I recently got a challenge to build a solution that could be price comparable to what cloud storage services charge, except with the performance being key.

The challenge: You can’t build a $3 Exchange 2010 Mailbox!

Vlad: “Sure I can! Just not one you’d ever want to put data on.”

So I set out to prove myself wrong and create a PoC (proof of concept) redundant system that could do random read/writes in the very high double digit MB/Sec, possibly even triple digits. Mission accomplished, here is how I did it:

Storage Server Contents

Below is a list of components, all available as a retail package (ie, 3 year warranty when it explodes) all accessible to everyone. Due to the pricing constraints I’ve had to make some significant sacrifices (particularly with the consumer-level drives, processor and motherboard) but mostly in the areas where I wish I had server-grade components but could not justify the cost differential based on performance.

Intel Core 2 Duo E7400 2.8GHz

G.SKILL 4 GB DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)

Gigabyte GA-G31 MicroATX Intel Motherboard

SuperMicro CSE-825TQ 2U Rackmount Server Case

8x HITACHI Deskstar 2TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s

areca ARC-1220 PCIe x8 SATA II RAID

So to sum it up: 8x 2 TB hard drives ($149), Intel C2D Processor ($124), 4 GB DDR2 Memory ($93), Intel G31 Motherboard ($47), 2U Server Chasis with Rails ($339) and a RAID 6 SATA Controller ($454) all for the grand total of $2,249 or approximately $0.16 cents / gigabyte.

In RAID5 configuration this system delivers 14 TB of space at a bottom line cost of $0.16/GB. The overall system draws almost 2 AMPs and takes up 2U with included rack rails. It took roughly 30 minutes to put together the whole thing, most of the time having gone to taking 3.5” plastic fillers from hotswap trays.

Opinions

Before I show you the actual performance thats relevant to Exchange 2010 servers, do you have any recommendations,  suggestions or questions? Anything I could have further skimped on?

I considered Western Digital Green series, since they were significantly cheaper, but they run at 5400 RPMs and I had serious concerns about their ability to withstand a beatdown of an Exchange mailbox role. I didn’t consider any other RAID controllers and software RAID is a bit out of the question considering that every time we tried software RAID in a high performance server the motherboard melted down – also without battery in high performance situations things tend to smoke. What I wish I could find is a more efficient power supply that didn’t cost thousands of dollars.

Update: Specifically, what I’m after is if anyone out there knows how to get similar performance at a similar price/GB. Are there better controller, drives and motherboard choices?

I’m on my way back from Dallas, reading the Wall Street Journal and my tears are just pouring all over the place for a little company called Porsche. Perhaps you’ve heard of them: they don’t make a single car under $46,000 and majority of their models cost six figures with the recently discontinued top model (Carrera GT) starting at $440,000. American.

The company is complaining that the new EPA requirements for fuel efficiency and pollution control would disproportionately hurt them, and I quote WSJ here:

“It’s not that we can’t do it, it’s that we lose competitiveness.” – Bernd Harling, Porsche

Now, if obscenely overpriced cars aren’t enough to jerk a tear out of you, also consider that Porsche routinely closes their production plants for nearly 2 months in the summer for vacations.

I think I have a suggestion on something that would help your competitiveness: earn yo keep. If selling overpriced cars and being lazy isn’t enough, the excuse is “we could do it, but it’s easier to just complain instead.”

The History

Most of these high performance automobile companies (Porsche, Ferrari, Lamborghini) were founded by amazingly competitive and hard working people who not only wanted to be the best but also didn’t back away from a challenge. As the legend goes, Ferruccio Lamborgini went to complain to Enzo Ferrari about his (Ferrari) car being a piece of track junk (too loud) to which Enzo politely explained that a simple peasant farmer simply couldn’t appreciate the engineering and luxury of a Ferrari.

When you’re in the industry with a ton of innovation and competitiveness, you simply don’t get to be lazy or say “no.”; When you do, you lose a client. Or your job.

