What a week

Posted: 4:43 pm
August 13, 2010
Shockey Monkey
4 Comments

We launched Shockey Monkey. This is probably the only place I can be honest about it so pardon the rambling. And to be honest, after years of development and feedback and making sure we have a platform to grow our partners and our business, I’m pretty much dead tired. Let the following be the bottom line as far as I’m concerned.

How did it go Vlad?

This is my gift to the business community that made me who I am. Personally. Professionally. Thank you. It’s free. Really. No catches. You don’t have to buy ExchangeDefender. You don’t have to join the partner program. I won’t sell your contact information to the Nigerian mafia that I pay to SPAM you with 419 letters.

Seriously. It’s free. Enjoy.

The launch went much, much, much better than expected.

That’s sort of a total lie. We spent a lot of money on the event and counted on launching it on Tuesday morning to coincide with the room drop at CompTIA. So everyone was supposed to go home, take a long nap, wake up at midnight and get ready to do last minute checks and polishes.

At 6 PM on Monday, Frank Gurnee from CharTec texted me to congratulate me about Shockey Monkey. How did he hear about it? He got the room drop. 2 seconds later, text from Stephanie: “Hey, they decided to do a room drop tonight instead of tomorrow.”

Now here is the really cool part: The www.shockeymonkey.com at that time had a blank page (intentionally because we didn’t want to be in the search index, the signup page had the payment gateway disabled, the documentation page had a test CSS my layout monkey wanted me to vote up or down and the contact page I had requested just that morning was pointing to a non-existent file.

So the plane started taking off, and in the clear violation of FAA rules, I was texting fantically to wake up the monkeys and get them to get ready to fling poo faster. I was texting about 3 words a txt, mostly because the 10 year old next to me was staring at my phone expecting it to crash the plane at any moment, and partially because I didn’t know at which point the 3G would go to Edge and be dead.

My texting stream ended with the following response from my developer:

“Plz stop. Each time you msg me my blood pressure increases. Let me handle it… I have about 2 hours right?”

fml.

But wait, it gets better!

I get on the Airtran wireless network and start trying to condense the 8 hours of work and review I should have done weeks ago – in a 2 hour flight. Apparently, I’m very efficient when 30 people aren’t asking me questions.

The only thought that was racing through my mind was: WTF am I the one doing this stuff.

So we get to San Antonio, wait for an eternity for our swag (300lb of shirts which BTW the tshirt company shipped to the wrong address and we couldn’t even overnight them on time) and get to the conference. Of course I see like 20 people that ask me to come down to the bar. Alright, gotta be a ho.

I walk downstairs to the bar.

First person I say hi to is Bob Godgart.

Vlad: Hi Bob!

Bob: You know Vlad, real CEO’s don’t write code.

Mother@#%. That’s OK, I got him back. Later that evening I introduced him as “This is Bob, he’s the Arnie Bellini of Autotask.” 😉

Spent a little bit of time at a bar saying hi to everyone and then decided to go back to my room, order room service and just knock out the rest of the stuff I had on my to-do list. Thankfully, nearly all of it was completed in a few hours so I got to sleep by 4.

At 5:30, Kate called me to tell me she missed her flight.

All things considered, it was still the best 90 minutes of sleep I got all week.

The rest of the week is sort of a blur.

I’ve spent the past few days answering questions. Here is one that I’d like to answer with as much profanity and sincerity as cleanly as I can:

How does Shockey Monkey compete with Autotask and ConnectWise?

Here is the PR answer:

How does this compare with the Autotask, ConnectWise, etc
To be honest, it’s not even close. Mature PSA solutions are flexible, customizable, offer variety of deployment methods and have a very sophisticated ERP, CRM, billing and sales management process. If your business is at that level, please contact the providers and don’t even look at Shockey Monkey – it’s not for you.

