Since early 2003, this blog (and it’s blogger.com predecessor) chronicled the Fast Times at SMB high, the rise and fall of several business models and the lessons learned along the way to building wealth and solutions for the SMB technology marketplace. From the network engineer to SPF to IT Consultant to VAR to MSP to Master MSP era’s, it’s been a fun ride and it’s also been 10 years since I’ve had a real vacation (instead of 2-3 days here and there).. so.. as both I and my company move on to the next chapter in our lives, I figured it would be fitting to sum up the last 10 years of SMB IT and explain how and why things are changing.

The Cloud Prior to 2002

From roughly 1997-2003, the SMB world was preoccupied with simply establishing a presence. From the massive buildout of LANs across small businesses to building web pages, this was the era during which people figured there was a world beyond @aol.com or @compuserve.com. Microsoft was taking over the network dominance from Novell and for the most part the IT businesses of this time were high on skill and highly compensated for it.

My first job in 1996 involved me talking to SMBs and helping them write connection scripts for Trumpet Winsock. With the release of Windows 95 the obstacle of connecting to the Internet was nearly eliminated and it created the largest surge of small business users trying to get to it. Along with it came the IT Consultant who no longer had to have a tremendous amount of networking skill – just listen to the customer and know who to call for help.

This was also the moment at which technology became affordable and available. Purchasing computers immediately prior to this era required setting aside thousands of dollars to place the order, waiting weeks if not months for your 486 or that shiny new Pentium, upgrading your modem or USR Courier firmware every fall – naturally, you wanted to consult more than the sales guy when parting with so much money or reading books (yes, books – thick ones with no pictures) to get up and running. Prior to this it wasn’t simply enough to want something and have money to buy it – you had all sorts of considerations and limitations in place. People had to find out if they were on copper or SLIC lines, they learned their distance from the central office or DMARC. 

This era ended with the ability to walk into Best Buy and walk out with everything you needed 20 minutes later.

With this mass availability of technology the biggest business for SMB consultants was connecting all these computers, printers and “the Internet.”

Primary business: LAN buildouts. Most of us made money on the side designing web sites, setting up an online presence, upgrading networks to Windows 95, NT4 and dreaming about XP.

SMB, The Cloud and 2003

This was the year that everything changed. Windows XP had taken off, Microsoft announced Office 2003 and SBS 2003.

For the first time, ever, it was the user that was put in charge. SBS 2003 was in fact designed to allow the business owner to manage things, not the IT department.

There was a catch here. Because things got so easy for people that were computer savvy, suddenly if you were in business but not on the Internet you were at a huge disadvantage.

Computers got cheap. Internet access got even cheaper. The demand for all things IT skyrocketed. We got mobile.

It also marked a gold rush of SMB IT jobs. Prior to this, most SMBs didn’t have an IT department, the closest they got to one was having one of the employees kids come after school to fix computer problems. But troubleshooting network connectivity wasn’t as easy as changing the screen resolution or creating desktop shortcuts. Enter the “IT Consultant”

This was also an era in which being an SMB IT Consultant went from a highly profitable hobby to an actual professional that had to talk about more than just technology. Because the job of connecting everyone and everything became more time consuming, it also became extremely expensive: justifying costs, explaining the tradeoffs, presenting alternatives and being a part of planning stages was the new norm.

It also shifted many of the existing companies from being technology enthusiasts to focusing on the business. The rise of VAR came from the rapidly declining costs of hardware, software and directly from the decrease in complexity. Because the costs started shifting from the cost of purchase to the cost of deployment and support, established SMB IT companies started reselling a lot more than just their time or their one vendor they were certified/authorized for.

Primary business: Network infrastructure. Beyond computers and monitors, IT in small business became less of a tool and more a part of the process. Margins on hardware declined but margins on support and billable hours exploded.

2004-2005 The Dawn of Cloud

Now even laptops were affordable. Internet was everywhere and it was free. It started showing up at Starbucks and McDonalds. Email became free and Google’s Gmail launched with 1GB of storage.

