Take a minute to introduce yourselves. Ed Osckar: I’m Ed Osckar, the co founder and co owner of Wowrack.com. We've been in business since 2001. I'm an MCSE myself, and I do a lot of the Microsoft infrastructure and Microsoft technical stuff in our company.
I do some sales and marketing, and operations, but I love the technical stuff, so from time to time I still dig in and do the dirty work. I was educated right here in the Seattle area. I have a business degree from Seattle University and a master's degree in information systems from Seattle Pacific University. Wowrack has been in business for about seven years. We've grown from a small mom and pop dedicated hosting company, to providing a lot more products and services, such as co-location, bandwidth services, IT professional services, network designs, and things like that. A lot of the time, I'm also the project manager and network lead designer for new client projects. Ed Kimm: I’m Ed Kimm, and I'm a partner in Wowrack as well. I also manage projects, but I’m more on the business side, and Ed Osckar is more on the technical side. I deal with a lot of the contracts and client relations, business development, establishing key vendor partnerships, sales and marketing.
How many employees do you have? Ed Osckar: We have 16 employees worldwide.
What Linux distributions do you offer? Ed Osckar: We run just about everything, but the most common are Fedora, Red Hat, and CentOS. We have some BSD, BDN, Slackware, and even Ubuntu.
Do you find that Linux distributions are basically the same, or are there significant differences that present challenges? Ed Osckar: That's actually a very interesting question. We find it challenging to manage all those different systems. They're kind of the same, but just different enough so that the way you do something on one distro isn’t exactly the same way you do it on a different distro.
Our engineers definitely develop preferences. One might love CentOS or Fedora Core, and another really swears by Slackware or Ubuntu.
But it is a challenge for us, because now we have to keep all these different images. We have five different distributions, rather than one single distribution. We have a lot of high-traffic clients on these systems, and some of them are more manageable and modular than others.
For example, CentOS has the Yum updater, which is similar to Windows Update; it goes to the Internet and grabs all the updates. However, it has also been known to cause a lot of problems for some of our customers, because it just updates the system automatically, and on CentOS that often breaks applications. How does Windows compare to that? Ed Osckar: Personally, I feel it's much easier and much more centralized, especially with all these new tools that Microsoft has come out with for Windows Server 2008, and even Windows Server 2003.
It sounds like you’re saying that Linux, being composed of all these separate projects, each with its own philosophy regarding patches and backwards compatibility, makes Linux overall more brittle? Ed Osckar: Yes, that is absolutely correct. And if you look some of these distributions, they are waiting for the bigger guy, like a Red Hat, to do an upgrade of something big like the kernel, and then they will follow that.
This means that fixes for bugs and vulnerabilities take more time to make it through. The people working on the Linux kernel project may say it’s fixed, but it’s not fixed in our customers' systems, because you can’t just roll the whole kernel forward, or other big pieces, without real testing.
As a hoster, we are also dealing with a lot of different hardware, especially server hardware. Driver issues are becoming a big headache for us, because what is available for one version of one distribution doesn't work for another distribution. Our engineers spend a lot of time reverse-engineering, just to make things work.
And that’s part of what differentiates Wowrack, correct? You really let customers make a lot of choices for their systems.
Ed Osckar: Yes, that is correct. Whatever a customer wants, we give it to them. Whatever distributions they want, whatever they want for management tools, we’ll provide that for them. This extends to the hardware, as well. The customer can mix and match processors, memory, hard drive size, or hard drive RAID levels, network gear, load-balancing gear, and firewalls. Whatever the customer is comfortable with, we're most likely going to provide. There are some setups we’ll recommend, but we’ll provide whatever they want.
And you see that sometimes a particular distro doesn’t have a driver for a certain piece of hardware? Ed Osckar: That is absolutely correct. In order to stay competitive, we offer some of the latest hardware, whether that’s the latest Intel hardware, RAID cards, even motherboards. We’ll put together a new system, with the latest hardware, and then we’ll load something like Ubuntu on it, and see all these driver problems. For whatever reason, we have the most trouble with RAID card drivers.
