Leveling the Intellectual Playing Field with Stanford’s eCorner

November 14, 2009 Leave a comment

What? Leveling the intellectual playing field with Stanford? The home of elite, wealthy, and over-privileged?

While eLearning is nothing new to the Internet generation, traditionally eLearning content was dull, “uninspirational,” and in many cases an ineffective alternative to Learning by Lectureresidence or classroom learning. Commercialized or neutralized to make lessons suitable for the masses, or in a worst case part of an uninspired project by religious or international organizations with motives more focused internally than for the benefit of their own organization – rather than the ultimate users of their product.

So we compare access to intellectual stimulation and development a student may have in residence at Stanford, UC Berkeley, or MIT to a kid growing up in Ramallah (Palestine), and the playing field appears far from level. Stanford will continue to pump out global business leaders, and the kid in Ramallah will learn to survive.

Good news for the kid in Ramallah – the Internet now extends to their home. Whether at an Internet café or kiosk in the city center, a library, at home through a wireless connection, or if their school is one of the lucky institutions with Internet access, the student now has the global network tether extended to their eyes and minds.

How the Playing Field is Extended

Being one of those lucky people with the means to enjoy MP3 players and easy access to the Internet, occasionally I unexpectedly stumble upon a “gold mine” of valuable resources. Accessing Zune’s library of free podcasts is a great way to not only harvest great music, but is also a gateway to podcasts related to the arts, business, education, entertainment – you name it, there is a podcast for it.

Having recently left the corporate world to jump into the entrepreneurial world, I did a search on “entrepreneur” in the Zune podcast directory, and was shocked to see a response of about 100 business entrepreneur, startup, advice, and news streams pinging on the keyword.

Stanford had a series listed as “The Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Lecture Series.” OK, cool. Let’s give it a shot and I can listen while on the treadmill.

What a shock. Suddenly I am inside an auditorium at Stanford University, listening to guest lecturers speaking to a class at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. The lecturers included Steve Ballmer, Craig Barrett, Greg Papadopoulus, Sheryl Sandberg, Jensen Huang – all people we read about in the papers as the thought leaders and business visionaries leading the technical world. These lecturers were giving their most secret strategies on how to build businesses, where the economy is going, what is important, and genuinely inspiring the students.

Just a few years ago, these lectures would only be available to the elite. The ideas, visions, strategies – all the most powerful thoughts of our intellectual leadership in an informal venue, with an extended question and answer period with students poised to start the next generation of technologies and dreams to lead the business world.

Now, with the Internet, and the benevolence of Stanford University’s leadership, this level of access to the highest levels of education is available to the kid in Ramallah with an Internet connection. Now that kid in Ramallah can be inspired by global thought leadership, enlightened at a level now exposed though the veil of a domain restricted to the elite.

The intellectual playing field is now being leveled.

Not Just Stanford

While Stanford’s program is the first which triggered my middle-aged head to explore this new ocean of resource, many other universities are delivering extremely high quality video and audio casts of their lectures and classrooms through similar venues. Stanford offers online lectures on topics such as the “Introduction to Linear Dynamical Systems, ” UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, and many others offer lectures on everything from the sciences, to dozens of foreign languages, to Business 101.

All free to anyone with an Internet connection. All available to kids and adults in Ramallah, Ulaanbaatar, or South Bend, Indiana.

AcademicEarth.Org

No sooner do I get over the hangover from looking at podcasts available through the Zune directory when I stumble on AcademicEarth .Org,

Academic Earth’s objective states “We are building a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will give internet users around the world the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars.  Our goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment in which that content is remarkably easy to use and where user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable.”

  • Participating Universities include:
  • UC Berkeley
  • Harvard
  • MIT
  • Princeton
  • Stanford
  • UCLA
  • Yale

With subjects covering all areas of a typical university curriculum, our subject in Ramallah now has access to as many lectures as time will allow – the same lectures students attend at the best universities in the world. While no video will replace the face-to-face experience of classroom interaction, contributions universities such as Stanford and participants in the AcademicEarth.Org provide a global resource that is unprecedented in quality and depth.

And leveling the global intellectual playing field

Filed under Entrepreneurs, Internet and Telecom, startup business Tagged with , , , , ,

Questions Data Center Operators Don’t Want You to Ask

November 13, 2009 4 Comments

We live in a world of clouds, SaaS, outsourcing, and Everything over IP (EoIP). The challenges IT professionals face when trying to sort through the maze of technology, globalization, SOX, HIPPA, PUE, and on,… result in daunting confusion. Mix in a few Your Future Data centeroverzealous sales people, an inquiring CFO, incorrigible users within the organization, and you have all the pre-requisites for a world class, globalized, migraine headache.

