Bader’s Bits

Interface is one of Portland’s “must attend” events. A free, by-invitation only event for CIOs and IT managers, Interface is designed by folks like you to deliver maximum value. In one day, you’ll have the chance to hear from national and regional vendors (or not!), see the latest in technology, and network with your peers. Focused on quality, not quantity in attendees and exhibitors, this event is the one you’ve been hoping for.

EasyStreet is a bronze sponsor at Interface and we’re participating in a number of ways. I’ll be presenting Top Five Technology Trends You Can’t Ignore at 1:40, just preceding the keynote presentation. I look forward to hearing what you think about them and what you’d add to my list.

More importantly, we’re hosting the reception following the keynote. Good food and drink and a chance to discuss the day’s events with your colleagues.

You can visit with us at Booth 324 and chat with me and your account manager about our latest services including Metro Area Ethernet, Hosted Microsoft Exchange for Outlook users, and our family of storage and backup services. And we’d be delighted to tell you about our new facility expansion, now nearing completion.

I know you’re busy, but I believe you’ll find this event to be worth your time. The event is Thursday, March 23rd. Even if you only think you can make it, please register in advance at http://www.f2fevents.com/register_pdx.htm. There is no onsite registration.

I look forward to seeing you there.

I must be getting old or something to have a senator for a hero. Why Sen. Wyden? He has proposed federally legislating Network Neutrality. Net Neutrality is of fundemental importance to protecting the Internet. It’s been a topic mostly discussed amongst the policy wonks and the industry. Now, it’s becoming a mainstream topic.

The Senator is leading the way in defining legislatively how Net Neutrality is defined. It’s principles, excerpted from the Senator’s press release are:

Not interfering with, blocking, degrading, altering, modifying or changing traffic on the Internet;

• Not being allowed to create a priority lane where content providers can buy quicker access to customers, while those who do not pay the fee are left in the slow lane;

• Allowing consumers to choose which devices they use to connect to the Internet while they are on the net;

• Ensuring that consumers have non-discriminatory access and service; and

• Having a transparent system in which consumers, Internet content, and applications companies have access to the rates, terms, and conditions for Internet service.

I applaud Senator Wyden’s initiative. He is one of the few Congressman willing to stand up to one of the best funded lobbying and political contribution machines in the nation.

His legislation will be part of the discussion for an update/rewrite of federal telecommunications policy. Those debates are in their early stages in Congress and it’s unclear if anything will come for vote in this session. The telcos are agitating for more deregulation. At least with Senator Wyden’s bill there is a counterbalance to their demands.

Show Senator Wyden you support. Send him an email!

Well, it’s not really my posse; it’s our POSSE. The Portland Open Source Software Entrepreneurs. The group represents a cross section of the Open Source software community, individuals and organizations, all committed to helping organizations succeed with OSS.

I had the pleasure to attend one of their meetings (they’ve been going at it since 2004) at the Lucky Lab. I found a talented and impassioned but practical group of folks anxious to help out anyway and anywhere they could. Topics that afternoon included the local open source “cluster” and economic development, open source for non-profits and schools (good fits in both cases), Of course, we couldn’t help get geeky: a group of us talked about server virtualization, Xen, SANs, and other cool stuff.

They meet the first Friday of every month at the Lucky Lab on Hawthorne. Check ‘em out!

After years of denying any reason for us to be concerned about Net Neutrality, SBC (one of the telcos) CEO Ed Whitacre let the cat out of the bag in a Business Week interview last fall. The significant exchange is:

How concerned are you about Internet upstarts like Google (GOOG ), MSN, Vonage, and others?
How do you think they’re going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there’s going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they’re using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?

The Internet can’t be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! (YHOO ) or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!

The misleading aspect of Whitacre’s statement regards “they” wanting to use his pipes for free. The fact is, there isn’t anyone using his, or anyone’s, pipes for free. We, as consumers on the Internet, pay for our pipes; so do “they” (the content providers) for the pipes they need in the data centers to serve up their content.

What Whitacre is really suggesting is discriminatory access. Unstated is his concern about competition for the services other than the pipe that he and the other telcos, want to provide: like voice and video. If he can justify additional charges, or more importantly control which content is allowed or preferred, he will ensure a huge competitive advantage for himself.

This is our worst fear coming true. Should this strategy succeed it will forever change the openness of the Internet. I don’t want my daughter telling her daughter about the “good old days” of the Internet.

EasyStreet does. What is it? ITIL is the Information Technology Infrastructure Library. Still not clear? ITIL is the result of the British Government’s extensive industry survey to determine IT best practices. In fact, it is a collection of schema, definitions, and functional and organizational relationships that are common to all high maturity IT shops. Implementation, is as they say, an exercise for the users (and the consultants!).

Most organizatons that embark on ITIL are large, publicly traded enterprises. They are driven to ITIL for increased services availability, and often these days for government regulatory compliance (HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, etc.).

