Today Rainer Enders published a rebuttal op-ed in support of VPNs. Mr. Enders argues, in part, that one of the biggest issues facing companies was hackers in general and specifically the protection of all corporate data, both on the systems where it is stored and when it is in transit. As more and more employees work not only from home but from WiFi hotspots in coffee shops, fast food restaurants and hotel rooms around the world, encrypting sensitive information end-to-end has ever-increasing importance.

Mr. Enders Op-ed is much more in touch with the way businesses need to operate in today’s networked world. Yes, there are corporate features and functions that can be pushed off physical corporate computers and onto the hardware at hosting companies. This does not mean that all information can or should be placed in fully public cloud environments and it certainly doesn’t mean that your information in “the cloud” is safe just because you can account for all your employees laptops and smart phones.

Corporations do not need to make either/or choices. Less sensitive, collaborative projects might be best hosted at massive cloud providers while the most sensitive information needs to be more carefully protected on private servers only accessible via the local corporate network and remote access VPNs.

At least once a week I work off-site. While I don’t need a VPN to reach my email, I do use a VPN to get access to in-house documents and systems. I use VPN Tracker from equinux on my Mac. It is simple and easy for both me (as an end user) and our IT staff that has to support us normal users.

Because we use them ourselves and understand the benefits, we made sure our new vmForge VDC product line supported both site-to-site VPNs for remote offices *and* desktop (end user) VPNs for remote workers. vmForge VDCs configured with Fortigate firewalls will support end-user VPNs and ipHouse can set them up and manage them for you.

What we haven’t talked about too much is what vmForge VDCs look like from the sales side.

In the past, we have sold servers and worked with customers to determine exactly what the specs should be for each of their servers. We were only focused on a single server here and a single server there and each server and each need was viewed individually.

• If a customer needed a mail server, well, we’d help them configure and then sell them a mail server.
• If a customer needed a webserver, we would sell them a webserver.
• If a customer then needed a database server, we would get into a discussion about whether they could save some cash and put the database functionality on the webserver or whether they should go with a more technically robust design and put the database on yet another new server.

Each new need spawned a new discussion about the tradeoffs of squeezing new functionality onto an existing server or deploying a brand new server with all the associated time and the costs of the physical hardware that entailed. The tradeoff discussion got especially fun when the new functionality need was in a development area. Many a production site has been compromised by new development code that wasn’t carefully vetted.

Our sales team has gone through a paradigm shift in order to sell the new vmForge VDC product.

The vmForge VDC is a collection of resources, basically raw server materials from which many new servers can be forged. Instead of having an in-depth talk with customers about specific servers, how they are used and what they need for RAM and storage, we now expand the conversation to be about their business and how their server layout and design can better serve their organization. It is a broader, more encompassing way of viewing how server technology can move an organization forward. Instead of 3-4 different discussions we now have a single, more engaging conversation. Changes in requirements don’t necessitate a complete change in hardware – the datacenter is virtual and can be resized easily.

vmForge VDC customers don’t have to view their hosting costs server by server (though they still will). They can now put together a global plan for how their organization can best leverage raw server materials for their immediate and long-term needs. If the best way to set up the web platform to scale for future growth is with separate front end servers and backend database & file servers, then we can do that from the start with either no additional monthly fees or minimal ones for OS licensing. Developers can finally have true development servers that are clones of production servers (and are on the same hardware) so new features and code can be easily tested faster, more economically and more throughly prior to deployment into production.

Unlike with physical hardware, there is no need to purchase or lease servers based on guesswork estimates of what you will require over the next three years. The vmForge VDCs let customers buy what they need today then add to their resource pools of RAM, CPU, storage and bandwidth as their needs grow and change. Since all the resources are part of the same pool, organizations can make more efficient use of them. Instead of purchasing the maximum resources needed for each server at peak utilization, customers purchase the resources based on the aggregate needs of all their servers at peak utilization. This makes economies of scale available to even our smallest vmForge VDC customer.