Now let’s go out and consider throwing all this confusion into an outsourced data center. You know your company wants to save money, have better quality facilities, be close to network and Internet exchange points, be close to carriers who can support your national distributed office. So you do what anybody might consider doing – you call on a data center sales person.

Each company has a pitch. That pitch is refined based on what resources the company has to sell, and the thought leadership provided by the data center operator will most certainly promote their “unique” product or service. As the overzealous sales person goes into their pitch, several topics will no doubt emerge:

  • Their power stability
  • Mechanical and Electrical Systems (including maintenance)
  • Their remote hands, smart hands, on-site tech support, and “nutty” devotion to service
  • Completion of SAS70 audits
  • Facility structure
  • Security
  • And so on…

This article will walk through a few topics that are normally not well explained by data center operators, avoided, or simply misrepresented.

The Data Center Compromise, Mixed-Use Buildings

Any data center presents the potential tenant with a series of compromises. Very few commercial data centers are custom-built from the ground up, and most data centers are either built into mixed-use properties (those properties originally built as office space), and conversions (those properties built for another reason, such as a retail outlet <we built a large data center in a former WalMart property in Seoul a few years ago>, a warehouse <such as the original Equinix/Pihana site in Tokyo>, or factory <such as the original Level 3 gateway in Brussels>).

Data center operators choose mixed-use building primarily when they are in an attractive location, such as near a carrier hotel, major fiber optic terminal, or in a strategic central business district location. Mixed-use buildings are normally built for limited floor loading (how much weight you can actually place on a slab of concrete, where you can place the weight (such as over a structure beam), and with lower floor to ceiling separation (in the US, this is normally around 12.5 ft).

In addition, mixed-use buildings may have one or more of the following shortfalls:

  • Limited access to utility power
  • Limited “riser” space within the building (for telecom, power, and cooling infrastructure needing to transit the building from basement/ground level or from the rooftop)
  • Antiquated power distribution within the building (such as old buss ducts, switch gear, panels, etc)
  • Limited cooling capacity
  • Limited ability to either power or cool tenants with higher “watts/sqft” requirements (server farms)

Mixed-use buildings are best used by tenants with the following profile:

  • Telecom, routing, and switching carriers/networks
  • Members/participants in a carrier hotel meet-me-room
  • Tenants with limited requirement to support large server installations

While the mixed-use building may have the most technical limitations, they also tend to be the most expensive space. This is primarily due to the lower cost of telecom carrier and network interconnections, limited need for interconnection backhaul (if the property has an open meet-me-room or distribution frame), and in most cases simply legacy network effect. The Newby-ism “if you are a network, and not present in a carrier hotel, then you are paying somebody to be present in a carrier hotel” is still valid (Hunter Newby, CEO, Allied Fiber).

For those who are considering outsourcing into a mixed-use building, make sure you understand your requirement for long term growth, the power, cooling, structural, and telecom restrictions, and safety record of the building. MOST major electrical failures and events which have occurred in the data center industry over the past ten years have been in mixed-use buildings. Find out if your building has had failures, and if so, a very detailed accounting of how the data center owner has corrected the infrastructure problems which caused the problem.

Do not accept explanations that it (the failure) was human error. While probable many electrical failures in mixed-use buildings are caused by sloppy maintenance, the age of infrastructure should be considered more of a concern. To understand the infrastructure in a building, ask the data center operator to produce a recent, stamped (by certified electrical engineer), single line diagram showing not only the infrastructure, but also age of infrastructure. Only those with something to hide will refuse the request. Stay away from them…

Bring a qualified consultant with you to the sales meeting, and understand the burden is on the data center operator to answer your questions.

Conversion Buildings

In many cases the conversion building will meet all requirements for building out a high quality data center. If the conversion building is considered a shell, meeting all structural requirements such as near unlimited floor loading, high floor to ceiling clearance, very large floor plates (greater than 40,000sqft per plate), adequate for high capacity cooling systems (prefer chilled water), generator backup, fuel storage, and good proximity to multiple facility-based telecom carriers, then you can do a lot of good things with a conversation.

Things to keep in mind with conversions:

  • They are often built outside of the city center, limiting high concentrations of facility-based fiber and carrier diversity
  • They are often located in areas sensitive to natural disasters such as flooding
  • They are often located in industrial areas, presenting both physical security challenges to the property (vandalism), as well as physical danger to people who need 24×7 access to their equipment (assault)

With the conversion, just as with the mixed-use building, you will need to ensure you fully understand the electrical and mechanical source and distribution. You need to know the age of equipment, that existing single line diagrams are accurate and certified, as well as ensure the facility has infrastructure laid out for future growth – and the local utilities can support growth (will the power utility provide more power? Will the city allow additional generators and fuel storage?).