If I compare that to Windows, I’d have to say Microsoft is one of the best, if not the best, in terms of driver support. People just don’t generally release hardware without Windows drivers.
When you run into problems on Linux, how do you go about solving them? Ed Osckar: A lot of Linux is only supported by the community. You get on Google and look for someone else having the same problems. This usually shows up in discussion groups or forums. Even for commercial distributions, we don’t usually bother calling the vendor. We usually get better support doing our own searching for someone who’s actually seen the same problem.
With Microsoft, we first look at the TechNet Web site, or support.microsoft.com, but if we really hit a wall, especially since we’re a Microsoft partner, we just pick up the phone and call them. And what’s the experience like when you do call Microsoft? Ed Osckar: I've actually had really, really good experiences. A lot of people think, “Oh, they’re a big company. They’re probably not really going to take care of you. They couldn’t give really personalized attention.” Trust me, I've worked with them on issues that really take a lot of investigation on their side. They are always really, really courteous and follow up really, really well. They don't seem to point fingers at any other vendors or anything like that, which is great, because if vendors start pointing fingers, it’s very frustrating.
Microsoft doesn't tend to do that. Even if they kind of know that something else is the problem, they just work through it. So my experiences have been extremely good, and we’re exceptionally happy with Microsoft support. Here’s how it often plays out on the Linux side. Hardware problems are very common, especially with new hardware. We spend a few hours, maybe even a few days, working to figure things out. However, the business environment is extremely fast paced. Our customers often need a resolution almost immediately. They have to stay online, so often, we simply don’t have the time it takes to work through the community and reverse-engineer a resolution. Often the solution is, “Let’s just switch to other type of hardware that we know is going to work,” or “Let’s migrate to a different Linux distro that we know works with this hardware.” On the software side, it’s very common for Apache, PHP, or even a kernel update to be slightly incompatible with a customer’s software. We often end up just rolling back to the version that we know worked. Normally, we recommend that clients set up a good test environment. That gives us more time to find the issues and really work through them to get a resolution, but even then, it’s not uncommon to have to say, “This just isn’t going to work with your software and these particular versions of Linux, Apache, and PHP, or this particular piece of hardware.” You support a number of free Linux distributions, as well as Windows, which obviously has a licensing cost. How does software cost factor in to your business? Ed Osckar: The cost isn’t really an issue. With the Service Provider License Agreement (SPLA), Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition is only $18 a month, which is very affordable. I think SQL Server is $50 per month. We pass that cost along to our customers, and they’re more than happy with that pricing. That cost is a very, very minor factor, and it’s easy to sell Microsoft solutions.
What about hiring? Is it easier to find people with Windows skills? Ed Osckar: For us, yes, it is harder to hire someone with good skills on the Linux side.
We noticed that you’re a Microsoft partner. What benefits does that provide? Ed Osckar: We are a gold certified partner, and that definitely helps with sales. We bring that up when we’re talking to potential customers, and it definitely helps. It’s proof that we know what we’re doing.
We also get free support. If we have a critical issue, this is really beneficial. Microsoft definitely takes care of their partners, and that helps us take care of our clients. Microsoft really invests in helping partners succeed. We also get a lot of free software licenses as part of the partner program. How does that compare with someone like Red Hat? Do they offer similar benefits through a partner program? Ed Osckar: No. Even with Red Hat, you have more success turning to the online community as your first step in getting a quick resolution.
Talk a little about how the security of Windows and Linux compares. Ed Osckar: Security is a really important issue for us, because we’re connecting servers directly to the Internet. Back in the NT4 and Windows Server 2000 days, there were some legitimate concerns about security, but those have really gone away starting with Windows Server 2003, and now everything is pretty secure right out of the box.
You see these tech articles in magazines, and they always seem to say, "Oh, Linux is more secure than Windows," but with my experience as a hoster, I feel that a lot of times the opposite is true. When we see servers being breached, eight out of ten times, it’s the Linux servers. Thanks for taking some time to chat with us. Ed Osckar: Thank you.
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