SMB IT started to mature and the support personnel that came with it was under more fire to respond quickly to problems and outages. Businesses started relying on technology more and demanded it on mobile devices. At home. On the road.

Assuring the uptime and eliminating ugly encounters with large service bills gave rise to managed services model. VARs could now get a more predictable level of revenue and eliminate the surprises that came with ad-hoc support.

The key here was that network control became decentralized: you no longer had to be in the office to work and the IT provider no longer had to stop by to fix the problems or perform maintenance tasks.

Primary business: VAR. The more dependent companies became on technology, the more stuff they bought and wanted it connected and sync’d to their existing infrastructure.

2005 – 2008 The Fall of Steel

As the small IT solution providers were building their management cloud, they were simultaneously discounting the relevance and eventual success of large software companies who no longer wanted middlemen at the gate. The entire SMB IT food chain turned from steel and towards services.

IT providers faced their second major growth challenge in a decade: maintaining technical expertise while supporting/migrating/project planning of legacy systems.

For the first time we no longer were preoccupied with the faster, newer processor or the next big OS – we were spending more time trying to keep the old stuff up.

It was also the beginning of the end. With software/hardware companies at odds with the clients and partners that dealt with the client issues, someone had to fix the problem.

Primary business: Support.

2008 The Fall of Bear Sterns & Global Depression. The rise of IT consumerism.

To this day, the most popular Vladville post is the one covering the fall of Bear Sterns that plunged us into a depression/recession. Almost immediately following March 16, 2008 folks stopped looking forward with technology as an investment and focused on it’s cost.

This was bad news for pretty much everyone. Large companies gutted their IT departments. Small companies froze projects, purchases and more.

This was the era of “Do we really need ___?”

This was the tipping point for the cloud in SMB. Up to this point, the sales were largely based on the solution fit and the new features that solved problems. The discussion went from buying something new and towards using something less expensive.

At the same time, technology became more personal and the division between work PC and home PC blurred with the new wave of smartphones, web sites and online services. The more cool stuff people used, the more of it ended up in the business.

Suddenly workers were not willing to wait for the IT department to get things online or to allow something that restricted their control – they just signed up for an online service and eliminated the middleman. In SMB, we were the middleman.

Primary business: Support.

2008 – 2011: Cloud, Cloud, Cloud

The title sums it up. IT providers, to both large and small companies, were dealing less with steel and cables and more with consumer devices, online services, hosted services and gadgets.

The era of buying something that would break and then cost you to fix it was replaced with the subscription service that (once it broke) could be substituted with another. When it was no longer needed it got handed down (iPod, iPad, iPhone) or repurposed.

Primary business: Pimpin’ – anything that could be marked up, measured or required IT assistance got a plan attached to it.

The Future

The future, or the end of the past I’ve outlined so far, is surprisingly similar.

The frustration of IT Solution Providers over not being able to move ahead quickly is met with the rapidly declining demand for their services. The consumers (not clients anymore) are willing to pay for certain services but that doesn’t make IT Solution Providers profitable or produce a reliable revenue stream. User friendly gadgets and user friendly online services seamlessly integrate with one another and with social networking and Google, solving problems is easier than ever.

The error margin is widening and tolerance for failure is higher as we have alternatives. If the computer is dead, you pick up your tablet. If it’s dead, you go to your smartphone. If you don’t have reception, you’re never too far from free wifi. Service companies get by without even posting a phone number on their web sites and support is peer based through social networking sites and forums. The value of the human interaction, while desirable, is not compensated enough for it to exist.

This is a far cry from a highly competent, highly skilled and full service IT solution provider. They are deemed too expensive. Meanwhile, a large cloud service provider loses tens of thousands of accounts and escapes without a scratch.

Let me make this clear: This is the end of IT Service Provider business as we’ve known it.

