Eric and Brady, give us some background on Opus Interactive and your roles there. Eric: I am the CTO. I manage the day-to-day operations of the facility and all the staff necessary to keep our data center and our hosting and managed services running. Opus Interactive is a managed service provider as well as an Internet Service Provider. We focus on managed services; we do a good deal of virtualization and virtual cluster projects for clients, and we do straight co-location. We are also a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner.
Brady: I am the data center operations manager for Opus Interactive. I oversee the nitty-gritty day-to-day operations of provisioning, support, architecture, and design for the equipment we operate in our data center.
What benefits have you gained from being a Microsoft Partner? Eric: I originally started looking into partnerships with large companies back in 1999. We started out as a Microsoft Certified Partner and now we are a Gold Certified Partner.
In terms of benefits, it was nice to get MSDN and TechNet subscriptions. That helped us on the development side of the business. Also, just letting potential and current customers know that we are a Gold Certified Partner has benefits. It's worth every penny of that $1,450 check we write every year, plus the effort it takes to put in references and make sure everyone is certified at Opus. We also take advantage of the Microsoft Service Provider License Agreement (SPLA). The agreement allowed us to roll out applications and services quicker and report the licenses we used on a monthly basis. We also wanted to get the security solutions competency and the networking infrastructure competency, and having attained those has really sets us apart from the competition. We get recognition for being good at what we do on the Microsoft side of the business, and having Microsoft stand behind us is great. We believe in what we do with Microsoft products, so it’s natural to back it up with the certifications and the partnership we have with Microsoft; it shows our customers that we really do know what we are doing and that we mean business. What platforms does Opus Interactive offer other than Microsoft Windows? Brady: Because we are a managed service provider in addition to a provider of shared Web hosting services, we support the platforms that a majority of our clients want: UNIX, Linux, and Windows. We support Red Hat, and CentOS servers for Linux, and we support FreeBSD. And, of course we support software like Apache, PHP, and other common hosted software.
How do Windows and Linux patching differ? Brady: Windows has had the Windows Update Service for years. On the Linux/UNIX side, they are getting there — as far as automated updates.
With Linux/UNIX you’ve always had the freedom to compile software from scratch, but in my opinion, that's nothing more than a series of headaches to get patches in place compared to Windows. Linux is finally getting to a point where you can automate some of that updating process, but with Windows we have had the ability to do that per system or from a centralized server for a while. We just don't have the same headaches with Windows. Eric: Microsoft has automated that for us so we do not have to do updates server by server. We download all the patches to our one update server, which then does the work of pushing those patches out to hundreds and hundreds of other servers. That is really nice, to be able to push out the patches to all of those machines from the local network.
What is your comfort level with applying the patches that come from Microsoft? Brady: I definitely trust that the patches will apply and not affect other things on the server. I can honestly say that I do not have that level of trust with Linux.
Eric: We definitely trust Microsoft on that. We do watch all the security bulletins and make sure we are aware of critical updates. If there is something critical, we can take care of it in an immediate maintenance window, if necessary, even the same day. However, for the most part Microsoft releases patches on Tuesday, and we roll them out the following Wednesday.
Considering you provide both Linux and Microsoft Windows to customers, what are the differences when it comes to supporting those systems? Eric: I would say that with Red Hat it’s different, because we do pay them for enterprise support. But on the FreeBSD side, we have to rely on ourselves and the community to find the answers to issues. We have to be a leader. We make sure to blog or post when we come across solutions for a problem. We want to make sure to share that information with the community. How many times have you read a forum where someone’s asked the exact same question you have, but no one has actually answered it?
I would also say that the one thing that is nice about the partnership with Microsoft is the critical business support. The experience of getting through the call trees is seamless. It is very nice. They find the right team for whatever you are working on. They work around the clock, 24/7, to help you get something back up and running. We have had to do that a couple of times with systems in the past. That is hands down a great experience. It’s not a five-hour wait time to get through the queues and delays you might find elsewhere. It is clear that Microsoft made a commitment to having the right support in place, especially for us as a hosting and managed services provider. There is a philosophy that computers should be hard. If they're hard, then you have to know what you're doing and you'll do things right. What do you think about that? Brady: I can see people buying into that logic, especially if you're a top-tier tech. But you've got companies like Microsoft, Apple, and others trying to make the operating system simple, and sometimes people don’t want to pay for that, or even feel threatened by that.
If you look at it from a business perspective, I cannot be throwing an $80,000 tech at every problem. I just cannot. People only want to pay so much for a Web site, and typically, that amount does not cover me spending excessive time managing our servers. It is different if you have a single Web site on a single server, but what if you have 250? I shouldn't have that many high-level techs sitting around working on this little problem, or that little problem, like I seem to with Linux. What else have you noticed about rolling forward to new releases on the LAMP stack versus Windows? Brady: With LAMP, you roll forward to the latest point release to get security fixes in place. If you look at the change log, you're getting security fixes that are sometimes bundled with feature changes.
With Windows, patches are generally just security or bug fixes. You don't have the feel that you're being pushed forward to a whole new point release just because you installed a hot-fix. On the LAMP side, you roll out a security fix and now you no longer perform actions using a given function, that's obsolete and you have to use a different function, and that’s when people’s code breaks. I wonder, "Why am I getting function changes when I just need security fixes?" We don’t run into that with the .NET Framework and Windows. How do the .NET Framework and PHP compare as development platforms? Brady: I feel that the .NET Framework is far more advanced, from end-to-end, than something like PHP. PHP is getting there. They did make big improvements going from version 4.0 to 5.0 in areas that needed improvement.
The .NET Framework is a bit more prescriptive in how it asks you do things, and that is a good thing. PHP gives you many ways to do the same thing. For example, with PHP there is an option called “safe mode” that you can turn on or off based on how your application is written. I look at that and think, “Wait, set one way the application is secure, and set another way the application is not secure. Why would you allow people to write an application that way?" From a security standpoint, it is just somewhat ridiculous, in my view. But half the applications I deal with on the PHP side don't work in safe mode. Just to wrap up, do you feel there is a productivity difference between the platforms? Brady: For us, definitely. On Linux I have to know how to do things four different ways because of the different approaches that different distributions use. On Windows, there's one way to perform a task. You can certainly argue that it’s simpler to do things in a Windows environment than in a similar Linux environment.
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