Back in 2007, while studying VOIP technology when Dialectic Networks was still primarily an IT support company, Lee Hansen, CEO and Founder, had the opportunity to visit a large state-of-the-art data center in downtown Tampa. Upon entering the facility his tour guide strolled up and Lee had to stifle a laugh because he looked just like the mad scientist from the movie Independence Day. He visited room after room filled with rack after rack of some of the world’s top technology. After a while he just couldn't imagine how any company could afford to deploy such a brilliant, almost mind boggling amount of technology, with multiple layers of redundancy at every possible failure point. Lee had to admit that his face hurt from smiling by the end of the tour. Finally after an hour or so of viewing some of the most amazing technology he had ever seen he reached the end of the tour and the question session. It was at this point that Lee asked "if a bomb, big enough to take out your 4 foot thick walls, totally destroyed this place, how much would it cost to completely rebuild it?" to which his friendly data center geek replied "about 7 billion dollars". Then he asked "with your current client base, how long would it take to recapture your losses?" And the mad scientist said after some thought "about 10 months". Ten months? Ten months to see revenue of 7 billion dollars? How could this be? That would mean that the data center industry was quietly making more per square foot per month than any other legal business in the world today. It was this one event that changed Lee’s whole life and led him to the knowledge that a data center can produce massive revenues that most of us cannot even comprehend.

Lee went home after the tour and called his business partner and friend George Emigh. After recounting the whole dazzling experience he asked him "why don't we build a data center, I mean we have supported hardware in them for years, what would stop us from learning all that we need to know and finding some investors to join in on our quest?" George said that he'd love to and so began their 2 year long study session. The next day on another call with George, while talking about who of the biggest data center players had the best data center centric technology, they both realized that IBM was the absolute master of this industry and started to laugh. About 3 months prior to this discussion they had received approval for an IBM System x resellers agreement The IBM System x lineup is the "cats meow" of x86 server technology and the best possible hardware to build a data center around. After a few calls with IBM this dream was really taking off. As it turned out IBM had several divisions of staff dedicated to the construction, design and engineering of data centers.

Skipping now past months of research, Sun Microsystems released information on a data center in a shipping container that they were commercially offering. It was a 20' shipping container that could do some pretty amazing things. Like reduce the overall cooling power related electricity by 40%, had much greater density and could be deployed anywhere in a matter of weeks. Compared with the "brick and mortar" data center this was a paradigm shift in data center thinking. Several more calls with IBM culminated in the realization that IBM was also developing a PMDC or Portable Modular Data Center, seemingly a much more advanced version of Sun's containerized data center. The IBM version came in many different sizes and configurations but what made their version stand out was the fact that they could do a rear door heat exchanger configuration and used iDataPlex (a new highly efficient, vastly more powerful parallel computing system). The combination of iDataPlex with IBM's new PMDC seemed that IBM had yet again completely dominated the competition with a ‘box’ designed totally out of the box! The PMDC uses 40% less electricity overall, is 50% cheaper to build than "Brick and Mortar" data centers, has a greater density of servers per square foot than the standard data center, is highly mobile, and deploys in 12-14 weeks anywhere anytime which makes it one of the absolute best designs for cloud based data center solutions.

Over all these months of study a new concept in the data center offering was taking shape. Enter "Cloud Computing". Cloud Computing is a fairly new concept that grew out of the need for Highly Available systems. Imagine, you own a company and this company makes thousands of dollars a day on the web. It is from your company's website that over 90% of your revenue is generated. One major issue is that you are "self hosting" (meaning that your web server is sitting in your office) maybe you built a room for it, maybe you even have a generator, line conditioners and an array of batteries to support it while the generator spins up. Maybe you have the best IT people in your town but it will not stop every possible disaster that you will face. How much is a week of downtime worth? Couple that with the ever rising costs of supporting your own technology and the value of a commercial data center starts to come into focus. Even without a failure the cost of self hosting a highly available server configuration is about $300,000 in the first year and that isn't considering the infrastructure costs. To rent the same solution in a data center is about $70,000 (with massively redundant infrastructure). These numbers are based upon the old data center concept of renting a group of dedicated servers (5) and migrating your software to them. These systems would be setup so that any single point of failure would not effect the overall operations of the software and systems. This is the beginning of the "Cloud". Multiple computers hosting "virtualized" servers have many advantages over the standard dedicated server model.