Without being able to pick the low hanging fruit (remote managed services) IT Solution Providers will find a harder time trying to pay off the huge investment in the tools and training they bought to build the business up in the first place. It’s not like all the servers and IT demands are suddenly going to disappear and be replaced by the iPad or the next Android tablet, but with the consumers ability to find quick and cheap alternatives the profitability and business viability of your typical IT Solution Provider is questionable.

That is a difficult thought to swallow but as you can read in this post, it is not the first time our industry and our profession has faced a challenge. What is new is that at some point the paths of software/hardware manufacturers and those that support their solutions diverged. The software/hardware manufacturers won – they are selling more stuff than ever but the support jobs that existed to get that technology in the hands of consumers aren’t needed. They made devices cheaper, software more reliable, user experience more friendly and the consultant unnecessary.

Everything has become a subscription service. There will still be edge cases, a slim minority that will either never be able to accept that or use it. But business is seldom about edge cases and IT services aren’t luxury goods.

It is time to take a good hard look at what makes money and what doesn’t, what sells and what doesn’t, and what the marketplace is actually demanding. In my career I’ve been blessed enough to build and sell computers with a $1,000 margin, collect thousands of dollars for a migration that took half a day, get thousands of dollars just for offering my opinion on a conference call and get paid for seeing the progress bar move from left to right.

Those days are gone. So is Vladville’s coverage and fascination with it. I have a month-long vacation coming up to reflect on the past decade of the fun in this business and look forward to coming back and talking about what’s next. In the meantime, I encourage you to sign up for our Own Web Now blog and Looks Cloudy site.

It never fails to surprise me how resourceful this blog is when I hit a wall. Last week I wrote a blog post about the genius use of default iPhone ringtone in Verizon’s commercials.. and Paul chimed in with the following:

Where I live, there’s no (read zero) cell service. ATT gave me a wonderful device to route my cell calls through the Internet.
I believe these are available everywhere now.
http://www.wireless.att.com/learn/why/3gmicrocell/

Well, I was early for a meeting with a partner this week so I walked by an AT&T store and decided to stop in and ask – AT&T is very vague about the device pricing, availability and even more confused about how it’s promoted. For example, I could have gotten the device for free if I agreed to a 2 year contract on the landline AT&T service (I live in CenturyTel territory).

Apparently, the device retails for $199.

This is apparently highly negotiable. In a single objection I was able to get it down to $99. I’m sure if I had more time I could have haggled it down further. All I brought up is that at $200 it would be easier for me to drop AT&T for Verizon and they’d also lose the remainder of my contract since you can walk away from a contract without penalties if you live in a no signal zone.

Setup

All it needs is power and an ethernet jack. Give it the cell phone numbers that you want to allow to be serviced through this device and as soon as they are in range, you’re switched to AT&T Microcell 3G provider. Works automatically on the iPhone and the Nexus One Android phone. It’s limited to 10 phones, presumably to keep it from being used in business environment where routing in-office cell calls via the local data connection could save a ton of money.

AT&T recommends putting it near a window, mine sits in my home office about 4-5 feet away from a window. The service has been solid, reception and call quality have been great.

Minutes and data do not count against your plan since they are going through your ISPs data connection.

I have not yet tested what happens if the cable modem goes down but it’s better than what we had before.

I’m often asked by people that are in growth mode just what the best investments and tools for making it big are. I too have unsuccessfully hopped from one piece of software to hardware through the years always in the search of something magical. 

Truth is, managing and growing a business is a complex combination of always being available, keeping track of every interaction and idea, keeping everyone else on track. Oh, and one more thing: paying attention to social conventions. Pull out a phone in a middle of a conversation or look at your laptop during a meeting and people will assume you are not paying attention. Older generations may even consider the move quite rude. It’s a rough terrain.

