Please take a minute to introduce yourselves. Matthew Taylor: I’m vice president of managed services and IT/IS operations for ViaWest. My group manages both internal systems and infrastructures, as well as the managed service products that we offer to our customers.
Mike Poole: I’m a senior Windows Architect on the product team at ViaWest, and also fill the role of Enterprise Windows architect. I spend a lot of my time working on developing Microsoft-based products that will benefit ViaWest and our customers.
Can you tell us a little about the ViaWest business and services you provide? Matthew: We were founded in 1999, and have been in business for almost 10 years, and we have just over 200 employees. We are a colocation and managed hosting provider with 16 data centers in five states: Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Texas, and Oregon.
During our life as a company we have performed 17 acquisitions. Over the past two years we have implemented quite a few technologies that we now offer to customers as standard products. Needless to say we have seen tremendous growth and have to have products and services which can scale with this kind of growth.
We offer co-location services and pretty much any kind of managed service you can imagine on top of those co-location services. We’re one of only a handful of companies that can truly provide these kinds of services. You offer Windows and Linux managed services. Which Linux distros do you support? Matthew: We support Red Hat versions 4 and 5. We do not support any other Linux distros.
That’s interesting. Many hosters offer the free Red Hat derivative, CentOS. What can you tell us about your decision to host subscription-based Red Hat? Matthew: In order to deliver a managed services experience that differentiates us, we have to standardize on the solutions that we offer. We do get requests for other distros, but when we talk it through with customers, they are very happy to use a platform that we are comfortable supporting.
For customers that really need a different distro, we offer straight co-location services, which allows them to run any operating system they choose, but we’re not providing the same managed services in that scenario.
For managed services, you offer Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Windows. How do the reliability of those platforms compare? Is there any difference in the Service Level Agreements you offer between the platforms? Matthew: There’s no difference in the SLAs between platforms. Windows is every bit as reliable, and, as of late, we are seeing more demand for the Windows platform than for Linux.
What about from a partner perspective? Do you get benefits from Microsoft as a partner, compared to Linux? Matthew: Absolutely. We receive significant support from Microsoft. It’s something that Microsoft is invested in. Microsoft definitely recognizes the importance of their partners. Red Hat just does not currently have the same model when it comes to partners.
Microsoft is much more focused on the partner channel, making sure there’s a good relationship, there are solid marketing materials that can be utilized, offering help when necessary, being willing to be a partner offering up professional services to help the business and being able to offer better, all encompassing solutions for the customers.
What directory services do you offer in your mixed environment?
Mike: We spent a good amount of time looking into directory services to determine what would best serve our customers. We want to offer them a shared directory service environment and we decided, working with the Linux engineers here, to go with Windows Active Directory as an integrated directory service. Microsoft’s solution just made more sense. Windows Active Directory is easy to use and administer, so right now we’re actually utilizing it for both our Red Hat systems and our Windows systems. The interoperability is very good.
We sometimes run into people who say, “Windows isn’t secure.” As a hoster, this is your business. How do you feel the security of Windows compares to Linux? Mike: That is definitely something you hear people say all the time, that Windows is not a secure platform, it blue screens, etc. But working in a hosting environment for the last three years, that’s just not what I’ve seen.
What we’ve become accustomed to seeing is that Windows is actually as secure, or more secure, than the Linux OS. One thing that we see with our Linux servers that we don’t see with Microsoft, and it was a shock to me when I came into the hosting environment, is compromised boxes. In my three years in hosting, I have not personally seen any Microsoft comprised boxes, but I’ve heard and seen numerous cases of Linux servers being compromised. Would you mind expanding on that? People just seem to take it at face value that Linux must be much more secure. Mike: I agree. I had that perception myself before coming into the hosting/managed services industry. I never would have imagined running Windows and IIS would be so secure.
Matthew: I’ve been in the technology industry as CIO for five or six different companies, and I’ve worked as the virtual CIO for about 10 or 15 different companies. Microsoft got a bad security reputation five or six years ago. Honestly, it was warranted, but Microsoft has really changed and is making very secure products. The issue is some technologists have not let go of those perceptions.
