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Exodus Files For Chapter 11 Protection
rit writes: "Albeit a bit expected, it is shocking to find that Exodus Communications has gone ahead and filed for bankruptcy. Exodus is one of the largest hosting facilities, and their major competitor, Above.net (owned by MetroMedia Fiber) is in pretty much the same boat ... circling the metaphorical drain of the dot-com world." Note that filing for protection from creditors while reorganizing is not the same as hanging up a big "closed" sign -- Exodus is still operating, and hopefully will be able to keep the LEDs turned on for a good long while (since Slashdot is hosted there).
I've been inside an Exodus facility. If they'd spent a little less on decor and "Gee Whiz" security features, they might be in a little less trouble. Must admit though, the plasma LED and the palm scanner for access were quite cool! :)
Bill
I'll bet HSBC are pretty p*ssed - they're owed about $2 billion.
Dictionary.com defines:Exodus
exodus
n.
1. A departure of a large number of people.
Vendor 1: "You had *how many* hits during the World Trade Center Crisis? Jesus Christ! I don't think we served that much data in 1998 and 99 put together!"
Vendor 2: "We can host your website, but we'll need to add some servers... and some bandwidth capabilities... and some reinforced steel floors to keep those servers from damaging the foundation when they crash and...:"
Taco: "How Much?"
Vendor 2: "One Million Dollars! Err... One Hundred Billion Dollars!"
Vendor 3: (Runs away crying)
Vendor 4: Of course I can host your website Mr. Malda. All you need to do is sign here on the dotted line... in blood please. Your harem of Natalie Portman clones and your Beowulf Cluster of Slashdot Cruisers will also be arriving shortly. Thank you for doing business with us. I assure you that your soul will be in *very* good hands.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
My company is also hosted at Exodus. I must say that as far as service goes, they have been TOP NOTCH. Really helpful.
Engineer on duty helping troubleshoot interface errors at 3am. That stuff counts...
Also, at our IDC, the conference rooms are named after James Bond movies! Cool!
Their IDC's are impressive facilities and I sincerely hope that they stay around...
Our sales rep was a casualty of this chapter 11 filing... Too bad, he is a nice guy.
RateVegas.com - Vegas Reviews
1 year ago, we started a new web application. We already had a cage at Exodus, but we need more room. It was almost impossible to get a 8 rack cage at that time. We managed to finally get one, and we set up our equipment. Since that time, I haven't been back there for about 8 months. Just went back there the other day and was suprised to see empty cages galore.
how many of us are going to be crying ourselves to sleep at night if the commercialization of the internet ends and it's back to the way it used to be in the good old days?
I hate to see Exodus go out of business as much as anyone else, but to make an omlette...
-J5K
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
They have a commitment for as much as $200 million financing from GE Capital, "which will be used to fund operating expenses and supplier and employee obligations". They won't be under for long. This really is just a reorganization.
1Alpha7
Live to be Moderated
... in that they sorta borrow money long-term (equity) and lend it short-term (purchasing depreciating hardware). Now this is OK if people are idiots enough to pay obscene amounts (dot.con) like clueless venture capitalists but if you get the situation where all your customers disappear (dot-bomb), you are left with a nice little term called negative cash-flow.
... buy monopolies like underwater sea cables.
Seriously, unless the costs hit marginal pricing level, you have to be very very good to make money in the deflatory environment that Moore laws produces (as can be seen by the dire straits of many PC box-pushers).
Conclusion
LL
Picked up from an article on zdnet.
...
The Exodus data centre in California, one of 43 worldwide, sits utterly undistinguished amid the sprawl fanning out from Los Angeles International Airport. The company's name doesn't even appear on the building, but the unassuming facade, which is wrapped in bulletproof Kevlar, belies its extremely high security, almost to the point of paranoia.
Inside, a biometric hand scanner, another layer of bulletproof glass, two Pinkerton security guards, and a 500-pound door block access to 66,000 climate-controlled square feet of Internet servers, the online backbones of Exodus clients like Best Buy, eBay, KPMG Consulting, British Airways, Virgin, Merrill Lynch, Yahoo, and some 4,500 other customers. It's estimated that as many as one-third of all Internet clicks pass through Exodus servers. In a real sense what's behind that 500-pound door is, well, the Internet.
....
One third of all clicks.. whew..!