Here is what made my 2010 the most successful year, ever. Not to mention that I executed my entire 2010 and even half of my 2011 agenda in less than 10 months. How? Louis Vuitton Notebook & Apple iPhone 4

Luis Vuitton Notebook ($500 leather cover; $75 paper insert)

Not to say that this exact same task cannot be done by a $2 notebook, but keep in mind that the level of abuse this thing has taken is nothing short of immense. You know what your laptop looks like, and it has an aluminum or hard plastic shell. Imagine what would happen to a notebook. Mine looks brand new and thankfully, it was a present.

This is simply the most powerful tool I’ve had in 2010. I laid out my tasks at the beginning of every week and spread them out across the workweek. I could track progress quickly and never forget a thing.

Problem: This applies to almost all business owners. If you aren’t completely ADD to begin with, you soon will be. The nature of growing and managing a business is being pulled in 10,000 different directions at the same time. If you’re lucky to complete one thing before you get distracted by another, it’s a slow day.

So how did I do it? We make quarterly goals. Those are broken down on month-to-month progress checks. I further broke down what I needed to do on a weekly basis. Every week I would have a big task to complete and I would break it up into smaller parts. When I completed each task, I would check it. When something fell in my lap, I would add it to the list and just keep track of it.

I spent A LOT of time on the road and in meetings this year. This gave me an analog way of staying on top of things. It also gave me an opportunity to sketch out my ideas, draw things up and be creative away from the keyboard and the whiteboard.

From social standpoint, people don’t react as poorly to a notebook as they do to a phone or a laptop in a meeting. They don’t feel like you aren’t listening to them or not paying attention.

Apple iPhone ($300 up front, $1200/year)

I can’t really say enough good things about the iPhone. I used to have high hopes for the OneNote but I just found the paper a lot more flexible. Sharing? Snap a photo with iPhone and MMS/Email/Facebook/etc.

It seems a bit ridiculous but the phone has become a camera, a training tool, a marketing research tool (video), instant messenger even video phone calls.

I have spent most of 2010 on the road and I would not have been as productive without the iPhone. The key to this has been the battery life. The iPhone goes a day or more on full blast – video, email, text, IM, etc.

I do not say this lightly – the iPhone has been more important to me this year than any of my PCs, laptops or iPad’s.

Conclusion

The most important thing to getting things done is managing yourself and your time. This is difficult on it’s own, but it’s made far worse when everyone else is after your time too. Get some basic tools to help manage your life and your work.

Microsoft is set to launch Windows Phone 7 today. And by launch, I mean start talking about it openly – you’re not getting a Windows phone today.

Features and how it compares to Android and iPhone for the most part don’t matter as far as I’m concerned. People will still buy it, I have friends that still use Windows Mobile for some reason.

What really matters (for Microsoft, for the rest of us in the IT business) is the shelf life: How long will Microsoft stick with a failure?

Right now, Microsoft has received a cold shoulder from many developers, even with (supposedly) a lot of money being thrown down by Microsoft to bring the most popular applications to it. It’s biggest evangelists are questioning it in public. Competitor’s fans offer it praise. So many questions for a phone that isn’t in any consumer hands yet.

It took Apple 3.5 years to get to where they are. Android, about two. Neither platform is perfect but collectively they are crushing the Windows Mobile, Blackberry, etc.

The Reality

Microsoft may as well demo a fantastic phone tomorrow. Hey, there is a first time for everything! But the reality remains that most people will not develop for it. We certainly won’t be touching Windows Mobile for a long time. Why? There needs to be a demand for it. Right now, demand is elsewhere. That is where development happens. Microsoft can get into it by establishing and sticking with a mobile strategy for years. So far, that has not been the case.

People tolerate imperfection. I own a Porsche 911 4S convertible. It’s not a perfect car. It’s ridiculously overpriced, it has the shock absorption of a brick and all the comfort and spaciousness of a discount airline seat. Yet, I’ve always wanted one and I absolutely love driving it. In part due to too many 80’s movies, in part because “I’ve always wanted a 911.” – Nobody out there has ever said “I’ve always wanted a Honda CR-Z”. Ever. Why? Because it got introduced this year. Perfectionism and commitment are built over time. Porsche has gone from an economic initiative of the Nazi government (Hitler funded Porsche’s “car for everybody” in late 1930’s) and for over half the century Porsche has manufactured the 911.

