Darin, could you give us a summary of your position at VIA Networks? Darin Elkins: I'm the president and managing director of VIA Networks. I've been with the company for about six and a half years now. I started as a systems administrations manager and moved up through the operations side of the business to my current position.
What's the breakdown on Linux versus Windows-based offerings in your business? Darin: From a revenue standpoint, about 90% of our business comes from supporting Microsoft solutions and only about 10% is from Linux based environments.
What do you think in general about the process of keeping a Linux-based infrastructure appropriately patched? Darin: It is very difficult to keep up with all the patches in the open source community, because you have got fifteen different people or more patching their own project or a piece of a larger project. So who knows when that obscure PHP patch you are waiting for will come out? From a business standpoint it takes a lot of time and energy to keep track of the numerous different patches on your own.
And when customers start authoring PHP-based applications, you can't simply just patch PHP on their server. You may have a patch that works perfectly in one environment; however it might break another customer's application. Due to the lack of continuity or standards in the Open Source community It is very hard to stress test patches across all the different PHP implementations that might be in use in a given hosting environment. I bring up PHP specifically because it is one of the most difficult technologies to keep patched. In relativity it isn't really a patch each time—just an upgrade to the last version that has a patch included. And again we are faced with the same situation, maybe a customer's PHP site will work with the new version and maybe it won't.
On the contrary, if someone is writing code in ASP.NET and Microsoft releases a patch or Service Pack for ASP.NET, it's an actual patch, and we are relatively sure that once applied the customer's code and site are still going to work.
So what do you think about the overall quality of the patches that Microsoft generates? Darin: I feel extremely confident when applying a patch from Microsoft. I have been managing Windows-based patching for nine years, and I have found that there are very few patches that will break our customers' applications or sites. However you do occasionally run into something that is affected by a patch, but in most cases it is a custom application that has gone 'off the reservation' in terms of the approach they took to developing it. It is very rare to see Microsoft release a patch that breaks anything at all. So, all in all, I have a pretty high confidence level in the patches that Microsoft releases.
Some in the Linux community would say that Microsoft doesn't issue patches early or often enough. What would you say to that? Darin: Patching is just one component to safeguarding our customers systems. In all honestly, we are far more concerned about maintaining the stability of our clients' sites. To us it is more important to ensure that their environment is up and stable than it is to make sure some obscure port overflow error is patched instantaneously.
What differences have you seen when it comes to managing Linux and Windows-based platforms? Darin: With Microsoft they have taken a holistic approach to system management. The term they use to describe this is the 'Ecosystem'; in terms of managing your entire system, backing it up, patching, monitoring and doing all the things you need to do to fully manage it.
In our experience, Microsoft's management tools work very well with each other. On the Linux side, different Linux-based management tools do not always work well together and you spend a lot of time trying to get them to integrate.
You're a partner in the Red Hat Hosting Program. What benefits does being in that program bring to your business? Darin: At the end of the day, we want to work with a corporation that will stand behind their product. I do not want to put our company in the position where we are support a product with no governing body or accountability. We offer a premium product over some other organizations in this space, which can be highly commoditized. We are not selling on price point; we are selling more on quality. Therefore, the cost to participate in the Red Hat Hosting program is not a factor for us.
We see value in the support we receive and some more control around how patches are managed. Especially compared to the model of patching you see with community-backed efforts, which are a bit 'wild west,' and the process is left up to the individual, so each group has its own set of patches. PHP has its own patches, and MySQL has its own set of patches. There is no single organization unifying the patches and distributing them appropriately. So with Red Hat, we see a bit more structure around their patching process compared to other more community-backed projects out there.
What ways have you seen Red Hat work productively to help you build out your business in terms of training, leads, etc? Darin: In the sense of directly sending business our way no. However we feel that by participating in their partner program and the Red Hat logo on our site does validate our commitment to brand and quality.
What about your relationship with Microsoft as a partner? What are your feelings there? Darin: Microsoft is a big organization, and that means sometimes you have to prod them a bit, but once you get their attention they are relatively responsive. Microsoft has been very cooperative at the Regional level and the Corporate Level and takes a real interest in helping our business grow.
In closing, what differences have you seen between Windows- and Linux-based hosting at a platform level? Darin: With Linux, there is almost too much flexibility. On the Red Hat side, there about a billion different ways you could do exactly the same thing. So it's a process of trying to corral things in an effort to give some structure to things that don't really have any structure to begin with. Linux is supposed to be free and you're supposed to do what you want with it, or that's the theory. But from a business standpoint, when you are trying to productize an offering and reproduce it for different customers, all those options don't really net out to a positive.
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