Rapid Nirvana
I'm about to start running a (very high volume) site. Who would you choose to host right now?
AboveNet?
Verio?
I work in the Managed Security Services department of Exodus (disclaimer: these opinions are my own, not Exodus's)...
I can say that fiscal policy was pretty lax for a while, and I'm afraid it still might be. The purchase of GlobalCenter was also probably the biggest nail in our coffin - it weighed us down with a lot of debt and didn't really accomplish anything. Sure GC was our biggest competitor, but they would've gone under without our help after the dot-com crash.
I hope to keep my job, at least for a while longer. The people are nice, the company pays for school, my boss is good on letting me schedule myself as I please...It's been a fun ride. I'm just surprised at the swiftness of the demise. I feel bad that I've kept my job, when several of my friends have been laid off all around me (I was unfortunate enough to witness several of the layoffs personally.)
Either way, I've got other job oppurtunities lined up, so I'm not too scared. However, anyone who sees a resume for someone with Exodus experience, please consider them - they'll be worth the money.
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
Just in case.
Since you happen to be right down the road.
(Local headquarters in Woburn, I think.)
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
It seems to me that dumping an unprofitable bandwidth hogging organization such as Slashdot would be an ideal restructuring move in the eyes of Exodus' execs. That would be a real bummer, Slashdot is such a vivid part of the Innurnet culture.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
With PSINet tanking bad, Exodus on the Rocks and Above.net far behind (Not to mention Rhythms, Northpoint, etc..) , we have to start asking ourselves: "Do we have a vital national security interest in seeing these networks survive?" I think we do.
Sure you can scream "Corporate Welfare" all day, but when the rubber hits the road (or whatever cliche' you like to use) we have got to insure the stability of these networks, notwithstanding the costs involved.
Question:
Does anyone know how close these troubled companies are to shutting down?
How do we do an effective cost-benefit analysis on bailing out these networks? (Which ones to help, etc..)
Who gets left holding the bag on these debts if the federal gov't decide to force them to keep operating and their vendors to keep supplying them?
Yes, it's a blog. Sorry if that offends you.
Not the end of the world for Exodus I mean. Obviously it isn't the end of the world for everyone else.
IIRC Exodus have fourty something hosting facilities, presumably mostly empty right now, but they do have a lot of work and an excellent reputation. They'll be fine, they just need to downscale by a factor of, like, five. This, and the refinancing by GE, are just a part of that process.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
Exodus is still operating, and hopefully will be able to keep the LEDs turned on for a good long while (since Slashdot is hosted there)
So since slashdot is there they should be able to keep the lights on for a long time?
Ah the wonders of English.
On the serious side, can anyone tell me how these places manage to lose so much money? Is it the labor, site or networking costs? It seems like web hosting should be an industry that, once you climb to the scale of Exodus, is really really profitable.
"...is not the same as hanging up a big "closed" sign -- Exodus is still operating, ...for a good long while (since Slashdot is hosted there)."
/. is going to post in the hopes of being the Last Post.
Oh great, I see it coming. Very soon, everyone at
For once we finaly have an opportunity to out-post those First-Posters clones.
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
I used to do some work for clients who had their systems at exodus and I found that it all seemed a little over the top. I've never understood why a datacenter needs 12 confrence rooms (or any for that matter... it's an OutSourced Datacenter, not a Marriot), bullet proof glass in the lobby, redundancy beyond reason - generators with enough fuel and power to run for 120 days at FULL load???? If the power is down for 6 months, chances are there's more important things to deal with than your website.
Also, when I was shopping around for my own hoster, Exodus (while _extremely_ nice) didn't even bother trying to price within a budget. It was if they had been so used to getting blind VC money, that they didn't even understand the phrase, "I can't afford that." I don't know, just my opinion....
CRN reports on CEO William Krause's (CEO for a month) conference call. "The action we took yesterday has given us the protection we need to restructure our debts and proceed on much more stable footing than before, and if you felt secure doing business with Exodus six months ago, you should feel even more secure today."
I have worked for several companies that host at Exodus, and I have never need such disregard for fiduciary responsibility in my life. Most of the Exodus centers in and about the Santa Clara area, and there are many, many of which I have visited all tell the same story.
This story was capacity that was build on expectation values attained from an unrealistic market. The bigger companies knew this, but the feeding frenzy was not abated even in light of its fiscal mindlessness.