Same with the likes of Corvette and Mustang.

Constant pursuit of perfection.

Microsoft’s mobile track record suggests anything but that – and the same guy that brought you the success of Windows Mobile all the way up to the Kin debacle (Andrew Lees) is in charge of Windows Mobile reporting directly to Balmer. Here is to hoping they have learned something.

This one is for my buddy Howard Cunningham (CEO of Macro Systems LLC, our go-to service provider in the Washington DC area) who has a unique challenge in backing up clients monster SAN. What Howard ran into, and the challenge we deal with all the time, is that there is just no “backup” once you get into a system that is beefy enough. You sort of put your faith into the controllers, drivers and the systems that are built for high density, high capacity storage.

If you run a business however, you don’t get “faith” deductions from your E&O insurance. So how do you back up a massive amount of data? Most of your “reasonably priced” storage systems require stacking of storage arrays. Stacking means expensive.

Is there a cheaper way? Yes, but you have to build it. Here is what we do:

Storage Array
areca ARC-1680IX-24 PCIe x8 SAS RAID Card – $1129
SUPERMICRO CSE-846TQ-R900B Black 4U Rackmount Server Case w/ 900W Redundant Power Supply – $999

Hard Drives

Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EADS 2TB SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″ Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive – $154

Or if you want to step up to enterprise storage:

Western Digital RE4 WD2003FYYS 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″ Internal Hard Drive – $299

So to sum it up, a 24 bay hotswap chasis with an enterprise grade storage controller, RAID6, etc will cost you $2,000 (or less, depending on reseller) and the hard drives will cost you between $3,696 for the general purpose and $7,176 for the enterprise grade drives. We opt for the FALS (non-enterprise) since they can have their firmware flashed and turned into WD RE3/RE4 ones. There, I just saved you $3k

Budget another $500 for the CPU, motherboard and gigabit network controller and you’ve got a ton of storage. Could you spend 10x as much? Absolutely, Dell will sell you a 15x 2TB MD1000 PowerVault for $18,000 barebone (no support, etc) while HP will charge you more than that for the 24x chasis alone (and just wait till you see the markup they charge on their drives – I’ll give you a hint, the quote comes with a pillow you can bite down when you see the total cost).

Can a case be made for the expensive primary storage built and backed by an enterprise manufacturer? Sure, we use Dell PowerVaults exclusively. Can the same case be made for the backup/failover systems? No, no it can’t. Unless money is not an issue and I’d just love to do business in that fantasy land

Unless it’s really, really fugly. I maintain that the new MacBook Pro and it’s light edition are fugly. Not that Apple can’t make beautiful stuff, again subjective, and I’d buy the Mac Air tomorrow if it could run a business OS at the core without being virtualized through MacOS. I don’t mean to hate but the OS is cute enough for a phone, not so much for anyone that extensively (ab)uses spreadsheets and 20-30+ browser windows at once.

Now this obviously didn’t sit too well with many of my Mac readers (I am shocked I have any to be honest) who dared me to say what I use as my laptop.

Dell XPS M1530

It cost me about $1200 for the midrange Core 2 Duo, 4 GB DDR, upgraded Nvidia video, highest resolution screen available, big battery (and extra standard battery when I’m not flying) and a few other accessories (TPM, fingerprint reader, webcam).

Is it perfect? Far from it. The aluminum-ish casing is basically a dirt magnet, the speakers at the top of the keyboard are a hair/dandrif/dog hair magnet and the screen are frustrating at times.

But the unit is light, it flies, it lets me do virtually anything I do on my desktop and most things actually flow a bit faster.

I’m not claiming it’s the most beautiful thing on the market (again, think that belongs to Air) but for the mix of beauty, functionality and size/weight along with a solid OS it’s pretty much the best. For what it’s worth, the unit has never blue screened.