The conversion is often a very good choice for server farms, and large deployments. The cost of space is normally cheaper, power may be cheaper, and floor loading is normally not an issue. Many satellite data center cluster are popping up in locations such as El Segundo near Los Angeles, offering very high quality data center space developed from conversions.

Site Commissioning, SAS 70, and CMMS

We covered this pretty well in a previous article, and will not go into complete detail here. However the main theme cannot be avoided:

No company should consider collocation within a facility that cannot produce complete documentation that integration testing and commissioning was completed prior to facility operations – and that testing should be at NETA Level 5. In some cases, documentation of “retro” testing is acceptable, however potential tenants in a facility should be aware that is still a compromise, as it is almost impossible to complete a retro-commissioning test in a live facility.

Disaster ResponseThis is most critical in a mixed-use use building, where there have been numerous electrical failures due to lack of any commissioning, limited commissioning, or major infrastructure upgrades without any significant level of integration testing. The candidate data center should provide all historical information on the electric al system, as well as commissioning documentation – on demand, for the prospective tenant. Reticence or reluctance to provide the documentation probably indicates a major problem.

Understanding SAS70 Audits

One thing to keep in mind about SAS70 audits… The audit only reviews items the data center operator chooses to audit. Thus, a company may have a very nice and polished SAS70 audit documentation, however the contents may not include every item you need to ensure the data center operator has a comprehensive operations plan. You may consider finding an experienced consultant to review the SAS70 document, and provide any additional guidance on whether or not the audit actually includes all facility maintenance and management items needed to ensure continuing protection from mechanical, monitoring/management, electrical, security, or human staffing failures.

Comprehensive SAS70 audits will go into a fair level of detail. If your candidate data center offers a SAS70 audit of 5~10 pages, then you might find it lacking the level of detail needed to give you confidence your mission-critical equipment and applications are being facility-managed in data center that really “walks the talk.”

The SAS70 audit should include all the following sections:

Security

  • Security Company profile
  • Key inventories
  • Access management
  • Badges
  • Biometrics
  • Staff selection criteria
  • Materials control
  • Confirmation each security guard has completed a background check
  • Security equipment is routinely inspected/tested
  • Security “rounds” are recorded and confirmed
  • Security camera images and access logs are kept for a minimum 60 days, longer is preferred

Maintenance/CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System)

  • Comprehensive preventive maintenance/testing schedule for ALL mechanical and electrical equipment
  • UPS
  • Emergency generators
  • Rectifiers/DC Plant
  • ATS
  • Switchgear
  • Complete semi-annual (or more frequent) infrared scan
  • Breaker audit for NEC compliance (or automated view via current transformers)
  • Service level agreements
  • Emergency call out for all critical M&E equipment
  • Diesel refueling during emergencies or extended operation

Human Resources

  • Staffing process
  • Background checks
  • Certifications
  • Termination management

NOTE: While all of us have examples and stories of people who became super routing engineers, electrical staff, and field ops professionals, having a high number of network, cabling (BICSI), or electrical certifications does give you a level of confidence that the data center company knowledge and experience level is capable of performing at the desired or marketed service level.

Operations

  • Recurring training
  • Recurring staff meetings
  • Business continuity and disaster recovery plans
  • Daily site verifications
  • Escalation process

Again, the more detailed an audit, the greater your confidence the data center is being managed and operated to the level you can confidently bring your business into their environment for outsourcing.

The SAS70 Type 1 audit is a paper audit, and the Type 2 audit actually includes measurement and compliance of each control or observation.

Final Recommendation

The bottom line is each that your business, whether it is in a cabinet, a 1000ft cage, or a private suite, depends on the data center operator for supporting mission-critical applications and function essential to your business. If you do not believe you have the knowledge, or ability to drive a hard factual line of due-diligence in your data center search, find a consultant who can provide that guidance and ensure you are getting exactly what you are paying to receive.

If the data center operator is reluctant to support your requests for audit or compliance, then the chances are that data center operator is either treating your company with a high level of contempt, they have problems which may make a potential tenant reluctant to use that facility, or even worse, they simply do not have the needed documentation.

John Savageau, Long Beach

Filed under Internet and Telecom Tagged with , , , ,

A Swift Kick to the IPv6 Backside

November 12, 2009 2 Comments

The institutional horror stories continue, the old Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) address space is nearly gone, and if we do not transition to IPv6 with its nearly unlimited address space the Internet will grind to a halt.