The reality of the modern business is no different than when these companies were started around the middle of last century. What has changed for those companies is the priority: it’s all about the money.

When absolutely all that counts is the bottom line, your income, your pay, and you’re willing to let your products or output fall apart because it’s not worth it to you, it’s simply the end of the road.

The alternative: do your best, every day, try to bring the best to the table and believe me, you will get compensated and you will be competitive.

I love my Apple iPhone 3GS and I can’t really imagine life without it – it takes pictures, video, has great games, FaceBook and TweetDeck rock and when you need to kill time it’s awesome. However, my business phone is just not something iPhone is meant for. So after over a year of searching around I’ve decided to try and replace my business cell phone with the Google Nexus One.

Reasoning

Microsoft will be releasing Windows Mobile later this year. It’s about 90% likely to suck as Microsoft always does when they chase. I’ve never been a fan of Palm and it looks like they are about to die. Blackberry I have religious issues with.

So that left Android. I chose Google’s Nexus One because it got great reviews and unlike literally all the other handsets, it’s not controlled by the carrier so I don’t have to be at the mercy of a carrier when it comes to upgrades.

First Impressions

It’s an HTC. If you’ve ever purchased nearly any Windows Mobile phone you know what I mean – cheap Chinese piece of junk. Feels and looks cheap. Accessories look 3rd world all the way.

The OS is clunkier than the iPhone, not quite as intuitive and the keyboard is not even close to the iPhone one. Nexus One also has four shortcut keys underneath the screen so when you’re typing an email you can hit the buttons rather easily. The app selection is pretty diverse and looks better than the App Store. The Exchange AS works, but there is no way to provide a signature for sent mail – very, very strange but apparently being worked on. The phone itself is very responsive but also very hot. Multitasking implementation is awesome – killing applications isn’t, you need to launch another app (task killer). Voice Search is not very accurate. Battery life is about the same. The camera is amazing. Tethering is supported and the AT&T 3G is moving quite fast. Customizing ringers, etc is a bit touch and go.

In a nutshell, it’s decent. It’s no iPhone, not even close. If I had to choose only one, I would definitely get the iPhone. But for pure business… That I’m not so sure on.

So far, no show stoppers. I’ll post an in depth review after using it for more than 1 day

Last night I had a very interesting conversation on where the line is drawn between producing a quality product and maximizing profitability. Believe it or not (software, MSP, IT Solution Provider, SPF) there is a tradeoff between perfection and profitability – the better you try to get your product, the more it costs and less it makes because it diverts money from sales and marketing efforts to make a better product that fewer people will buy.

But where is the line? Let’s for a moment forget the beta culture most of us younger entrepreneurs have brought up in and assume that there is a happy place between shipping shit for money and burning the midnight oil checking all the t’s and dotting the i’s.

The question is: Where is the line and how do you find it?

I don’t have an answer, earlier in my career when I was very close to the product development and support I spent far more time focusing on perfection but we made a lot less money. I worked very hard and we grew slowly and patiently – but we didn’t take it to that “next level” until I focused on the product distribution and growing the scale of what we do here. In the end, we’re able to deliver a product that has a higher quality and reliability with a better profit margin.

One piece of advice I have for people that are just starting up is to focus on building the business, not the products. You can always hire amazing people and build amazing things – once you’ve got the money. The line between where you can be proud of your solution and run a profitable business – that I don’t know. I’m proud of what we’ve build and what we deliver but I also know at least a dozen holes that we’re working on and I have another 200 that I haven’t even thought of yet. But by the time I perfect ExchangeDefender there won’t be any SPAM around to block anymore

We’re on our way back from a long week in California, closing some fantastic meetings in Los Angeles, an awesome Xchange Service Provider event and the CharTec Academy. Fantastic partners, great people, ton of fun but not easy stuff by any means.

I had perhaps one of the most interesting conversations in a very long time that started with the following questions:

They seem to work really hard – barely seeing their kids.

He puts in insane hours just so his wife can stay at home and raise their kids.