I have previously mentioned that I cannot phantom possible use for the rise in the Mini-PC laptop world. You know, the kind where you have to hunch over like a squirrel about to devour a nut and contort your fingers in order to type anything while you sit 3″ away from the 7″ screen that you can’t make anything out on. Paired with the latest in the light-speed C7 chip not fit to power a middle school calculator watch, it really makes one wonder just who in their right minds would want one.

Then my mother pretty much makes me eat my words by asking for a small PC so she can chat and email now that she’s done working. My parents are typical middle aged couple that have postit notes and directions on what to click on, what to drag where and how to troubleshoot their home laptop. But there is unrest at the Sr. Mazek household – they have been fighting over the PC. My dad has been accusing my mom of messing up his computer. And now that they want to watch their grandson around the clock, mom wants a PC.

My first (mean) thought is to ask the folks in Dallas to pull one off the rack and ship it to her. I figure once they plug in one of the monsters and it blows them clear across the room they’ll stop asking. But I figured, OK, I’ll go find you a cheap laptop.

So I went and looked at Eee’s, and MSI Wind (which I wanted but they are all out of stock) and I ended up with Acer Aspire One since it was 1) In Stock 2) Cheap and 3) Had a webcam. About $300 or so, with 9″ screen, 120GB hard drive, 1.6 GHz Intel Atom, Windows XP Home, 0.3 Megapixel camera, bunch of USB ports (3) and connections, Ethernet (Gigabit lol), VGA out as well as a memory reader:

Here it is next to a can of coke and Red Bull. It’s tiny. That’s pretty much it’s only downside – it’s tiny. The keyboard is very hard to type on and the mouse pad sucks. Instead of Dell-style mouse tabs on the bottom it has them on left and right. However, when you tap the mousepad twice it does left click so it’s not as bad as it might appear.

Weight just about 2lb. Promises about two hours of battery. I am sure that assumes that no applications are open, that you’re running in BIOS, with the light display turned all the way down.

For $300, not bad. For more, you’re better off with a real laptop.

We’ve got your green right here.

As some of you have figured out already, OWN has committed to scaling out our other product lines to EU and Australia. This commitment came out of the loyalty we have received from our partners in UK and Australia and we are bringing Shockey Monkey, LiveArchive, Exchange 2007, Offsite Backups and Sharepoint over the Atlantic and Pacific, starting May 1st, 2008.

It’s not easy, being green

ExchangeDefender was our first and only global infrastructure project. We learned a lot in the process and with the desire to scale out the US-based services we wanted to do something that was wildly different from our strategy in United States. We are based in Texas, where everything is bigger, including the power. <sarcasm>If there was a global capital for tolerance, it would be Texas.</sarcasm> When we sat down to draw up the new global infrastructure, we wanted to change our 80lb, 3 AMP server habit and we started testing the green stuff. Surprisingly enough, there is quite a bit in the way of components that are green and still performance conscious.

Performance was our key concern. SuperMicro, Dell and other manufacturers provide greenish, power-effective, systems but they seriously lack on the horse power or space. But if you look a little harder, there are devices that are both sizeable and capable of performing well under the load.

For example, Western Digital manufactures a SATA2 3 GB/s drive, 1 Tb in size, that consumes 40% less power. Because it draws less power, it heats the chasis less (less cooling needed in the HD slots) and is overall more cost efficient. It spins at 5,400 RPM which is your average laptop drive, but under load speeds up to 7,200 RPM which is average for the desktop. For low intensity storage, low priority inserts, etc, we were able to adjust some of our own (read: poorly written) code to work on it quite well.

For their part, Dell also has a low power high performance solution in PowerEdge R200 for smaller nodes. It also has the PowerEdge 2900 III Energy Smart, about 2x the price of the regular model. For their part, SuperMicro brings forward a 1U server with a 260W power supply drawing less than 0.4 AMP at full blast. (if you don’t know me, this would be a great place to stop reading this post)

Texan by the grace of god..