We designed Shockey Monkey from the ground up to be simple. As veterans of the software business we had to take a hard look at the mirror and see what kind of software we were developing – selling features, selling enterprise quality and support. We simply could not write such a solution and make it available for free. Over the past few years the Web 2.0 has caught a lot of hype and popularity because it focused on the users, not the system and the IT. We wanted to create an environment that was easy to use, easy to configure and start managing right away. We also spent a significant amount of time to make it easy for you to upgrade to the professional services automation platform and currently have Autotask ready to go. We also created an XML export so you can integrate it into any other solution that supports XML import and data mapping.

Now here is the actual answer:

For the past 2 years we’ve been developing a ton of software for both Autotask and ConnectWise. Between them, they control 99.999% of our MSP client base. Plus like two dudes in Texas that use Tigerpaw.

The notion that we’d write a software product to compete with Autotask and ConnectWise is pretty idiotic. To be honest, I didn’t even want to call our thing a PSA but the common agreement on our team was that we needed to give people an acronym that they were familiar with. So here is what we went with: “It’s the gmail of helpdesks that also manages your calendar, billing and clients.”

Not a day goes by that I don’t wish we could outsource our Exchange.

Then there is a sad realization that we make millions of dollars hosting Exchange.

The idea behind Shockey Monkey is simplicity. It’s the anti-PSA. The un-PSA. It won’t show you a sales opportunity funnel. Or the Gannt chart. If you need that, or if you even know what that means, Shockey Monkey ain’t for you.

Listen.

I’ve spent the past 2 years talking to a ton of partners and the part of the final chapter of Vladville will clue you in on the fact that the End of IT World 2012 as Mayan’s predicted it isn’t coming in a form of IT – it’s coming in a form of people entering the business of technology from the completely opposite angle many of us did. I’m here because I love computers and I was too bad at thermal physics at UF that I had to resign to the life of writing software instead of designing chips.

The new crop of IT people come from business schools, car lots and mortgage industry and they’ve likely never even seen a server in their lifetime.

In order for technology companies (like mine) to stay alive we need to design the software that is free of IT and full of common sense.

My 2 year old knows how to run an iPad. He knows how to change cartoons, how to open applications, how to get to individual parts of it.

My dad can’t figure out how to deposit and withdraw funds from Ameritrade.

When I look at the future of IT, I am far less concerned about designing software for my 63 year old dad and far more concerned about designing software for my 2 year old son.

So Shockey Monkey is free.

Does this suddenly invalidate the whole complexity thing and put all of us out of business? Well, I sure hope not – or I would have written a perfect poison pill. My thinking is that by providing something free and simple gives a very broad base of people a shot at designing a process oriented system. When they reach the level of success that needs to be managed with the likes of Autotask and ConnectWise, we’ll make that transition seamless. But we are not going to be able to grow our reseller base or the business base of MSPs without providing the onboarding solution that will help people get into business, sell all our services, support them better and report true value to the clients.

The future is simplicity.

If we make it easy for people to give us their money, I’m confident they will.

It’s all about priorities

Back in the 90’s I wrote my first web hosting control panel simply because there wasn’t one out there. It allowed me to be unique, to be competitive and in a sea of millions of web hosting providers (even free) I was able to grow.

In 2010, I’m hoping the Shockey Monkey creates that opportunity for everyone I know that this blog and my voice can reach.

There is no bad blood here between OWN or Autotask or ConnectWise.

And before anyone else asks me that question again, let me be quite clear in my response: You’ve got a very narrow view. Companies like Google and Microsoft have thousands of developers to make sure IT world as we’ve grown up in ceases to exist. If you’re trying to find conflict among the few companies that are championing the channel and empowering it’s members to grow and succeed then allow me to suggest that you’ve got to redo your priorities.

In a nutshell

I owe my business and my success to the thousands of people that have sold our products, helped build our services and constantly work with us even when we’re being DDoS’ed off the planet and server resources go to 0 and slow everything down except the heart rate.

