Tweet

By: OpenSRS Team on December 23rd, 2008
Posted in: Announcements
Tags: Holiday Hours
Comments: 0

Well, as 2008 comes to a close, many of us are taking time away to spend with our loved ones, and so we have some reduced service hours to let you know about.

The table below lists the department along with any special holiday hours.

We’d all like to wish you a very safe and happy holiday season and best wishes for a prosperous new year!

Thanks to Michael Pereckas for the USB Snowman photo!

Tweet

By: Rick Yazwinski on December 19th, 2008
Posted in: Inside OpenSRS
Tags:
Comments: 0

I’m going to tip my hand early:  Sun’s new Open Storage platform is really sweet.

Ok, now that that’s out of the way, let me give you some background.

We first heard from Sun about the new Open Storage platform in April of 2008. The concept of mixing solid state drives (SSD) with SATA drives in a variety of configurations sounded really good, but our experience with Sun’s NFS products in the past had been less than stellar on the performance front.  When it comes to our business, especially the email side of the business, storage performance over NFS is critical. So in the past, Sun’s (and StorageTek’s) solutions were always left behind in favour of other providers (read: Netapp).

In October, Lucian Florea (our Director of Technical Operations and Planning) and I were down in the Valley talking to Sun about Tucows and OpenSRS, our challenges, and their solutions. Mike Shapiro and Victor Walker took us through a demo of the platform – it was real!  The web UI for managing the platform, replication, SSD, the low price; it was all there. This was, of course, still pre-launch, but Victor generously offered us an engineering evaluation unit to put through the wringer. I have to tell you, it was difficult to contain my excitement: in Canada, you get accustomed to waiting MONTHS before hardware released in the US is available north of the border, never mind getting a pre-release platform on site for extensive testing!

Since early November we’ve been putting the platform through progressively more demanding tests. Tests that many vendors fail miserably and which cause us to immediately halt further testing. Tests in which previous Sun/StorageTek equipment has not fared particularly well.

We start with Bonnie++, a tried and true disk subsystem benchmark suite. It’s interesting to note here that the Toro (Sun 7410) was very comparable to a Netapp 3040 in performance and beat the 3040 in many of the tests.

We next move on to a suite of tests using tools we’ve built to simulate the email storage subsystems: many threads, many directories, and huge numbers of files in the directories being randomly created, read, stat’d and deleted.  Many vendors have serious problems when directories become heavily populated. The 3040 has a serious performance hit when there are more than 1,000 files in a directory (the exact number is unclear, but somewhere between 1,000 and 5,000 files performance really drops off). I was happily surprised to see that the Toro we tested didn’t suffer a performance penalty until there were over 100,000 files in a directory and even then the hit was pretty minor.

We’re now working on getting the hardware deployed into our dev/qa environment for email so we can run our email platform on a Netapp drive side by side with the Open Storage hardware for some direct application comparison testing. If  that goes well, we’ll progress to our production test environment and then to limited production deployment on test mailboxes. Finally, if all this testing goes well, we’ll have the ability to slowly introduce the Sun platform into production. This is a painstakingly slow process, but it’s necessary to ensure the stability and performance of the OpenSRS platforms.

I’ll close with a reiteration of my opening:  I’m really impressed with this platform.  Sun’s done an amazing job, and the Open Storage platform is going to shake the (largely ridiculously overpriced) enterprise storage market to its core. Keep up the great work!

Tweet

By: Adam Eisner on December 15th, 2008
Posted in: Reseller Resources
Tags:
Comments: 2

One of my favourite destinations for free, timely market research on domain names is VeriSign’s Domain Name Industry Brief. VeriSign, the registry operator for .COM, .NET and other popular extensions, puts a lot of resources into producing these Briefs, which are quarterly reports focusing on the state of the domain name industry. VeriSign also periodically releases special reports on specific topics, such as the state of the domain name market in Latin America and the Domain Name Primer, an in-depth look into how domain names work.

Earlier this month VeriSign released their last Brief of the year, which as usual was packed with all sorts of interesting facts. I always encourage our customers to read these Briefs, as they’re often full of data that can help our customers grow their businesses. For example:

• According to this quarter’s brief, the top five ccTLD registries in Q3 by domain name base were: .CN, .DE, .UK, .NL and .EU. All of these represent large domain markets which are experiencing significant growth. These also happen to be easy domain extensions to introduce to your business using OpenSRS.
• In Q3 2008, the .COM/.NET renewal rate industry-wide was 72 percent. If your renewal rates don’t hover around 70 percent, it can be a signal that your business may be experiencing retention/satisfaction issues. You can monitor your renewal rates and other business facts using the “Advanced Business Reports” link in OpenSRS.
• A surge in online video viewership and use, combined with an increase in quarterly .TV registrations, is making the .TV increasingly relevant and useful. The .TV extension is another easy opportunity to introduce a new domain name into your sales process.

I find that the Brief is rather well-hidden on VeriSign’s site, and that each one is released with little fanfare. I highly recommend bookmarking the site and checking it quarterly; I’m sure many industry participants still have yet to discover this data gem.