You’re thinking of way back in 2001 with Blaster, Slammer, Code Red, etc? Matthew: Correct. But it’s not like Microsoft just stood still after that happened. Technology changes monthly and you have to keep your mind open. There are technologists who are zealots, and will latch on to any reason to hate Microsoft, or even love Microsoft, but if you’re not constantly evaluating technology, with an open mind, you just won’t be successful in this industry. How can there possibly be an advantage in holding onto a belief when it’s no longer true?
What’s your experience with keeping systems patched? Mike: Microsoft releases patches on a fixed schedule, and personally, I really like that. Having a known schedule makes it very easy for us to communicate with our customers. We don’t roll patches out the instant Microsoft releases them. We spend about two weeks where we run the patches on our internal test servers, and also to monitor things just to make sure that no one else is running into any issues with the patches. But I haven’t seen any issues in recent history with Microsoft patches. We have not had any customers have compatibility issues with the patches at this point.
In the Linux community, I hear about patches being released very, very quickly—sometimes the same day. But I don’t think people realize that hosters are rarely in a rush to roll out patches. From a business perspective, what’s important? Speed? Quality? Mike: We deal with so many customers and so many servers, that prematurely pushing a patch can be just as devastating as an exploit, maybe more devastating. It’s easy to just set the server up to automatically push out the patches, and be done with it, but we just have too much on the line with our customers to do that. We’re just not seeing any issue with giving the patches time to bake. We’re not seeing exploits, and trust me, if our customers were getting hit with exploits, we would definitely know about it.
Matthew: I oversee the Linux and Windows engineers, so I have a little more exposure to what you are asking. I would agree that patch quality is much more important than speed.
I think this also gets back to why we are seeing more Microsoft customers today than we may have in the past. In the past, our customer base was a self-funded or venture capital funded firm that was running on the bleeding edge, making changes very fast, and at times, not having the controls and processes in place that best practices would demand. They were more willing to take risks in the interest of reducing cost and increasing speed so they often favored Linux. We would roll out something like a PHP patch to the Linux systems, and the patch would not have the needed level of quality and testing. Couple that with the nature of those customers to build applications in a quick but non-standard way, and we see environments struggle or break. As you move up into the SMB customers, they have more controls and processes, and they are more interested in Windows as a less risky platform. Microsoft is very good with the quality of patches, and that helps us service our customers with greater confidence. With Windows Server 2008, Microsoft has invested in making the AMP stack (Apache, MySQL, and PHP) run well on Windows. Do you have customers interested in that? Matthew: Personally, I find it very intriguing, but I don’t think most of our customers are aware that this is really a viable option. There is the perception that this platform is supposed to run on Linux. I first became aware of this trend at this year’s Microsoft Partner Conference. Since then, I’ve looked into it and mentioned to customers that they might get better performance on a Windows box, I have to admit, I have gotten some strange looks. People just aren’t aware of this option.
I think it will be especially interesting for companies that are mostly Windows and have a little bit of Linux. There are lots of organizations that are currently in a situation where they have to keep a couple Linux engineers on staff. If they could run those Linux applications on Windows, standardize on one OS, and support everything with their Windows administrators, this would intrigue customers. Are there things in Windows Server 2008 that have caught your attention from the perspective of a hoster? Matthew: There are a lot of new capabilities that we look forward to utilizing. In the virtualization space, we are pushing out our virtualization product over the next 45 days. We are starting with VMware as the initial virtualization product, but we will have a multi-tier approach, and the new Microsoft virtualization platform is quite interesting. We are currently going through prototyping, determining long term virtualization product sets and how Microsoft will be part of that mix.
Mike: I came back from TechEd in Orlando, and that’s where I really started seeing a lot of interest in IIS 7. IIS 7 is perfectly set up for our hosting environment. There are so many new features in IIS7, such as configuration files that can be shared across servers, manageability features, and the ability to lock it down, and allow management outside of the company on a per-site level. I personally think that we’re going to have customers in the near future knocking on the door specifically for IIS 7 and the features that come with it.
Any final thoughts? Will: I have seen a remarkable amount of growth on the Microsoft side in the 13 years that I have been doing this, and I honestly expect that to continue to be the case. We are excited about where Microsoft has taken Windows, and we look forward to great things. I do not say that lightly. If you would have asked me those questions ten years ago, I would have been more dubious, but I am really happy to see that Microsoft has moved forward their Web technologies as much as they have.
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