This is my thank you to all of you. I always say thank you, I spend a lot of time and money on my partners. And this, wholeheartedly, is the most sincerest way I can say it:

We’ve built something that’s genuinely all yours.

We don’t expect anything in return.

We’ll find more people that feel that way and will help fund your growth just for the attention you give them and their products.

Enjoy: www.shockeymonkey.com

P.S. I’ll explain the product and announce it a bit later this weekend after I’ve had about 30 hours of sleep I’ve missed this week.

It’s all in the name…

Posted: 8:55 am
August 11, 2010
Shockey Monkey
2 Comments

This seems to be a popular topic so allow me to address it. If you’ve never been a manager and suddenly you become an entrepreneur with employees (and don’t build an HR department or someone to baby your children) you deal with employees failing you in the worst of ways:

“Your job could be done by a monkey. It would be cheaper and easier to train a monkey than you.”

Ouch. So a bunch of us started referring to our front line infantry as monkeys. Fast forward a few months to an event where a buddy of mine had issues with his staff. While he was gone they “let the fire burn” and when he came back to kill them the following line ensued:

“I could make more money by setting it on fire and burning it than giving it to you to do your job.”

And then.. this cartoon came out:

Any time you can get something that can bring a smile to your face when you’re dealing with difficult stuff.. you use it.

So there you go. From an inside joke among friends to a hopefully biggest gift anyone has ever given the MSP community. Enjoy it: http://www.shockeymonkey.com

Nothing of importance happened yesterday

Posted: 5:41 am
August 7, 2010
IT Business
3 Comments

Aside from a hat tip to one of the greatest historical ironies, nothing really “new” happened yesterday when I posted about the Next to the last chapter of Vladville. While I wholeheartedly appreciate the notion that my blog posts would be missed, it’s not the blog that’s going away:

nuke  

What is gone is the argument and the era of small business technology centered on building and managing a computer network. Check out the book The Big Switch or the last few years of the Vladville blog.

With the most complex and complicated aspect of delivering IT services to the masses solved, what is the next wave of simplicity that will wash over the IT industry, and even more importantly – what does a profitable IT business look like in a world where IT is a reference to something as inherent as flipping the light switch or opening a can of tuna?

dukenukemAs far as my opinion is concerned.. you’ll find out in a few days. After design, redesign, draft, redraft and release delays that would make Duke Nukem cry, I believe that I have the foundation for what is possible next.

My general thesis is as follows:

If the realm of IT Services is so easy to figure out that even a CPA could do it, then the profitability and business growth of an IT service provider is not based on our ability to deliver a high end solution that our potential clients can figure out on their own given a little bit of time (if you like to argue with “the cloud” go check out how much brains you need to setup Google Apps and get 80% of the features your $30K a year for a 10 person office solution delivers) — then the future isn’t in pretending it’s a solution to a complex problem that requires expense and expertise – quite the opposite – it’s a simple solution that is cheap and it saves them time and money.

I know it looks like a paragraph, but it’s actually a 131 word sentence. 🙂

The book that Vladville wrote on the evolution of an IT problem solver into an IT service provider is being closed on the notion that the IT-as-a-Problem no longer exists: So what do we do with the IT now?

Next to the last chapter of Vladville

Posted: 3:03 pm
August 4, 2010
Vladville
8 Comments

For the past 6 years (8 if you count Blogger) I’ve been documenting the evolution & extinction of the IT service provider. When I first started blogging my role revolved primarily around the technology – and the IT service providers were heavily engaged in debates on what is enterprise and what is SMB.

Today, the debate is not much different. It’s in-house IT vs cloud IT. Same debate, same points, same concerns and largely, the same players. Only there are a whole lot less of them. The era of RMM eliminated the fly-by-night SPF that existed for the sole purpose of workstation reimaging and spyware removal. The era of cloud eliminated a lot of hardware specialists and “we install support and manage small business networks”

And here we are today.

