Wednesday, June 04, 2008

BastionHost Debuts Dataville

I ran across an interesting company tonight - and upon further reading on their site discovered that they offer what I have envisioned ever since I read about containers. I work in the colo industry and although the vision is a bit cloudy (pun intended), I think there is a colo play for containers.

Check out Bastionhost - a Canadian company that offers Dataville - a "secure closed system campus of data centers, ideally situated on the Great Circle route between New York City and London." They offer a number of services, have a pretty experienced management team and advisors, and claim to offer protection from "the prying eyes of big brother, while meeting the stringent standards of the European Union." On top of that - their web site has a cool spinning globe (lower right corner) -- yes I was into the animated GIFs in the late 90's. :)

The most interesting part (to me) was what they call Hot Parking. It looks as though they offer the Sun and Rackable container systems, and then give you the sheltered, conditioned environment in which to run it. These "mini modules" can be returned to BastionHost to be serviced, upgraded, or provisioned elsewhere in the world where it may be needed. I think this is an extremely cool idea --- it might take a bit to catch on, but knowing what I do of the containers, knowing the efficiencies and setup speed they offer, I think there is some huge potential for customers and colo's alike.

The company is based in Halifax, Canada; which I admit, I had to look up in Google Maps. If I had Google Maps and Google Earth when I took 8th grade geography I know I wouldn't have been as bad at it as I am now.

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