So there you go, Own Web Now Corp has gone green. We felt that as guests in these nations we should start to be more respectful.

As for our beautiful home, crank that Dell: “Malaysian by birth, Texan by the grace of god”; We will continue to rack servers that weight more and consumer more power than a teenage girl because nobody wants to see that buffering text while waiting on pr0n to load. As vulgar as that may seem, it’s the truth, people pay for performance and convenience – and the market isn’t ready for the green.

Looks like it, at least according to Gizmodo’s tally of people that got the chance to play with it ahead of release.

I must admit, I want one and I’m sure the video on this device is awesome (having seen Vladfire on first gen) but $249 for me is a showstopper. Two years ago, sure. A year ago, maybe. But today I look at what $250 buys and a portable media device at $249 just seems like a mountain of cash.

I guess time will tell if this is the great player to dethrone Apple, but for the moment I’m sticking with my iPod Shuffle clippy.

The following is my personal review of the Digital Loggers, Inc Web Power Switch. Own Web Now Corp is a Digital Loggers, Inc customer that has paid for all the units in use, we/I have not been compensated or enticed to write this review in any way, it is offered to the general public as-is with no warranty.

I first found out about the Web Power Switch from Randall Richardson from our partner MicroLogix Information Systems. He spoke about this $89 power switch on one of the forums and I initially dismissed it as a joke as we’re an all APC company. We have tried a number of power switches over the years but only APC ever lived up to the promise, even given the price tag. But less than a $100 for an industrial quality 15 AMP power switch? Might as well give it a shot.

And I did. Ironically enough, we already used DLI products in one of our remote data centers. One of our DC partners provides a Digital Loggers, Inc Ethernet Power Controller II which has a number of cooler features albeit at a higher price. So, what do you get for $89?

First, the Web Power Switch comes with a standard plug, meaning you can just plug it into your current battery power supply or other PDU. It includes 8 remotely controllable ports and two unswitched (always on) ports that are not controlled over the web. The unit itself is sturdy and loud, believe me, you hear it when the port is switched on/off. Top of the unit has several controller lights, indicating system status, remote access and power. Side of the unit has a 10/100 network port and a power switch. Aside from a registration postcard, that’s all you get.

The main screen (Outlet Control) is pretty simple and self-explanatory.  It shows you a list of what is connected to each switched port and gives you an option to either switch the port on/off or cycle (reboot). You can also shut off/on all outlets or cycle the outlets sequentially one at a time.  On the cheap ($89) unit I found that the cycle does not work – it shuts the server off but does not power it back on. However, on/off works. Cycle also works perfectly on the more expensive power switch.

Setup is straight forward as well. First, you can configure outlet names so you know what is connected to which switch port. Network configuration and authentication credentials are also pretty simple to configure. One caveat is that the switch is HTTP only, meaning all data sent to it is sent in clear text. If that bothers you, you can always put the power switch on the private network and there is a setting in network configuration that allows you to only accept connections from the local subnet.

Finally, there is some control over the behavior of the device itself. You can enforce password lockouts. You can control how the device behaves after it comes back from a power loss state. There is also a handy list of links.

On an upgraded model, one with Autoping for $37 more, you can also setup the web power switch to ping the target host and reboot it. As you can tell from the reboot counts, we’re making ours pay for itself.

In closing

If its in the budget, go for the more expensive switch. The more expensive switch has all the features described here along with an auto reboot built in plus it gives you access control. The device is simply accessed with an htaccess authentication prompt and can be easilly scripted whereas the $89 web power switch requires you to to authenticate as a form post first.

The verdict: You’ve got to be kidding me, right? First, a 15 AMP switch tends to cost well over $100 even for the ghetto brands like Triplite. To have those ports remotely controllable, with authentication, with autoping.. $89 is a steal. If it even saves you one after-hours emergency trip to reboot a server it will more than pay for itself. No, it’s not APC but you can’t spend $89 any better than this.