Tweet

By: OpenSRS Team on December 10th, 2008
Posted in: Partners and Resellers
Tags: Meet the Resellers
Comments: 0

Devoted blog readers will remember that back in October, I posted an entry about my meeting with our Resellers in Iceland. Though the boss hasn’t let me travel since then, I have been in touch with some of our other Resellers and wanted to share some of their stories with you. This latest installment in the “Meet the Resellers” series features Eric Longman of zConnect. Eric was kind enough to answer some questions I sent him via email.

Eric Longman, zConnect

James McNally (JM): Eric, tell us how long zConnect has been doing business and about all the services you offer to your customers.

Eric Longman (EL): zConnect has been around for about 12 years now; we bought the company in 1999. The company was built on dialup Internet access and Windows-based hosting, and had about 50 (small) customers when we bought it.  Within a year, we had grown the customer base to something like 250 customers, and have been shifting the focus more toward small businesses. Today we’ve got more than 300 customers, and are focused entirely on small and mid-sized businesses (up to about 100 employees). We provide web and email hosting services, spam/virus filtering, web design and maintenance, and server co-location services.

JM: Where are you located and what makes it such a great place to do business?

EL: We’re located in Marietta, Georgia, just north of Atlanta. Atlanta is fantastic because there’s such a strong business community here, strengthened by several large universities in town (Georgia Tech, Georgia State University, Emory, Morehouse, Clark Atlanta, Spelman College, and others). There’s a strong entrepreneurial spirit in Atlanta, and a large market for our services.

JM: I understand you’ve been with OpenSRS since 2000. Can you describe what the domains business was like way back then. Any funny or interesting stories?

EL: We registered our first domain name through OpenSRS on February 17, 2000, and it was definitely like setting up shop in the wild west! The business models for selling domains were all over the map – some people signed up with OpenSRS so they could bundle domain registration with hosting plans (which was essentially where we were), while other companies built businesses specifically around selling domain names. We were so steeped in the notion that domains cost $35/year that it was unbelievable to be able to buy them for less than a third of that price. Everyone just seemed giddy about the possibilities.

At that time, the mail lists represented a fantastic community, with dozens of messages flowing back and forth daily. They positively crackled with discussion ranging from pricing and services to technical challenges and the competitive landscape. I think everybody felt like they were best friends with Scott Allan, Ross Rader, Tom McDonald and Chuck Daminato. Heck, I think there were resellers who cried when Chuck announced he was leaving Tucows!

One funny thing: We were probably the first Reseller to get the client code up and running on Windows servers, and actually published a HOWTO before Tucows even managed to get one online. In fact, for years, the semi-official HOWTO for setting up the client code on Windows was actually a link to a page on our website. We even created our own repository with the necessary Perl modules and made it available to the community. Improvements to the client code over the years obviated the need for our stuff, but it was kind of neat to be the “go to guys” for OpenSRS on Windows.

JM: How has your partnership with OpenSRS helped your company succeed?

EL: One of our biggest clients today started their relationship with us as a domain registration customer! Over the past eight years, it’s grown from a few domain names to multiple managed, co-located servers, web development work, and a really strong business relationship. We’ve got lots of clients today who started out with us because of OpenSRS services. Even when things haven’t gone well, it has actually helped make us better, because we grew monitoring and reporting tools that have helped us do a better job with all of our services.

JM: What can we do to make the relationship stronger?

EL: Just don’t forget that the relationship was based on an important understanding: that we always own the customer. The unusual and special thing about OpenSRS was that everything you offered was always based on the premise that we control the relationship with the customer, and that OpenSRS would simply fade into the background where our customers are concerned. By doing business with us the way we do business with our customers, we’ve been able to grow together.

The other important thing is to never lose sight of the fact that when things don’t go well, it reflects on my business. My customers don’t give a darn that I’ve outsourced service delivery for some aspects of my company, and they hold me directly responsible when it doesn’t go well. We put a lot of trust in OpenSRS to do a stellar job running services for us!

JM: Any other suggestions or feedback for us?

EL: We appreciate the relationship we’ve built with OpenSRS over the past eight years, and look forward to many, many more! Thanks for everything.

If you’re a reseller interested in sharing your story with our readers, get in touch with me (jamesmATopensrsDOTcom). We’d love to hear from you!

Tweet

By: OpenSRS Team on December 1st, 2008
Posted in: OpenSRS Services
Tags:
Comments: 0

We are happy to launch our new System Status tool at http://status.opensrs.com after a few weeks of preview. System Status is our service availability tool. We want to keep you informed for all maintenance windows and service status details, including any relevant incident summaries. We will update it in real time to ensure that you have the details you need to communicate with your customers.

This tool will replace the old System Status tool (formerly at http://status.tucows.com). Though we will be redirecting the old page shortly, please update your bookmarks to point to the new page.

Once a week, I will post all maintenance windows for registries and our vendors here on the Reseller blog. You can search the blog for these using the “maintenance” category. We will continue to send you our regular advance notifications via email for any of our own OpenSRS service maintenance windows.

To help you get familiar with the new tool, we created a screencast:

Email and RSS subscriptions for the old System Status page will not be migrated to the new OpenSRS System Status. To make sure that you continue to receive notifications, please subscribe to the new OpenSRS System Status. You can subscribe via email, RSS and Twitter. For more info on how to subscribe by email, either view the screencast or read the last blog post about the new Status website where we provided a step by step subscription set-up.