But here is the response that my best friend shared with me last fall when I went to visit him and asked why his wife seems to be stressed out:

“She’s at home stuck with the kids and she wants time off but I just can’t give it to her right now.”

He works so that his wife can stay at home and can get the joy out of raising their kids. Yes, that too is a sactifice because there are times when we’d all rather do something else – but we all sacrifice for what is really important in life.

One thing I’ve learned in life (at my old age of 31) is that really successful people tend to sacrifice (at times a lot) to get to the next level and become successful. One of my friends in the industry recently shared with me that everyone thought she was a lesbian because she didn’t have a man and worked so much. Ouch.

I won’t speak for those people. And please understand, I am not trying to preach here – this is my life and this works for me, your life is your own and I am not trying to change it or challenge how you live it. At all. Please don’t look at this as anything other than an explanation of how us weird “workaholic” people see the world.

Believe me, if I could do this on a sofa in my tighty whities eating M&Ms from my bellybutton (oh yeah, you pictured it didn’t you?) I wouldn’t be writing this blog at 30,000 ft on a redeye flight on a Saturday night after an 80 hour workweek. Alas, Ferrari’s are expensive. As are Porsche’s. As is kids private school and college education. As is a big house, big house cleaners, insurance, Disney passes and Snaussages.

I was raised to respect money and my parents always told me that they both worked hard because they wanted me to have an opportunity to make something of myself in life. I don’t recall mommy and daddy ever handing me the Corvette keys – I had to earn those myself. And now that I have a family of my own, I want my kid to have a chance to have a better life than I did.

I wouldn’t trade my life with anyone I know. So it takes a few extra hours to earn it, will I really remember this redeye flight in a year? Doubtful.

About balance..

Lot’s of people seem to talk about “balance” in life. I for one don’t really find my life unbalanced, I’m blessed to love what I do and I would be on this computer doing this stuff at 2 AM no matter what. I don’t particularly enjoy the meetings with lawyers and accountants, or apologizing when we fail, but there is no such thing as perfection.

I also do not believe there to be such a thing as “balance”; Oh, I know a lot of people that talk about balance – and talk about it a lot – but truth of the matter is that someone always feels like they are losing out no matter how much you think you’re balancing it out.

– “ Your spouse thinks you’re working too much and you’ve got problems at home. Your boss doesn’t think you’re working hard enough so you’ve got problems at work. You bring your home problems to work which affect your performance which affect your compensation which leaves you to go back home to your loved ones and unload on them when they hit the wrong button during the “how was your day” talk. So you stay awake past your bed time to try to make it up with sex, wake up exhausted and just can’t wait for some sucker to call you up and as John Wayne put it – “Go ahead punk, make my day”  “

That little bit of darkness is courtesy of my friend Steve who delivers the above rant to a perfection in person. Gloomy, ain’t it? But there is a grain of truth there, we all have to sacrifice.

So why do it?

The reason I am writing this post is to tell you that there is an enormous sense of urgency among the technology providers to become a full technology solution – because so much is now possible without physical presence, all of the traditional “suppliers” and “vendors” are going direct to the consumers and the old “business2business” world is no longer an entity onto itself – it’s just an extension of consumer experience.

Everyone is racing at a frantic pace to offer VoIP, BUDR, cloud, commodity monitoring, remote services and support. We all want a spot on that clients org chart.

And among my hard working friends there is an understanding – hard work and dedication over time breeds winners. We become so critical, so essential, so core to the success of our organizations and our clients businesses that the payoff is guaranteed and proportional to our effort.

It’s the equivalent of the universe saying: the money is yours, all you have to do is put in the effort pick it up.

Some people only want to reach down for $10. Some will reach deeper for a $20. Some will roll up their sleeves and try to pull out a $50.

This is the greatest, most profitable time to be in business. And what you build now will stay with you for years. Make yourself indispensable.