Call to Action for IPv6A recent survey in Europe by the European Commission concludes that even in technology-progressive European countries “few companies are prepared for the switch from the current naming protocol, IPv4, to the new regime (protocol), IPv6.” ARIN (the US-based Internet Registry) agrees, reminding us that “with less than 15% of IPv4 address space remaining, ARIN is now compelled to advise the Internet community that migration to IPv6 is necessary for any applications that require ongoing availability of contiguous IP number resources.”

OK, so what the heck? Why aren’t we listening to those who understand the sense of urgency to migrate to IPv6, and get moving towards establishing a solid migration plan? Are the vendors ignoring the problem, reticent in providing IPv6 support in either application software or hardware, and preventing us from adopting IPv6? Are we just comfortable in our use of IPv4, network address translation/NAT, and are information technology professionals simply afraid to make a stand with management to start making the move?

Most mainstream software providers appear to be making the effort to go to IPv6. Microsoft has IPv6 as an inherent part of Windows and new Windows applications, Apple – ditto. Google engineers Lorenzo Colitti and Erik Kline recently received the Itojun Award from the Internet Society for “contributions to the development and deployment of IPv6.”

All major switching, routing, and server hardware companies are producing operating systems which include IPv6 compliance. Even cloud computing vendors such as 3tera are providing native IPv6 support within their platform and infrastructure as a service support.

What I Want from IPv6

I want everything from IPv6. Everything that has an electronic, communications, mobility, or interface should be addressable. I love the idea the California Highway Patrol can work with a company such as On Star to shut down a stolen car on the freeway before the driver kills himself or an innocent motorist. I love the idea I can work with an electrical utility to provide smart GRID technology to my entire home electrical system and not only reduce my bill, but also lower my carbon footprint. I love the idea I can control nearly anything I own or manage through a smart phone handset.

The IPv6 address space is large enough that we will have more than sufficient means to address everything we want – while smart people start working on IPv10 or whatever is needed for a couple generations down the road. So they can extend IPv10 to the rest of the galaxy.

Of course, unless we move forward and accept the temporary pain of moving to IPv6, none of this is likely to happen outside of some private implementations such as Verizon Wireless’ LTE network. Verizon is forcing the IPv6 issue with handset and device vendors by demanding their “…device shall support IPv6. The device may support IPv4. IPv6 and IPv4 support shall be per the 3GPP Release 8 Specifications (March 2009)” Kudos to Verizon for taking a stand on IPv6.

I further encourage moving my identity to an IPv6 address. Who needs a social security number, =social insurance number, or other identity when I can have my own personal IPv6 address? No identity fraud, as it can be linked to my DNA or other funky unique security code. My IP address, with my DNA and fingerprint, and I have the basic elements of a base for all other communications and identifications. Or I will become a borg.

But I would like to log into my home, and have heat turned on 5 minutes from arrival, the oven warming, favorite TV dinner selected for cooking, and even my 2 liter bottle of diet soda positioned for easy removal. My television set was remotely programmed, and the MP3 player auto-filled with music and other stuff from its docking station to give me something to listen to during my evening run along the beach or Wildwood Canyon.

Every device for my personal life that has a pulse can have an IPv6 address, controllable by me for whatever reason I choose. No IPv6 address for my jog though, as I want to de-couple some things important to life.

Who Cares About IPv6?

Martin Levy, from Hurricane Electric (a global Internet service and network provider based in Fremont, California), is a tireless evangelist for IPv6. A member of nearly every IPv6 working group (real working groups, not social working groups!), Martin travels the globe teaching, chiding, and inspiring networks to make the move. Martin recently recorded an interview with the European Internet Registry/RIPE where he explains His position on IPv6, his company’s approach to IPv6, and reminding the Internet community of the risks of not making the move to IPv6.

Martin strongly advises ” If you’re getting connectivity in a data center as a transit over an international connection, as a cross connect inside a telecom hotel, if you are an enterprise, IPv6 (deployment) should just be a tick mark…”

Martin travels the world in his quest to inform, and encourage those who do accept their responsibilities and urgencies embracing IPv6, such as at a recent conference in Slovenia, where Martin congratulated the Internet networking and content community by stating “Slovenia’s IPv6 initiative has been very successful and is becoming a blue-print for IPv6 initiatives in other countries worldwide.”

Internode, a large Internet network provider in Australia, has joined the movement towards IPv6. Partially because it is the right thing to do, partially because it is nearly impossible to get additional IPv4 address space from the Asian Internet registry, APNIC (Asia-Pacific Network Information Center).