As an example of the value of virtualized computing, how much of your home computer or laptop is being utilized at any given moment? Are you compiling software, pushing the CPU to 100% usage 99% of your day? Is the memory full and the hard drive being accessed continually? No? Most computers today run at 99% Idle, which is to say that they use quite a lot of electricity doing basically nothing. Multiply this energy waste by thousands of servers like those found in data centers and one begins to understand the problem. Virtualizing these systems offers the benefit of stacking multiple server demand into a single inherently under-utilized server. So before you would need multiple physical servers to support your Web server, Mail server, File server, Print server, Domain Controller, etc. Now you can run multiple operating systems on one physical server and maximize its available resources all the while minimizing its idle time which saves massive amounts in electricity and helps consolidate your hardware requirements. But how do you guarantee uptime? Like chocolate and peanut butter, virtualization and cluster computing are two great tastes that taste great together. It is the combination of virtualization and cluster computing that truly defines what a "cloud" is.

Cluster computing is the latest evolution of parallel computing, a concept that grew out of the generic super computing market. Historically when one wanted to process large quantities of data or calculate super complex formulas, one would have to purchase a "main frame" or "super computer" like a Cray or IBM System z. These systems were non-generic and extremely expensive. Then some brilliant geek got the idea that they could produce similar results without all the expense by linking multiple-generic x86 based hardware together across the network. Software had to be created to process requests across multiple servers but once this was done the generic clusters completely dominated the super computing market place. It was much cheaper and vastly superior to have thousands of generic nodes (servers) linked together across super fast Ethernet or fiber connections than it was to build a custom super computer to serve the same purpose. Ultimately the parallel computing environment led to a massive advancement in server redundancy. Nodes fail; hard drives die, memory corrupts, stuff happens! How do we guarantee uptime, keep prices low, save electricity and speed our needed calculations? Cluster computing, virtualization, Cloud Computing, massive redundancy, generic "off the shelf" hardware and extremely energy efficient room designs, all working together being utilized by software designed to migrate data and processing away from failed nodes, keeping multiple images of data on arrays of storage and servers. So a "Cloud" is a cluster of generic servers, linked across a network, with software that virtualizes the server concept (turning many systems into one) with redundancy designed into the software. There are different types of clouds--private, hybrid and public. Suffice it to say private is "self hosted", public is in a data center and hybrid is a combination of the two.

In his own words, Lee says: "I digress. Basically as George and I studied these bleeding edge technologies we began to realize that the Cloud was going to revolutionize the data center industry and completely transform our current technologies. We both are convinced that there will be no more singular non-clustered systems in the next 10 years and that room based "brick and mortar" data centers are going to fall by the way-side because of this and because of the massive highly mobile, vastly superior "Data Center in a Shipping Container" or IBM PMDC."

"For years now I have wanted to participate in an emerging market within my industry. It seemed almost out of my comprehension to actually step out into the bleeding edge of an industry driven by some of the worlds most talented, most intensely brilliant humans. Yet here we are, owners of a Dialectic Networks LLC, a company that not only offers cloud services but also sells IBM PMDC's and has several active projects to build public clouds in North America."

"Today we are a total IT solutions provider, meaning that we can assist any company large or small in any "information technology" related project. Obviously we specialize in highly available systems and we have extensive knowledge in Open Source technologies. Dialectic Networks represents the latest paradigm in IT support, and combined with IBM we have the latest and greatest technologies that can transform your business, ease your mind and set your company free to do its business while we do ours. We do IT and we do IT better than anyone else."