So before I write the last chapter, I’d like to take a moment and let you in on a little secret. Throughout my blogging career I’ve received countless amount of advice from people that are less successful than me (at blogging or in business) and I can’t even begin to count the millions of dollars I have lost by not spell checking my posts, including more advertising, making my posts less direct and my arguments less controversial. Yes, if only I were more boring, surely that would translate into more money…

… meanwhile in the real world, what really matters is the idea. Thanks to the calculated profanity laced posts and opinions wedged in between grammatical crimes, I have been able to talk to the world and have it respond back with some brilliant ideas. People I’ve never met in my life have approached me in person and said “You’re Vlad! I like you!” – best damn feeling in the world.

As my mentor once told me, opinions are like assholes – everyone has one. My opinions are just that, and my opinions don’t typically represent those of OWN & ExchangeDefender (though multiple people have quit over them). What’s important in business is rarely what you say – what counts is what you do.

So before I drop the nuke on this place, I would like to thank so many of you that have not just read Vladville – but actually gave some thought to what I was saying and bothered to email me and give me some more ideas. I have benefited from those tremendously, both personally and financially, and I’ve spent a great deal of that time and money giving back. I encourage you to do the same.

In business, there is a safe path and there is a challenge. If it’s safe and easy, everyone will be doing it soon. So you can either be first – and always be chasing, or you can be brave.

Somewhere between outright stupidity and careless spending is a goldmine. Thank you!

100 hr Workweek

Posted: 9:44 am
August 3, 2010
Vladville
2 Comments

Here is some inspirational music.. (slightly dirty)

Why external perspective matters

Posted: 2:34 am
August 1, 2010
Events
8 Comments

Not external perception, external perspective. You have relatively little control over the opinion people have of you, and even if you’re just the nicest guy on earth people will still hate your guts (see Tim Tebow) and find great reasons to.

Few years ago when we were having issues I turned to my friends/clients and asked why they worked with us. Two comments from my buddies Wayne Small and Dean Calvert stick with me to the present day:

“This isn’t a date, this is a marriage.”

Getting everyone in an organization to understand the level of dependence that clients have on us, the level of trust they extend, and in bad times – the level of personal stake they have on the product choice they use to solve problems – is incredible. How do you build that? My personal answer to this is under a press embargo and NDA for a little while, but I can offer you some insight

Autotask ________ Conference

Last week we were invited to Autotask HQ for a ______ conference. As you can guess, literally everything is NDA at this point and in the event that even the company name is NDA, consider this a lovely event I had behind a dumpster doing heroin with my imaginary friends.

First thing they did at 9 AM was to let the CEO lay out the next 2 years worth of the roadmap, with the first year of it clearly spelled out – from vision to agenda to the end game.

The next 6-7 hours was basically spending time with some of the smartest people around and the key executives, developers, support, etc going over the details, suggestions, ideas and implementations.

The final hour was the CEO again, basically saying “Here is a list of places where you make money.”

Note to Self

First of all, I don’t know anyone that does this. The closest thing I’ve seen to this type of event is what Microsoft used to put on back when they had a partner program – back before the CEO would stroll into a keynote looking like he just left a BBQ and the program itself looked less like a time share sales training seminar.

Second, shame on me for not doing this for our partners. I talk to thousands of people each year, I’ve got a bunch of people in my company that talk to far more and we talk to each other every Thursday and Friday. Why we’re not sharing this collective knowledge (that most of you probably get on Vladville in between profanities) is embarrassing.

Third, shame on you for not doing the same for your community.

On To The Next One

I’ve made no secret over what I’ve been doing for the past year.

After we damn near rewrote our process, support, billing and half the products I dedicated myself to a new job – that of the PSA strategy. About a month ago I took a leave of absence to take care of some other business projects that just needed to become rock solid before I took the helm of OWN again.

In about a week or so, I am coming back to the helm of ExchangeDefender. And my first goal is to make sure we let our partners benefit from everything we know about where the money is.

I don’t think I’ve been this excited about what we do in at least 4 years.