From the sales side, there is nothing more exciting than selling a solid, cutting-edge product that gives customers new advantages in the marketplace and helps them succeed. The vmForge VDC is a technological game changer for organizations of every size.

And that is why I love it.

Background

Front-end Server Details

Back-end Storage Details

Outage Overview

Steps we have taken to Prevent Future Incidents

At some of these events we have held a drawing for a free Amazon Kindle. Personally, I have a Kindle and I love it.  Do you folks feel the same way? Do you want a chance to win a free Kindle? Should we be giving something else away? Please send us your opinions and ideas.

Our next event is the 55th Annual Minnesota CPA Tax Conference on November 16th and 17th at the Minneapolis Convention Center.  This is a well-organized and educational event put on by the Minnesota Society of Certified Public Accountants. We look forward to seeing you there.

If you are a small business with just a couple people, you can use addresses like sales@mydomain.com, support@mydomain.com and billing@mydomain.com and have all the email delivered to the same one or two mailboxes.

The use of aliases gives your business a more professional look while at the same time making it easier for your customers to remember how to get in touch with you.

Within your mail client, you can setup rules that sort or mark mail differently, depending on the alias it was sent to. If all your billing mail, for example, is in the same folder, it makes it easier for you to read through all of it before you post invoices.

If you are an individual user, aliases can help you track who is selling off your email address. Just setup a couple aliases that you can use when responding to different offers. Then watch to see which of your mail addresses are receiving any unwanted email.

Setting up your aliases is easy. Just go to our customer account management system ipMom and click on Aliases.

Hardware configurations, including manufacturer choices, operating systems versions and configurations, firewall rules and ongoing maintenance of all the above heavily impact the performance and reliability of your systems.

Regardless of whether you have computers in your broom closet, colocated at your ISP or deployed in the cloud, your company needs a good system administrator looking out for your network and machines. Good system administrators know the pros, cons and quirks of different hardware, operating systems and network configurations. They know about possible vulnerabilities first because they are on private security lists you don’t even know exist. They’ve got your back. George Reese of enStratus, expanded on this in a recent post that compares programmers and sys admins.

One of the big differences between an ipHouse virtual machine (which is essentially deployed in a local cloud) and deploying a server with one of the national cloud providers, is the sys admin expertise that comes with your ipHouse machine. We work with you to make sure the system configuration is optimized for your business applications. We can also administer the machine for you, keeping it securely patched and up-to-date.

Because ARPANET was developed at universities and funded by the government instead of private industry, the underlying functionality, processes and standards were developed and discussed openly. When Steve Crocker published RFC 1, his first summary of of procedural rules for the Network Working Group, it was truly a request for comments. This open discussion of standards for creating and managing the infant network was unique and greatly shaped the development of the Internet. The rules for how the network operated, and to a large extent how the Internet operates today, are based on a process Steve Crocker refers to as “rough consensus and running code.”

The Internet was able to become the global network we know and love today in part because anyone could freely access the protocols, follow the published standards or RFC’s and join the network. This openness is still a critical component of how we at ipHouse run our network. We are Internet old-timers.  Many of us have been on the ‘net and working in this Industry since the early ’90s. Being honest with our customers is one of our core business values. One that we believe enhances the power of the Internet to bring people together.

Because it isn’t cheap to bring broadband service to rural areas, knowing which areas are most in need is necessary to determine where to best spend limited resources. The Minnesota Commerce Department is working with Connect Minnesota to map Internet connection speeds throughout the state and is promoting the Connect Minnesota Speed Test as a way for consumers to check on the truthfulness of their ISPs. While this is a great goal, there are significant technical problems with the Connect Minnesota Speed Test.

The first problem is the coding and assumptions present in all Ookla speed tests. Because the speed tests assume you are on a DSL or cable connection, they automatically assume a huge asymmetry in upload and download speeds. Therefore, they give false results for any type of connection other than DSL and cable connections. Don’t use this to test the connectivity for your servers colocated at an ISP or your office T1 or Metro Ethernet connection. Our engineers have pulled down 230Mbps to their workstations here at the office and Ookla speed tests are unable to calculate that type of speed.