Why not wait to expand until you are bursting at the seams, having problems accepting new customers? Most people at Exodus cheap out anyway, I know a few personally that only buy non burstable 1mbit. Yet they built an infrastructure such that every cage could get an OC3 worth of bandwidth.
I was in awe when my company got us a 6509, a 7206 and a 7507. We got this stuff used and it cost us a mint. I cant believe what Exodus did, the bought miles of $200,000 routers, switches and other things, miles of giant Liebert batteries, huge air conditioners, diesel power generators, hired the most moronic and incapable security guards on the planet, and bought these hand scanners that never - ever - seem to work right.
At Digital Island, much is the same. The lease on all the equipment must be in the millions per month. The sad thing is that most of the carrier technology will probably change before the lease is up on a lot of the stuff.
My suggestion to businesses: Never expect anything - Only expand to meet demand. If you are constantly "full," you can charge a premium rather than build a football field worth or colocation space for 10 customers.
I have seen a few co location centers pop up recently; they are more intelligent in design. They don't wire in bandwidth until its needed, they don't buy equipment until its needed (and the BUY it), they have a building which is neat, like Exodus, but isn't extravagant, I mean, they make all the Exodus co-locations look like clean rooms at NASA or Intel.
Co-location recipe: 1) Cheap warehouse in area close to a few OC-12 central offices. Make place look like Costco with lower roof. Add a few miles of Chatsworth ladder track. Buy routers per every some number of people that reaches three quarters capacity, avoid fiber to the cage until customers actually need it. Hire good people. Don't over invest in lame hand scanners that do work. (If every cage is locked, what would a person do in there anyway? Pull power cords from the mesh? And do this without getting caught?). Peer with a few carriers and scale up when needed. Most bandwidth is idle most of the time, bragging about OC-48 interconnects isn't cool, its useless.
My current place of Employment was trying to get on Exodus's price list with our technology. The concept was to pay Exodus $50,000, the "verify" our product, then they will resell it.
We laughed and moved on, knowing full well they were trying to squeeze for revenue - and we didn't need the endorsement of a dying behemoth.
With Chapter 11, maybe Exodus will need to get smart. It has to now shift from building big, inefficient farms to having to farm the land you have properly to produce revenue.
I wish Exodus the best of luck, and stop thinking you are AT&T or some such. Exodus is an overpriced co-location center with unresponsive technical support and too many dead weight employees.
(One of the employees was shocked to find out we didn't have Visio 2000 installed, and he could not give the diagrams to me in JPG or PNG or PDF or some other useful format. I kept getting VSD files. I asked for a network diagram in xfig or something that we can use, and still, a blank stare)
Interesting.
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
No wonder they're bankrupt! All that fancy hardware, really just for PR.
sulli
RTFJ.
well.. sungard is this really large, old company with an insane amount of cash and no debt.
they LOVE recurring revenue streams.
specialty is data recovery and data warehousing... they could take over exodus's customers without skipping a beat...
... hi bingo
And lo, Moses said, "Let my people go."
that if Exodus starts selling some of their real estate, my living-in-a-colo dream will come true! Screw that living in a wired warehouse crap. I want my building to be ON the backbone and protected from the strongest earthquakes and bomb attacks, et al. Yeah! I'll be l33t!
:) Ohhh the raised floors were smooooth and the room was so biiiig. *sigh*
I swear, every time I went there and saw all the space that they were preparing during their expansions - I just wanted to grab a skateboard or some blades and just ride around. Either that or an office chair
FYI
Sungard doesn't really do collocation. They do disaster recovery services... they are not even close....
You pay sungard a monthly fee, kind of insurance, if you datacenter burns to the ground, or otherwise, you declair a disaster, and go there and rebuild. They supply space, servers, everything you need to rebuild your business, including desks/desktop computers if you want to pay for it...
I talk from experence, I worked for a company that used sungard, and about 6 months ago we went to thier AZ facility to run a Disaster Recovery test.... We ran everything on very large NT servers, and they had to do some specail stuff for us, because they've never had to provide NT servers so big... they mainly do mainframes and large unix boxes....
-Tripp
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
"I know of a few co-location providers that have disappeared over the past couple years and wanted to know what steps people were taking to make sure that their data is up and running..."