This is why your email is getting delayed..

Posted: 4:29 am
July 25, 2010
Exchange, ExchangeDefender
5 Comments

On Friday I actually got into an argument with one of our partners about what is causing an issue with the sudden stop of mail flow from ExchangeDefender. It immediately prompted the “My name is Vlad and I’ll bet you $100 that this will fix it” support policy for anyone that wants to argue with me and consequently, “Vlad is no longer allowed to call partners to help them with technical issues” policy.

There is this new thing in Exchange (new as in it’s been there for 4+ years) called Backpressure. It’s documented here in great detail. In a nutshell:

Exchange 2007 and beyond comes with a self-monitoring system called backpressure that will either temporarily or permanently stop the hub transport role. It monitors memory and drive space. If you start running out of either, Exchange will either temporarily or permanently stop accepting inbound mail.

Here is what it looks like from the outside:

telnet 1.2.3.4 25
Trying 1.2.3.4…
Connected to clientserver (1.2.3.4).
Escape character is ‘^]’.
220 clientserver Microsoft ESMTP MAIL Service ready at Fri, 23 Jul 2010 12:20:28 -0400
ehlo ownwebnow.com
250-clientserver Hello [65.99.255.226]
250-SIZE 10485760
250-PIPELINING
250-DSN
250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES
250-STARTTLS
250-AUTH
250-8BITMIME
250-BINARYMIME
250 CHUNKING
mail from: vlad@ownwebnow.com
452 4.3.1 Insufficient system resources

Note: In order to check for inbound mail problems you should be using an SMTP diag. Your Exchange will still be functioning when the backpressure brakes kick in.

If you’re an SBS user, make sure you have at least 2x RAM (or at least 10GB free) disk space free on the volume on which Exchange resides. If that is not immediately possible, turn off backpressure and restart your Exchange Hub Transport services. If you’re not on SBS and have a real Exchange setup with proper separation between your log / db / queue storage separation, make sure you take free space available on the volumes which hold your queues and your transaction logs.

Case 1: Infrequent Email Delays

Exchange clients who typically only complain about email delays during business hours, or have sporadic email delay issues are likely dealing with a low memory issue. As the server gets more and more abuse throughout the day, it is likely to exhaust all available memory and Exchange backpressure stops processing inbound mail temporarily.

When it does so, the senders are greeted with the 4.5.2 4.3.1 Insufficient System Resources error message above. The message isn’t bounced / returned, the sending mail server will attempt the delivery again in the next few minutes (depending on configuration, server software, etc). ExchangeDefender is set to pound your server every 1 minute.

Case 2: Frequent & Persistent Email Delays

This is related to the backpressure being triggered by low disk storage availability. Start nuking stuff. At best, you’ve just downloaded too much stuff and you’re physically out of space until you delete it. All mail flow will stop until you address the issue.

The more exotic event, in which you have something that temporarily stores data on your server that also holds your queues and transaction logs, find whoever hired you and have them hold your head in the toilet while they persistently flush and slam the toilet seat on your neck until you stop convulsing. Since that’s technically murder, you might have to do this on your own, make sure to put a heavy weight on a toilet seat.

The more exotic event is particularly frustrating because the delays are compounded. We had a partner whose client used the same volume for his backup jobs as well as for Exchange. At the end of the day he’d exhaust nearly all the server space, thereby shutting down Exchange – once the backups were moved to the external device the space was available again and the inbound mail resumed. Another had clients rendering software run on the server, which had a 10GB rendering scratch allocation on C:\. I’ll give you one guess where the queues were. See the toilet seat fix recommended above.

What about compounding? Well, if you have resource issues and are a heavy user of email, inbound mail itself will cause delays. There are only so many messages that Exchange hub transport can route at once so a sudden surge of mail can trigger delays all by itself.