The second problem is that the Connect Minnesota Speed Test site itself is clearly limited by a 10Mbps connection. No Internet connection ever performs at 100% and there is always going to be some routing and other overhead wrapped around the actual data itself. This type of speed test will always underestimate the actual speed of any given connection. This is an old speed test issue. Internet routing hasn’t changed and all the caveats Peter John Harrison wrote about in his 1999 SpeedTest still apply.

Finally, and here is my major problem with the Connect Minnesota Speed Test, it is coming from a provider and machines in Texas! This means that it isn’t really testing the speed of your Minnesota Internet connectivity (even with all the above provisos) it is testing the speed of your connectivity to some provider in Texas. There is a lot of network between here and Texas. The packets for the speed test are traversing different networks and providers on their way to and from the server in Texas. They may be affected by various routing issues on networks that have nothing to do with your ISP and that your ISP has no control over.

If the Minnesota Commerce Department wants a more accurate picture of broadband connectivity within Minnesota, they need to locate the speed test on a well-connected server within Minnesota.

Of course, anyone who really wants an idea of the speed of their connection should not just be using an Ookla speed test. Basic FTP gives you a much better test to determine how fast you can pull down a file from a remote site. In fact, ipHouse has files on our servers specifically for customer speed tests. More accurate tools exist for calculating bandwidth but they aren’t easy for the average consumer to use. They almost always require command line access on two machines on each side of the connection you are testing. If you are an ipHouse customer and want to know the speed of your connection, just contact our support team and we will let you know the test options available for your connection and how to see bandwidth usage throughout our network.

Technology can be the secret weapon that allows your existing employees to provide a high-quality customer service experience. It is far more cost effective to keep existing customers than to find new ones. From the customer standpoint, it is easier to work with a company you know and trust, than to go through the process of finding a new vender. Your well-organized web site and online database servers can help customers find the information they need and can even lead to new incremental purchases.

Technology can also be leveraged to reduce basic business expenses. By implementing plans that enable employees to work from home, employers can help the environment, lower office costs and reduce employees’ travel expenses. Solid Internet access combined with secure access to internal company servers can keep your employees productive at home.

If your servers are showing their age but a big project and capital investment doesn’t make sense in this climate, managed and dedicated servers are a great option. 

ipHouse has years of experience managing servers and, although we don’t provide internal network support, we can work with you to explore different options for your employees to work from home. Companies who colocate servers as part of a corporate, work-from-home solution can qualify for reduced rate DSL accounts for their employees.

Whether you have a plan or are just exploring options, give us a call. We can help you examine the pros and cons and put together a strategy that will help you make the most of your IT dollars in 2009.

ipHouse is working hard to position our network and data center for the future.  This fall, we initiated a huge virtualization project. By using high-performance, efficient, virtual servers, we have been able to reduce the total number of physical machines used for hosting email and web services without impacting performance. Mike, our CTO, has been blogging about the virtualization project in his multipart series, “Virtualization and the ISP.”

Of course, virtualization is only part of the solution. IT departments need to think about the power consumption vs. performance of every machine on their network and every machine they are thinking of getting. Decommission machines that are no longer needed. Replace outdated energy hogs and stop getting more machine than is needed for the task at hand.

For years, data center and colocation power and cooling costs have been hidden or ignored. ipHouse is working to fix that. We are looking at both the power used by our equipment and the power consumed by colocated equipment. Colocation pricing is being revised to have a power consumption component. We want customers to consider power when they are choosing servers. We are also encouraging customers to take another look at their network assumptions. Especially with virtualization, separate services do not necessarily need to be on physically separate machines. 

If you are considering a move to a more energy efficient network design and want a second opinion on server specs and choices, let us know. We have been helping customers make infrastructure decisions for more than a decade and want to make sure you make the right choices for your organization.