So from the 30,000 ft in the air on the red eye flight after a 7 day workweek, with my laptop in one hand and gold plated revenue digging showel in the other… good night and happy Monday.

This is my third part in attempting to answer the question behind a highly emotional set of responses I’ve received to this post. Things in the IT world are changing radically and it’s natural for most people to resist change – most people enjoy their comfort zone and when comfort zone impacts your livelihood it’s natural to feel uneasy about it.

To read about the journey so far:

How do you create compelling value on top of something that is no longer a problem people will pay to solve.

Why things fail.

And the post that started it all: Success.

Let’s continue…

This part is something that is universal to us all in business, business owners and business employees alike. We have to meet expectations. If we don’t meet expectations, we don’t get promoted or even worse we get fired.

Whether we’re fired by the client or the boss is of little concern here. What should be a concern is: are we meeting expectations. Now, keep in mind that this is where things tend to get complicated because money (that which we spend on our happiness) is at stake. And to make it even more complex:

1. You don’t control the expectations. Your boss or your client does.

2. You don’t judge whether you’re meeting expectations. Your boss or client does.

Argue with it if you will, cry that it’s unfair, paint a sign to abolish the filthy western capitalism – whatever makes you feel better. But accept it. You are not in control.

If you can make it past that….

(by the way, most won’t / can’t – because they feel it’s unfair)

Now that you understand that you are not the one in control of the situation, try to figure out a way to manage those expectations and even more importantly – celebrate when you exceed the expectations that you have established in black and white!

That is easy to say but very hard to do. Because what really counts isn’t that you’re meeting or exceeding expectations, it’s the consistency that matters. You have to be great all the time or the first time you flop you’re back to everyone else – us humans down here that make mistakes from time to time but generally seem to move forward at a slow pace.

Establish a set of goals and a set of metrics that can be easily measured..

Again, just common sense. When you need to prove that you’re actually worth being kept around as a service or employee, you need to establish the set of metrics that both parties can agree on and then do your best to exceed them and make sure both parties are aware of it.

And this is where it all falls apart..

Keep in mind that I am not a motivational speaker.

Here is the thing – just because you can agree on a set of metrics, doesn’t mean that the other party considers them to be important. What’s even more infuriating (as discussed in the previous post) is that the level of importance of the things you’re delivering tends to diminish as you get further away from the original problem you’ve been hired to solve.

To wit, your ability to maintain your current service charges / salary or even increase them depends on your ability to consistently prove you can do more than what you’ve committed to. Here is how the decision maker thinks: If this service/person is only delivering what I pay them for, giving them more business is not really going to make me marginally better off so I’ll have to think about it. It means – they don’t buy. In the HR terms, if the person is constantly asking for a raise but never consistently going above the call of duty, then giving them a raise will only increase the output so much and may not be worth it (what if they decide they don’t want to work as hard?)

So now you know why as a business owner you don’t get a ton of business or why as an employee you aren’t paid. Truth is, no matter where we are – after the initial euphoria of the win – we all believe we’re not being paid enough.

So here is the secret:

1. Dedicate yourself to constantly improving.

2. Market your improvement to the decision makers.

3. Prove you can do something before you ask for money (ex: at OWN we give people free trials)

4. Always, always, always go back to #1 and solicit feedback. Because remember, it’s the person that parts with the money that defines the parameters of your job and their expectations of you – it’s not up to you to decide whether that’s fair or what the service/job is. Ever tried arguing with your client over an invoice? How well did that go?

Summary

The truth of the matter is, whether you feel you’re underpaid or your business is not successful, at the core is the fundamental truth that you suck. <gulp> The nice thing about life is that “suck” is relative and so long as you can dedicate yourself to both improving and being open to the criticism (otherwise people won’t tell you that you suck and you’ll just keep on beating your head against the wall) the only thing that matters is consistency and dedication.

If you’re really willing to be successful (and aren’t just faking it) and are committed to always improving instead of quitting because you’re either right or the grass is greener on the other side.. success is just a matter of time and a journey, not a specific point in time.