In a nutshell

1. Don’t keep your queues and logs on the same drive.

2. If you can’t comply with #1, make sure you have a ton of ram and hard drive space.

3. Make sure to check out  Exchange 2007 Mailbox Server Role Storage Requirements Calculator: http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/01/15/432207.aspx

4. If you are an MSP, and aren’t monitoring the free hard drive space on your servers if it dips below 10GB (again, Vlad’s toilet seat fix is highly recommended) at least monitor MSExchangeTransport EventId 15002.

5. For temporary relief only, turn off backpressure.

I need a cloud strategy

Posted: 1:04 am
July 24, 2010
IT Business
3 Comments

I get this pretty much every day. On Thursday I did a presentation at MSPU and I got a lot of people asking me about how to formulate a cloud strategy.

Being the pimp that I am, I told them I’d not just answer their question but all the ones they weren’t asking. “It’s not what you know, it’s what you don’t know.” Basically, I got a bunch of people to proof read a part of my book for free. 🙂

So here it is in a nutshell, the core of pimping the cloud and pretty much anything in any kind of a business:

All businesses have internal competition. Accounts receivable vs. Accounts payable. Payroll vs. Human Resources. The case for internal competition is that it efficiently allocates corporate resources (ie, cash, people) to make sure the company grows efficiently and responsibly. Without it, companies can burn out their cash or starve their innovation – both leading to doom.

Business growth in IT is similarly structured. You have to recruit and entice a new client base with one hand, while you smack some of it away with the other. Without a steady stream of new business, you cannot find remarkably profitable accounts consistently. Sure, you can spend a lot on marketing and referrals and get lucky every now and then, but long term success is founded on a long term strategy of cultivating your client base and serving their expanding business technology need as they grow.

If your response to the above is: “Well, yeah, no shit Vlad.” you’re on the right track. But I can tell you that at least 90% of the people I speak to don’t get it.

Most IT Solution Providers consider the cloud from what I like to call the blacksmith angle. Blacksmith is someone that looks backwards at previous success patterns and thinks that current and future innovation is a fad. Instead of chasing the fad, they focus on past success patterns. The truth is, success is somewhere in the middle.

As I told several executives that I’m pitching a solution to recently:

“You’re going to have a tougher and tougher time finding people that are going to go from managing their business with Excel & Notepad and dedicate themselves to automating business processes that don’t even exist.”

The same applies to the IT Solution Provider crowd. You’re going to have a tougher and tougher time trying to find a company that needs to build out a computer network, or a new server – if they even had IT in the first place. They are out there – but how much money will you spend to find them?

Is the case for a server or a network gone? Absolutely not. Have customers started putting their workstations on eBay in favor of working on their Internet enabled TV? Absolutely not.

But choosing not to build out a lead generation system based on a profitable and proven technology is insane. It’s dead easy to grow horizontally, especially when you have the right staff or the right partners.

The cloud is an opportunity to quickly and cost effectively build up a huge client base without building a huge support department or staff. It is a complement to a long term strategy of delivering professional services to customers that have chosen you as their platform. Microsoft and Google get this. They are cannibalizing themselves because they know that the platform is the marginalized good and what you help your clients accomplish with it is where the money really lies.

Seriously. How often do you get shot down in a business proposal over dollars and cents? And how often do people not even blink at the cost even if you’re the most expensive solution on the table?

Would you like to know why?

When you don’t understand or don’t appreciate something, you will only qualify and consider it at the factor you do understand: the economic one – how much is this going to cost me and which one is the cheapest? But as the business grows and technology needs pile up, it’s more cost effective to have the best solution because the cheapest one will require hidden costs or unravel a string productivity losses.

There. Now you know everything you need to know about the cloud, infrastructure, failed and winning business strategy. If you’d like to know more, sign up for one of our webcasts.

To be honest, it’s not really about what solution you pick (although I’m really, really, really biased) it’s important that you have and implement a lead generation and a prospect grooming / qualifying process in your marketplace.