Well we started by having dual Co-Location presences with two major world-class providers, Exodus and AboveNet... Doh!
Forgive the anonymous bit, you'll understand why in a moment.
We've hosted with Exodus for over two years. We're on the same contract we started with and have been using five times our bandwidth for half that time. We're still billed for our original amount! We should be paying tens of thousands of dollars more per month.
Seeing some of the other posts here that are similiar, it's no surprise they are in trouble. They expanded too quickly but I think they should do okay in Chapter 11.
Aside from the billing issue (which was fine with us) we have had awesome experiences with them.
(DISCLAIMER: I own stock in EXDS)
Note: I am posting this AC because quite a few Exodus employees know my /. account name.
Exodus is screwed. They have been losing customers at an alarming rate for a variety of reasons, including:
- The dotcom collapse. Exodus spent a fortune on these customers, many of whom never paid them a cent.
- Customers that left due to dissatisfaction. This includes even Hotmail, who left Exodus because, well, they suck.
- Incompetence. While Exodus had some incredible employees, they also had a LOT of terrible ones, a huge factor in the horrible network problems that Exodus customers have.
-The GlobalCenter buyout. Exodus bought GlobalCenter from Global Crossing. After the merger Exodus pissed of numerous customers with their poor service, resulting in the loss of such big name clients as Verisign and Google.
I have had some good talks with some important people at Exodus, and that company is SCREWED. Most of their datacenters are at least half empty, and many of the ones they built in 2000-2001 never had a single customer. If anyone is thinking about buying Exodus stock at low, low prices, DON'T.
If your website is important to your business, and is hosted somewhere, then by definition, the financial stability of that 'somewhere' is something you have to pay attention to.
Just as with manufacturing, where not only do you source your parts, but you find a second-source for them as well, and also verify that THOSE sources are not using the same supplier... etc, etc. You find two sources that are as independent as possible, even going out to making sure the raw materials are coming from different parts of the world. Why? So a disaster somewhere along the line doesn't stop your business.
Running a website is no different. You need to be able to move to a new location, or even have a second location set up already, in case of a problem.
They lose money because they spent huge amounts of money to "build capacity" during the dot-com boom. That included buying up other hosting providers. Now many of their customers are gone, they have enormous excess capacity, and they can't service their debt load.
The fact that while money was easy, they wasted it horribly also doesn't help. The businesses that succeed are the ones that plan for the downturn, even as they are building capacity, rather than spending as if there's no tomorrow.
During the dot-com boom, the conventional wisdom (which, as is often the case, was actually foolishness) was that you had to spend big to gain market share to survive the coming shakeout. That's a little different from planning for a downturn: it's planning to be the biggest when the downturn comes.
It's like a game of chicken, where companies compete on how ludicrously they can overspend. In this environment, it's easy to lose sight of why you're spending the money, and get carried away. Strategic thinking is replaced by keeping-up-with-the-Amazons.
How else could the Aeron chair fad be explained??? :)
You make it sound like Slashdotters are a bunch of parasites that just suck up bandwidth and disk space while never clicking through any ads because we've junkbuster'ed them.
Oh, wait...
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
My company has used Verio (formerly Digital Nation) for over two years. Service as been top notch and they have more bandwidth than we'd ever need. At out peak, we were pumping out a continous 62 megabits/second and our ping times never grew a millisecond. Their prices are lower than most of their competition and they're fast acting (every departman that is aside from billing -- billing will try to screw you by continuing to bill you for some service you changed or deleted months ago... so watch your statements).
Verio rocks.
You realize you've just given either Neal Stephenson or William Gibson the framework for their next novel.
I can see it now, Hiro Protagonist will move from his U-Stor-It to the nearest Exodus IDC...
Rob? Better look for a new provider! Exodus has been a spamhaven for some time. Here's the scoop: Spamhaus.org ROSKO entry, with full list of spammers and their spam, replies, etc.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
We use SUNGUARD services for mainframe data storage. God help us if we ever actually need that data in an emergency :(
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
and CHILLY this time of year but their business seems to be on solid footing (pun intended)
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I think we do business with that guy. He's always flaming us...
Best Slashdot Co
The kevlar fronting and bulletproof glass is for when their investors come-a-calling.