“Our objective is to ensure that Internode has the most experience of any Australian broadband provider with the operation and support of native IPv6,” Internode managing director Simon Hackett said in a statement. “By the time IPv6 becomes a necessary part of connecting new users to the Internet, Internode will offer the very best ‘production’ IPv6 service available in Australia. At that point, for all customers, IPv6 will ‘just work’.” (Network World, 6 Nov 09)

Our Call to Action

Every blog entry is supposed to include a pithy call to action. In this case the call to action is real. We need to adopt IPv6. Excuses will not bring our global Internet-connected and Internet-enabled world together, and will not enable our next generation of network users to fully execute on the promise of exploiting life in the “matrix.”

IT Managers – you need to get off your backsides, and learn, learn, learn, everything you can about Ipv6. It is mission-critical. Then you need to brief your management – the CFOs, CTOs, CEOs, CXOs, and let them know the urgency of re-stacking your organization to accommodate and drive Ipv6.

Networks – If you are an Internet network provider, and you do not support Ipv6, please get out of the business. With all due respect, you are the problem.

Content providers, application service providers, SaaS providers, equipment vendors, and everybody else hanging an Internet shingle on your door. Ditto – if you are not building IPv6 support into your product, you are the problem. Make it easy for the IT managers, individuals, and future generations by taking Verizon’s approach. “If you do not include IPv6 support in your product, we will not use it.”

What is your IPv6 message?

John Savageau, Long Beach

Filed under Internet and Telecom Tagged with , , , , , , ,

A Catalyst for Entrepreneurs in Santa Barbara

November 11, 2009 3 Comments

Catalyst for ThoughtOver the past couple of years we have visited small business and entrepreneur support organizations in LA (the Convergence Technology Council/CTC), OCTANe in Orange County, the San Diego Software Industry Council/SDSIC in San Diego, and the Silicon Valley Product Management Association (SVPMA). Last night I visited the Catalyst for Thought group in Santa Barbara, and attended their November program “Building a Thriving Business: How to avoid the common pitfalls.“

CATALYST MISSION: An official event and lecture series promoting entrepreneurship, financial literacy, and philanthropy for entrepreneurs and professionals.

  • Invest In Yourself: Get educated and motivated through dynamic speakers and connected with valuable networking opportunities
  • Invest In your Community: Net proceeds from Catalyst event ticket sales benefit non-profits

The guest lecturer Tuesday evening (10 Nov 2009), Ms. Susan Urquhart-Brown, is a private consultant from Oakland offering individual coaching for entrepreneurs. She is a former columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, and author of the book “The Accidental Entrepreneur: 50 Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me About Starting a Business.”

Catalyst for Thought’s meeting drew a very large crowd, with standing room only along the walls. Most of the attendees were either recent graduates of Santa Barbara-area universities and business colleges, with a smaller number of business people from small local companies. All were very excited about the possibility of either starting or expanding their own businesses, and paid close attention to all parts of Susan’s lecture.

CATALYST OBJECTIVES

  • Bring together, and foster, a community of entrepreneurs and professionals.
  • Promote entrepreneurship and ethical business practices, as a way to improve the individual, and the community.
  • Motivate the individual to act on ideas.
  • Equip the entrepreneur with the resources and contacts to be successful.
  • Raise awareness about the current needs in the community, and extend financial support to benefiting non-profits.

CATALYST VISION: Advance the community, by motivating individuals to create, develop and act on his or her entrepreneurial ideas.

The event format was much like a university lecture, with a 30 minute presentation followed by a 30 minute question and answer period with the audience. The main themes presented in Ms. Urguhart-Brown’s lecture were:

  • Plan and stay accountable: Learn to leverage your expertise and uniqueness, setting goals that propel business forward almost magically!
  • Don’t be a “lone wolf:” Learn the essentials of asking for help, monitoring growth, and getting access to advice at critical stages.
  • Listen and understand your customers: Learn to listen, offering benefits and solutions.
  • Know where your business is headed: Learn how to keep your eye on the bottom line, so that effective changes can be made to keep your business on track

The Entrepreneurial “Buzz” in Santa Barbara

Santa Barbara is almost too nice of a city for people to work and live. Not surprising that some of the most dynamic companies in the tech industry are launching from Santa Barbara, including world class, innovative cloud computing companies Rightscale and Eucalyptus. The academic leadership at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the Santa Barbara Community College/SBCC are fully engaged with not only their students, but also the community in promoting both education and providing small business development resources.

Melissa Crawford, director of the The Scheinfeld Center at SBCC met attendees of the Catalyst event at the door, both welcoming each person, as well as trying to get to know the entrepreneurial experience and spirit of as many people time allowed. If she is an indication of the support students and others in Santa Barbara can expect, then Santa Barbara will continue to attract and retain the best in both Southern California, and other distant locations the buzz extends.

The Scheinfeld Center is a “nexus for entrepreneurship education on the South Coast and is responsible for education and training, and the cultivation and dissemination of new technologies and business models for the 21st Century entrepreneur.”