Somewhat personal…

Posted: 8:55 pm
July 22, 2010
IT Business
1 Comment

Most of you may not know, but I’m 31.

And man, if you look at the archives of this blog, I’ve said some hella dumb stuff in the past 6 years of writing this thing.

One of my agendas for 2010 and beyond is to stop being petty and stop worrying about the little things. Because you know what, I don’t wake up each day trying to make sure every little light is on and that every little corner of my kingdom has fresh paint. I wake up each day because every day I help my partners move an inch forward towards what they want to accomplish. That’s why in 2010 I’m the one at OWN with the most miles traveled, most conference calls minutes killed, most webcasts pulled off and spending as much money as I can to push my partners. It really is all about you, because if you do well, we will continue our track record.

We’re kicking ass on all fronts and in all areas, and frankly the past year has been spent in the PSA business – if the process of getting paid and justifying our value isn’t met it doesn’t matter what we’ve done for the client – they need to realize the benefits and be aware of them too.

The Process

First, look at the big picture. Is the decision I’m about to make, or a comment I’m about to put out there really something that fits into my overall strategy?

Second, does it really make an impact? If what I’m about to do is not going to make a difference a year from now on, pass.

Third, self control. This one is a toughie. I’m a bit of an inconsiderate asshole. When you have a tunnel vision to your agenda you don’t happen to see all the people your train is running over. That’s both a gift and a curse. You can’t get to where you need to go without focus. You can’t just blindly plow forward. I’m trying to work myself towards that middle – where I don’t say the first thing that’s on my mind but also don’t let opportunities pass me by.

The Week

In the past 3 days I’ve watched four of my business partners engage in the most juvenile show of childish pettiness I’ve seen in a long time. They are all grown men and women, working in senior levels of multimillion dollar corporations. One was pissed off about the time he was speaking. Another was pissed off about a competitors presence and shirt color. Another was pissed off about voting fraud on a video site. The last one was just pissed off at being in the middle. Not kidding.

Now, that’s their problem and they have to live with it. I love them all dearly.

From my perspective, I realize that as these people piss off each other over petty shit, I may be doing the same to you. I hope that most of you that read this blog don’t mistake what I’m doing here. I hold Own Web Now Corp and everyone we work with to a higher degree. I don’t take people that drop their services with us back and I don’t hire employees back. I feel OWN owes a lot to the industry that developed it, and I also feel like I owe this industry to talk about things that are threatening us.

Sometimes we’re the biggest threat to ourselves. From our ignorance to our lost opportunities.

I just figured, watching the last few days unfold from a somewhat independent third party,  I owe all of you that are offended by what you read on Vladville a huge apology.

Please don’t misplace my sincerity – I could give two shits less if you disagree with me and I hope you do – that’s why I put stuff in the open so we can discuss it and find a better way to make money. Nobody is beyond making mistakes, learning from them, and benefiting from the lesson they learned. I just don’t want you all to think it’s coming from a petty angle because I sincerely love and appreciate all my partners.

You’re paying for the Ferrari’s. I’d like more. The better off you do, the more Ferrari’s I get. I don’t want you to think I do any of this for anything less than that. 🙂

As always, thank you for your business, and thank you for all your money.

How would you build a RAMzilla?

Posted: 8:06 pm
July 18, 2010
Misc
1 Comment

Recently I wrote a blog post detailing some gear we use for large scale data backups (“How do you backup a ton of stuff?”)

So here is what I’m looking at: Giant RAM drive.

The workstation-class system with 24 GB RAM is under a grand.

Solid server-grade stuff from Dell with 32 GB RAM is $1683. Double the RAM and the price nearly quadruples. But that’s Dell.

The idea of running a primary database or an entire system virtualized on a ramdisk has a huge appeal. We run a lot of stuff in a ramdisk to make a more responsive experience and with the replication to more reliable stuff it makes for an awesome solution.

So what do you think, have you had to build something beefy? I know the easy way is to just go to SSD but the performance is really not the same.