To give you an idea: I run a multimillion dollar software company. Nobody gave me money to start it. I’m at a business conference where my sole purpose for being here is to ask people to give me their money because I can do something better than they could and for far less. It took a ton of time, money and sacrifice to build what I’m about to offer them. It took a ton of time to perfect my ability to communicate what I will do for them and why they should choose me over someone else. And then when I finally win the deal (or job) I have to keep on kicking butt every day, deliver more than what they are paying for (consistently, or they’ll switch to a lower cost solution) and keep on asking them if we’re doing a good job. It didn’t happen overnight. It didn’t happen in a single spurt either. It’s process. Nobody is just going to give you stuff. You have to completely blow people away before you can ask them to part with their money.

The beauty of capitalism is that (on the average) so long as you can execute all the above, you can drive a red Ferrari and take your kid to Disney World. Or whatever brings you joy.

The MSPU bootcamp monster is growing – if you’ve never seen MSP University bootcamp in action you’re missing out. It’s 3 days packed with MSP training on sales, management, HR, service desk – basically building and running a business from how to manage your hardware to how to manage the cleaning detergent supply for the office cleanup crew We’ve proudly sponsored every single one of these and will continue to because they remain as (as biased as this may seem) the best resource for MSPs out there.

But now it’s growing again with pre-day events. Next week in Dallas, should you happen to come early, you can check out CompTia’s security workshop.

P.S. Your head will spin with ideas when you go through one of these – and they are free as well – so it’s not for everyone.

Getting back on the road this week, look forward to hanging out with our partners for a while. Here is my schedule:

Monday – Wednesday, xChange with Travis in Los Angeles.

Friday – Saturday, CharTec with Shannon in Bakersfield.

Tuesday – Friday, MSPU with Shannon and Stephanie in Dallas.

What a difference a year makes..

In the past, I had a nearly insane fascination with control and going on the road basically guaranteed that you would have no chance of getting in touch with me. Now that I’ve let go a bit (ok, a lot) the road trips are a lot more about relationships than products and features… and since I’m not pinned between the office and the phone all day in meetings and webcasts, if you need something or have been waiting on something this is a great time to ping me again.

You know where to find me, if you’re heading to the events above please let me know.

P.S. Everyone keeps on asking about “the feature” being added to ExchangeDefender this month. After we dropped version numbers from ExchangeDefender I promised that each month would come with a really key feature you can take to the bank (ie, take to the client and open a conversation that can bring you more money). This is something we’re intentionally keeping under wraps and don’t offer any roadmap/insight to because we have several things being developed at a time and those of you that have been (un)fortunate to be ExchangeDefender users in the past are well aware of the quality control issues – so now without the pressure of deadlines and “next release” I am no longer stressing my folks – but I demand perfection. So when the next big piece is ready it goes to the top of the newsletter and to your inbox. So chill folks, we’re growing like crazy here and of course it’s going right back to adding to the product and improving the service.

I get this question all the time so here it is, the mythical SMTP headers.

1. Right click anywhere in the ribbon and select Customize Quick Access Toolbar. The Quick Access Toolbar are the commands immediately next to the Outlook icon in your upper left hand corner, right above the File Ribbon.

2. Select Quick Access Toolbar. Under Choose commands from select Commands Not in the Ribbon. Locate Message Options and click Add.

3. You will see the new icon in your QAT, click it for SMTP headers:

Enjoy.

Long title but it gets the point across – how do you stay commercially viable when your offering is not something people are willing to recognize as a problem worth paying you to solve?

I’ve been on record stating that I believe the SPAM / Virus filtering is something that is rapidly losing value and will be free. Later this year we will be launching a barebones antispam/antivirus cloud solution that is a fraction of the cost of whats currently out there and aim at making it free eventually.