Having attended many networking and educational events in California and Virginia over the past year, it is clear Santa Barbara brings business entrepreneur enthusiasm to a new level. It was an exciting evening, and reluctantly I left while the informal networking was still in session to make the long drive home to Long Beach.

John Savageau, Long Beach

Filed under Entrepreneurs, Internet and Telecom, LA Life, startup business Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Wiring Los Angeles Part 4 – WilCon’s Path to the Future

November 9, 2009 Leave a comment

This is the fourth article in a series of interviews with Eric Bender, President of Wilshire Connection (WilCon), the largest independent telecom carrier in Los Angeles. In this segment Eric discusses the future of WilCon, including expansion outside of Los Angeles, wireless topics, relations with local utilities, and some great examples of WilCon’s flexibility in delivering telecom solutions to the LA community.

Pacific Tier: Outside of downtown LA , what is your expansion strategy for going to place like El Segundo, Las Vegas, or other cities, parts of the city?

Conduits Inside a Street VaultEric Bender: We’ve leased dark fiber from other carriers to get to other off-net locations such as El Segundo. We connect Equinix on Maple, so we can do lit transport into that facility. We’re working on a plan that would extend from there to the 365 Main location in El Segundo, and then with a second route back to downtown.

We’ve acquired several 10Gbps wavelengths from LA to Las Vegas, and into the Switch NAP facilities, so we can connect with all their switches and facilities, including the Super NAP, which is a 400,000sqft monster of a data center facility. So we do just backhaul or transport to Vegas. We’ve got approximately 10 gigs of traffic back and forth between here and there now.

I don’t see us building on a long haul type arrangement where we would build far outside of downtown LA. We’ll go off-net by structuring deals with existing customers and partners that we have to get fiber and connectivity into other locations. One of the things we are working on is connecting our buildings in LA to Phoenix, there’s a couple of different data centers in Phoenix – there is I/O, (etc).

Then we might go from Phoenix to Las Vegas, and from Las Vegas we already have to LA (which we already have), but also Las Vegas to San Jose/Santa Clara, and then back down to LA. So we basically have a ring from LA to Phoenix, to Las Vegas, San Jose, back to LA.

Pacific Tier: So would you have arrangements with Edison (Southern California Edison), or Burbank Power, or people like that to extend into Hollywood or Burbank or Glendale?

Eric Bender: Well, we do work with Edison and DWP (Los Angeles Department of Water and Power), and have used them to get to further out locations from downtown. The city of Burbank, we’ve not been successful and have not really chased hard to try and make a deal with them. Our initial efforts to work with them were rebuffed without comment – they had no interest in working with us, which surprised me.

I think we can be creative in building, like at 900 N. Alameda which we now have connected with dark fiber, and there is a variety of ways we can do that. We have connection and interconnection agreements AT&T to use their infrastructure so we can theoretically deploy assets throughout the city and state in coordination with AT&T’s network.

Pacific Tier: Would you consider for example going to San Diego using a capacity swap with Edison where they gave you a pair of fibers to San Diego?

Eric Bender: We do that already, well not to San Diego, but we have done a variety of barters, trades, or however you want to call it, with companies like Edison. With Equinix, with DWP I’d like to – but they have no interest and can’t by law (they are a public utility), and can’t really do that. Level 3, we’ve had discussions with them to do the same thing.

Because I’ve got all this infrastructure, whether it’s the conduit, or the fiber, and it’s all there, it’s paid for, there’s no debt, there’s no cost of capital to me – it’s there, so if I need to allocate a couple pairs of fiber going here or there on my network, and I can get something that I can generate revenue off of on somebody else’s network – we’ve done that many, many times and it’s worked out very well with a variety of companies.

Pacific Tier: Expanding a bit more on WilCon’s flexibility…

Eric Bender: We have no rigidity with anything we do. I think that one of the reasons we’ve been successful, and have continued to grow every month, basically where we’ve continued to grow over the previous month is because we’re not rigid and have a straight line approach to things.

Servicing WilCon's ConduitI think the advantage of not being a telecom guy by trade or training and education is that we look at things by how do we get the customers the things they need? When a customer needs something my first response is to say “OK,” and the second response is to call my technical guys and say “I just committed us to doing this by a certain point in time, make it happen.” And they do.

We’re a small company so we don’t have all the various layers of engineering groups and planning groups to say from here it has to pass from point “A,” to point “B,” to point “C,” before you can be told it can be done, or not be done, or how to do it. We just make it happen and get it done.

The story I tell that kind of tied the real estate to the telecom all together well for me is at one of our buildings, 700 Wilshire we had a t4enant in the building. This goes back to about early 1999. We had put conduit in the ground already, so it was probably early 1999, had already connected the conduit to One Wilshire, as well as 700 (Wilshire Blvd), and we had leased space to this tenant.