EasyStreet is privately held, and our service availability is 99+% already. Fortunately, as ITIL’s popularity spreads, the key software packages needed to implement it are becoming more affordable. Our motivations include:

• Building in better organizational scalability as we grow, while maintaining high service availability
• Improved measurability of our performance against SLAs (and the internal Operational Level Agreements, OLAs) for system availability and service desk/trouble ticket responses
• Create new and improved services using the “service management” approach to better integrate our services with our customers operations

We began our ITIL journey with some classes sponsored by the SAO’s Oregon Training Network, offered by Pink Elephant. Virtually all EasyStreet employees attended a 2-day overview class, and three employees have earned the Foundation Certificate in IT Service Management. We immediately put training into practice by establishing a change control process for some key customer services, and as a sign of its value, the process was spontaneously embraced by the technical staff for all changes, virtually eliminating the famous last words: “This change shouldn’t affect anything…oops, what happened?”

We are now well along in our next phase: a new service desk automation system. We selected Footprints by Unipress. It’s got a great feature set, is web based, and is ITIL compliant; which means it helps implement ITIL concepts and integrates more easily with other ITIL compliant packages (we hope).

We’ve still got years to go before we become a high maturity ITIL shop, but we’re on our way and the positive experiences so far are helping with the inevitable cultural changes.

Sound interesting? There’s a international organization dedicated to ITIL implementation known as ITSMF, the IT Service Management Forum. A local Portland chapter is just starting up. Here’s the invite to the upcoming meeting, courtesy of Leslie Rohrs of the BPM Group. She hosts an IT breakfast group (attendance at the breakfast is by invitation only from Leslie). Leslie’s recent breakfast featured a consultant from CA educating us about ITIL implementation issues.

Who’s in control of the Internet? Nobody really, and that’s why it has been such a fertile ground for innovation. You don’t need to ask permission, or buy a license, or sign a contract to launch a new website or application on the Internet. And when you do, you can reach virtually all of the hundreds of millions of users out there.

That fundemental premise of the ‘Net is now being questioned. The issue was first raised years ago, by folks seen as Chicken Littles (here’s a great backgrounder). However, national telecommunications policy is swinging back in favor of the incumbents, and that puts net neutrality at real risk.

Real risk of what? That the owners of the last mile connections to users (a small number of large cable and telephone companies), will assert themselves as gatekeepers between the content and the consumers. It is in their best interests to establish that control for their economic advantage, selecting winners and losers and discriminating in who can connect to whom. That is the antithesis of net neutrality, and would mark the end of the Internet innovation era, and the beginning of the slide towards the business/content model that exists in other mass media distribution like cable, satellite and network broadcasting, and may threaten emerging applications like voice over IP.

It’s also worth pointing out that this is the same issue as open access networks, ones that allow you a choice of ISP (unlike cable-provided Internet access where you have a choice of one). Choice and competition are good for all of us.

• More info: The Center for Digital Democracy

Yeah, it’s cool, no question. OK, it might not be legal (IANAL). But, it’s really cool, and that’s what matters, right? I’m talking about running Apple’s OS X on my PC at home. Hypothetically speaking, of course.

Let’s just say that you found a copy of OS X out in the wild. It’s out there, I’ve heard on Bit Torrent and other file sharing networks. It’s probably already hacked by the latest legend, Maxxuss, who has singlehandedly disabled Apple’s attempt to lock the OS to Apple hardware. Burn the image to a DVD, drop a blank hard drive in your machine and you’re ready to give it a shot.

Whether it works or not is a matter of luck and drivers. If you’re hardware matches the supported profiles, you’re in business. In my hypothetical case, everything worked at first except sound and my network card. Consulting the OSX86project website, I discovered an Intel NIC I had is on the “supported hardware” list. Ten minutes later, I was hypothetically on the ‘Net, with Safari browsing away. Bottom line: if you want to try this at home, save some aggrevation by getting some hardware that’s supported.

It runs nice and fast. It’s solid. It’s pretty. There’s a bunch of software that runs on it. But you know what? After getting it running, I pulled the drive and went back to Windows and Linux. Maybe I’ll get back to it. But what I’m really focused on is running more apps on my servers, and on the ‘Net. I want my client machines to be not much more than an Internet connection and a browser. So I may get back to it someday, but OS X on Intel may be too little, too late for me.

You’ve got to hand it to Brandon Sanders. He doesn’t look old enough to have been around in the 60’s, let alone remember them. But all that was missing for me at the RecentChangesCamp he helped produce was the incense and patchouli, and…well, never mind.

The event, held downtown, was today’s be-in: all about community building, but instead of communes, it was mostly wiki-based virtual communities. What needs to be freed today isn’t Bobby Seale, but software and ideas. And the participants for this 3 day event were as passionate and eloquent as we were, jeez, forty years ago.

I had a great time meeting new folks and seeing some familiar faces. I got invited to go to Bali with Nobel prize winners to solve the world’s problems (no, I had to pay my own way). I learned about news4neighbors, a terrific local resource, and David Poole who runs it. I got to talk about data center stuff with my new buds from OSU/OSL, who host a Who’s Who of open source projects. And then…well, you really had to be there

Check out their website, and if you’re into The Movement, make sure you make the scene next year.