The response of the security vendors has been to nickel and dime the client base because there is still a lot of value in filtering and lots of money can be made on the things like encryption, web filtering, etc. Our response has been to eliminate wasteful resources and reallocate them to those features that the users are actually willing to pay for. Here is a concern one of our partners voiced in our portal:

During these financially stressed times, it gets harder and harder to provide justification to a customer on why they should spend the slightest penny on anything. With that said, after the upgrade to ED5 and the induction of “SMTP Tempfail,” the numbers of SPAM messages being filtered out by ED servers and listed in our customer’s daily reports has dropped dramatically. This is great for both OwnWebNow, by reducing the loads on the ED servers, and our customers, for having to filter through less junk in their ED quarantines and daily reports. But the unintended result is that we, as OWN partners, find it harder to justify to the customer why they need to have or maintain the ED service. The reason being is that the numbers on the Domain Security and the SPAM Trend Reports have dropped dramatically. These reports gave us the numbers and graphical proof that our customers needed to wrap their minds around to see the service working and made it easier on us to justify the need for the ED service. The feature request in all of this: Even if the message is dropped via the SMTP Tempfail, couldn’t those messages be counted, and listed on the reports, as being filtered in the total number of messages for that domain? Or maybe adding a section within the report for the SMTP Tempfail that list the number of messaged dropped.

Here is my response:

Dear Steven & Nathan,

Unfortunately, the tempfail is something that is issued during the SMTP transaction and we do not know the destination of the email – it could be heading to any email address or domain on the network. Logging that information is not just pointless, it would only require more resources and cause users to be even more unhappy with the service and the amount of junk they are dealing with.

I will tell you both that this is not the first time I’ve had to answer this question.

I will also admit that I share your concern, however, I have chosen to address it in a different way.

I can’t build a company on top of a fear for something that the technology has already addressed. That is to say, I can’t sell a solution to a problem that has already been largely solved that shouldn’t have existed in the first place.

Now, how do you create a compelling value offering considering that the original problem is already a component of the solution? Grow the solution. Add web filtering. Add business continuity. Add encryption. Add large file web sharing. Add it all for free.
That’s been my answer. Honestly, if a user is so unaware of the widespread SPAM problem that keeps on growing year over year, and all it takes to aleviate their fear is a chart, we’re not really dealing with sophisticated people. The kind that will likely not place value on the rest of the stuff we do either. So I can’t address them.
However, I can grow the sophistication and the value in my product by giving them more security, not just the illusion of it.

Please feel free to email me at vlad@ownwebnow.com, I don’t want to be insensitive to your concerns Steven because I’ve had to answer them and the above is what we came up when it came to the product design. I hope it also helps you in your discussions with your clients and gives a better footing for your managed services solutions because this goes hand in hand with the total solution.
-Vlad

There is a larger question here that the managed services providers have to answer to remain in business and address the pricing pressures from the big boys. I’ve been doing a series of “cloud” presentations with MSPU trying to explain to people all the vectors that need to be considered here because the truth is: When you are paid to solve the problem, and you solve it, the client no longer experiences the pain and their willingness to pay for it diminishes the further they are removed from the problem.

Basically, there is a diminishing value of providing managed services. Response? “Screw them, if I stop doing what I do for a day their network will explode.” Ok, guess that would work but I don’t know that it’s great customer service. From experience, bunch of charts and graphs isolating the problem don’t work either – When you are not directly experiencing a pain, charts and data points do not have an emotional impact which makes the client wonder why they shouldn’t consider an alternative (cheaper) solution.

Now, I think I wrote a blog post or two about commoditization of services Remember, it’s too late to think about this stuff after you’ve lost a client. You need to do it now because I can guarantee you they are being bombarded with alternatives. You can’t call me a day after Microsoft swiped your client and you want to get into Hosted Exchange business but you never introduced it to your clients before because you’re a LAN guy. You have to be faster, better informed, less biased than Google, Microsoft or _____.

Bottom line is: Ignorance As A Service doesn’t work. And as painful as it may be, we need to approach our clients with different set of collateral and value propositions than we did in the past. What that entails and how effective it is going to be is a matter of trial and error.