Part of their requirement was they needed a couple of DS3s between the meet me room at One Wilshire and their premises they had leased at 700. At that point we were only doing conduit deals with our carrier customers. They were going to Level 3 for this DS3, and Level 3 hadn’t really built out their network yet. Because we put Level 3′s first conduit in the ground in LA (it was conduit we’d installed in our trench and gave them, basically), and Level 3 was provisioning this DS3 through PacBell (now AT&T) or someone, and they were re-provisioning (the DS3) through them.

The timing for the tenant was going to be 90 days, or 120 days wait for the tenant to provision this DS3. The tenant came to us and knew we had started Wilshire Connection. So they came to us and said “we really need this, is there anything you can do for us?”

I didn’t know what to do, I mean we just had conduit between the buildings. So the customer said “all you have to do is this. We have the equipment, you’ve got fiber cable already (because we’d already deployed that), you need this piece of equipment, you’ve got this box on this end, that box on that end, and we’ll tell you how to do it and what works well.”

Two weeks later we had that DS3 traffic up and running between the buildings. So we got into the transport business. But that was because we were flexible, somebody needed something, (we had the resources), and we got it done.

If we can see there’s a reasonable return on investment and payback on the infrastructure or cost to deploy new equipment, we’ll do it. We got all this MRV DWDM equipment (dense wave division multiplexing) because we had a very limited amount of fiber into the (particular) building, so the only way I could provision this service (lit bandwidth) was with the DWDM gear – so we went out and bought it.

So the equipment was paid for within a year. The customers can come and go – it doesn’t really make any difference (other than we want to keep customers), because it is already paid for. So we’ll continue to do that, and that’s how we’ve continued to grow into the buildings that we have, as well as the transport circuits that we do between all these buildings, as well as connecting into Vegas, and the same to Phoenix, Santa Clara, and other cities.

Pacific Tier: So what is the future of WilCon, where do you go from what you have today?

Eric Bender: several years ago we had some strategy discussions, and (since) we are a dominant carrier in LA, we’re known around the world as the provider of choice, the connector of choice here in LA. We have a great relationship with Equinix, and CoreSite now (CRG), so we get a lot of referral business from those guys. We’ve provided such good service to our customers that big carriers such as TATA, PCCW, and others that they just come straight to us when they have new requirements.

So we had this discussion “let’s go and expand, and into other markets” and we took a very quick and dirty analysis and determined that it costs so much to build out and deploy in these other markets, and we know other companies have been doing similar kinds of things, and we might be providing a similar type of service. In order to do that (expanding into other markets) we’d have to take on an additional equity investor, or venture funding, and then all we’re doing is servicing somebody else’s debt.

So, does that make sense (expanding) or should we continue to be the provider here, and continue to grow which has made us a profitable company. So we said “we are gong to do that, and we’ll expand and provide services outside of LA in various ways that make sense, and does not require a huge capital outlay, and we’ll do some – but we’re not going to spend millions of dollars to deploy.”

The reason many companies went bankrupt was because they built these massive networks, and there was no r4evenue to service the debt on them.

So our future is to grow in selected and strategic ways. It will probably be between LA and other cities by usi9ng lit waves, and then establishing a POP (point of presence) in a couple buildings, and then maybe in some cases building a bit in those markets to connect those buildings.

In Dallas we’ve looked at buying an existing network, but there’s really no need to connect between those facilities – there’s no business with that. Chicago was no different. San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Clara are all so spread out its hard to justify a new build or new construction.

I think working with companies like Allied Fiber which is building their long haul network, and working with them to be the local metro piece to what they’re selling to their customers on the long haul – we can tag along with them, working well with them in LA, and possibly duplicate that with them in other markets.

Pacific Tier: Is there any wireless in WilCon’s future?

Eric Bender: I don’t really see that. We did look at partnering with some wireless, WiMAX, or other guys using Terrabeam or some of these free space optics. It seemed like they just had such a long way to go before it would make it worthwhile, and that in LA maybe it’s a problem. Trying to negotiate the line of sight, and rooftop antenna rights and those things,… that we didn’t really get anywhere. It became cost prohibitive I think.

So it would be nice to do something like that. We looked at that (wireless) to support NANOG (North American network Operator’s group) several years ago when they were here. We were in Library Tower (the US Bank Building) on the 56th floor. I had a line of sight directly from my window to the hotel, but it was too far. We would have needed a couple of hops to be able to deliver a gig (Gigabit connection), and it was a disaster for them to have it there (at that hotel).