I'm a former GlobalCenter employee. Fortunatley I left the company before Exodus bought them off Global Crossing. I had worked for Global Center for about 2 years previously. I watched the data center I worked in grow from one suite to half the building it was in, to the entire building it was in, to adding 180,000 sq. feet down the street.
.com out that has gone bust is just as guilty as EXDS. We had foozball and pool tables, video games, and catered lunches. Just like every other .com out there. It was just the way that things were done.
Every time the company grew it was because the current space was either full or spoken for. In fact, while we were waiting for the 180,000 sq. feet to open we crammed cages in our existing building in places where we never would have before...next to AC units, around fire supression tanks, and even moved the NOC into the office to sell the space in the NOC.
After we opened the 180,000 sq. feet the building began to fill up amid the rumors of an EXDS sale. Yet still everything seemed ok.
The "buy, buy, buy" mentality really was justified. We had sold roughly 1/4 of the new 180,000 sq. feet 6 months before building completion. A building that large requires a _lot_ of network gear. A building that large requires a _lot_ of backup generator power. Many customers (especially financial type companies, of which GCTR hosted many) are very interested in bio-metric hand scanners, kevlar, etc.
For quite a while there it seemed like we couldn't spend the money fast enough. But I don't think that's a problem suffered by the hosters alone. Every
EXDS wasn't doomed by mismanagement, overspending, or anything else that people keep talking about. The problem is that a huge number of their customers went out of buisness themselves, and a majority of those couldn't pay their bills when they left. They expanded when they should have, but now they need to shrink.
To stay alive EXDS should close a bunch of their empty data centers, sell off the extra gear, and use the money they make off that to keep operating. They do (or at least did) have a fairly decent number of large "name brand" customers who haven't gone out of buisness. That should help pay the bills for a while.
In my attractive one-bedroom flat.
I have a DSL link!!
x2 inbound bandwidth! Great for those sites that, er, you know, have lots of uploads and comments and stuff!
...Like Slashdot. CmdrTaco, bring me the servers. I'll set up IP_MASQ and we'll be up and running in no time. We'll show those bastards how to do hosting!
- undoware.ca
Check out savvis. Top notch service and a faster network than exodous.
If they stay in business I have no doubts that they'll soon be one of the largest players around.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
That address forwards to my other addresses.
If I start getting too much spam on that address, I will just point it at uce@ftc.gov and go get another one.
So, I don't really give a rats ass if the spammers get that address.
Bet you didn't think of that, you retard.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Cool companies like Exodus staying in biz and providing competition and customer service == goooooooooooood.
h ere , featuring high prices, low security, and low service == BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD.
Cool companies like Exodus dying, getting bought out, and consolidated into the Benevolent People's Dictatorship of AOL/TimeWarner/Corpnamehere/Corpnamehere/Corpname
Let's recap. Goooooooooooooooooooooooood > BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD. I think we understand these concepts now, hmmm?
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
Why the hell didn't VALinux take a shot of that and put it up somewhere? It was the best add for VALinux hardware I had ever seen. How many boxen is in that cage? 16 1Us? How many run slashdot? It was impressive to see in action. It was even more fun to surf slashdot during lulls--since I was 4 cages down working for the ill-fated Voter.com.
I hope you guys have pictures to remember it by. But then, you might be sick of the cage (I got sick of mine pretty quick). They don't call 'em cages for nothing.
"Doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs." -- Switchfoot, Ode to Chin
S4R does hosting, colo, services, and has rack space in SBC's Irvine IDC. Inflow is also good (and in SoCal, if you need that), but I get a very Exodus-like feeling from them... more sizzle than steak, like they've bought too many Aeron chairs.
Whatever happens, if you have a server in an Exodus rack, you should probably make plans.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
'course, what they fail to mention is that the hosting facility has floor to ceiling *normal* double paned windows *in the colo*.
<P>
At least, that's the way it is in Santa Clara... All that physical security is a joke, it's just to make the executives of client companies feel better.
<P>
They waste money in other interesting ways too, like with LCD windows that become transparent at the push of a button to reveal.... the colo....
<P>
That said, I hope they don't go bust, that would be a big, big problem.
-- I don't have a cool sig.
You made me think what kind of people would live in Gates' house instead of him. Suppose he dies or can't afford it. Who would buy it? What for? Imagine it full of squatters.
And by the way, would they find a sled named "Rosebud"?
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu