoToMyPC, or LogMeIn. So all those things, he juts uses something like that to get to the system that he wants to get into, and he can do his QuickBooks, or his electronic medical record tool right there, and access that in the data center.

And then when he’s done, he shuts off his little, you know, Windows XP computer, even though XP’s not supported anymore. But he’s not really using that. It’s just a terminal to get into the data center. So that is effectively what we’re doing. And also, as I discussed two weeks ago, your own private cloud. We can do that private cloud, and that’s basically, you control… no NSA interruption. You control the data from your office to our data center, and it’s you completely control the… it’s completely secure. You don’t have to worry about anyone else getting in.

So I’m sort of running out of time. I’m sure there’s going to be some questions, so please feel free to ask. Yes, Dr. Yamamoto.

Dr. Yamamoto: Is my backup on that cloud?

Marc: Your backup is not on… in our data center. It’s in Mozy’s data center, which is in Utah. Which is… and Mozy’s owned by EMC, who is really an excellent company as far as storing data. So it’s in a good place.

Dr. Yamamoto: So we’re okay.

Marc: You’re in good shape. Yup. Anybody else? Anybody, like… any other questions?

Audience: No NSA agents? And you got the memo on the shirt, right?

Marc: Oh, yeah. I got the memo on the shirt. So anyway…

Audience: Is it… so you have to defrag that… the… [inaudible 10:40]

Marc: We take care of all of that stuff for you. Yeah. Yes, it’s quick. No, the only limitation is the speed between… is the bandwidth between you and there. And in order to have a good remote desktop or virtual desktop, you need modem speeds. So if you’ve got more than a modem, you’re going to have a very responsive solution. And so here’s another thing that… you know, if your connection to the internet goes out, which probably you’ve all experienced at some point in time. Time Warner goes down, or Cox, or AT&T, or whatever like that. You drive down the street where it’s still working, to Starbucks, and you can plug in again and still go to work. And that’s a really nice feature.

And also, if you have distributed sales force or whatever all over the country, it all comes back to the same data center.
So there’s one more question. Ed?

Audience: Is it just data hosting, or do you do web hosting?

Marc: We are… we do web hosting. We are working on maybe having another server to take care of that. So, yes. Thank you very much.

1000 North Bristol Street #17-129
Newport Beach, CA 92660
Phone: 800.884.7559
Fax: 949-544-2901
www.zephyrnetworks.com