They had to go buy a DS3 from AT&T (PacBell). If they had done the conference downtown I could have connected them with no issues.

Pacific Tier: Any final words you would like to say to the global telecom or Internet community, or Los Angeles? Why LA, or with WilCon, downtown LA is an attractive place to do business?

Eric Bender: We’re number one!

I think LA is a great place to do business. From a location perspective its perfect, as its the gateway to the US. You can get anywhere from LA, whether its physical transportation, or from a telecom infrastructure perspective. I think if you come to LA as a carrier, as a provider, as a bandwidth user, in this industry – and you’re going to locate in one of the half a dozen facilities (in downtown LA), whether an Equinix, Level 3′s gateway, One Wilshire, or TELX Carrier center.

Any of the main big facilities here (and Switch and Data) you are going to need, ultimately, to connect to customers that are in one of the other facilities – somehow you’re going to find us. You may be referred to us, do your research – ultimately you are going to find we can provide that connectivity.

We are really easy to do business with, as any of our customers will tell you. And I think that in all the years we’ve been in business, since 1998, I think there are maybe two deals we’ve lost because of price, that we were not the lower cost provider for that particular deal. And, we try to provision within 24~48 hours (of an order).

Pacific Tier: That is outstanding. Words for the global telecom and internet community from Eric Bender, President of Wilshire Connection. Thank you very much.

John Savageau for Pacific Tier Communications, Long Beach

====

This concludes our interview with Eric Bender, President of Wilshire Connection in Los Angeles.  you can contact Eric at ebender@wilcon.com for more information on Wilshire Connection.

The entire interview is available online.

Previous entries in this series include:

  • Part 1 – Wiring Los Angeles, an Interview with Eric Bender, President of Wilshire Connection
  • Part 2 – WilCon Takes to the Streets
  • Part 3 – WilCon Manages Infrastructure Risks

Filed under Burbank, Internet and Telecom, LA Life Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Wiring Los Angeles Part 3 – WilCon Manages Infrastructure Risks

November 9, 2009 Leave a comment

This is part three is a series of interviews with Eric Bender, president of Wilshire Connection. Wilshire Connection, or WilCon, is the largest independent local network and neutral fiber infrastructure provider in downtown Los Angeles. In this segment Eric discusses how WilCon managed risk to their network during the initial construction process, the continuing management of critical telecommunications infrastructure, and the role WilCon could play in the event of a major incident impacting the telecom industry in Los Angeles.

Pacific Tier: (on the topic of utility gas and electricity) What risk is there to the infrastructure in downtown LA of an explosion from either electricity or gas, and what would that do to your conduits if it occurred?

Eric Bender: Interesting question… I haven’t really thought much about that, it would, depending on where, you never want to see that. Fortunately with power, Street Utility Tagging in Downtown Los Angelesthe lines typically won’t explode, it is the transformers, which mostly are in the buildings.

The way LADWP (Los Angeles Dept of Water and Power) sets up they bring the high voltage lines into the building, so if the transformer blows up it will be in the building. The transformer is typically not out in the street – but they do have some vaults out in the street, and they have had some explosions, but they have been contained within the vault. We don’t run through any of their vaults so from that perspective we’re OK.

Somebody who is digging and hits a gas line… that’s a different story.

I can say in the roughly 12 years that we’ve had conduit in the ground, and since we were one of the first to dig, I can say that we are lower in the ground, and more protected in many respects, and more of a straight line in routes we’re going without having to jog around any other existing infrastructure that came later.

But we’ve never had one of our conduits damaged or cut. Or interfered with…

The difference between how our conduits or duct banks are typically done vs. many other carriers is that we put in massive amounts of conduit. We use (typically) four inch PVC conduit, and I don’t think we have a single one (trench) which has less than six or eight four inch conduits. Most of them have multiples of that, for example going on Wilshire Blvd between Grand and Figueroa we have an average of conduit in that whole duct bank is probably close to sixty four inch conduits.

Because fifty of them go into One Wilshire, although they kind of peel off in WilCon Conduit Duct Bank in Los Angelesdifferent directions from there, we’ve also got a main ’48 and they lateral off down into other streets into buildings, so there’s some doubling going on.

But in some areas we have up to sixty four inch conduits so that’s the size of a desk, or bigger, and that duct bank is encased in a concrete slurry around it, surrounded by a couple addition feet of dirt and asphalt on top.

So if anybody digging is going to hit (the duct bank) typically there is warning tape on top of the conduit, concrete, or in the concrete they are going to pull it up. They are going to hit (the tape) or something before they hit the conduit. So unless it is some young, uncontrollable (person) with the backhoe who is on a rampage – no matter what you do you can’t control that.

NOTE: Whenever a company opens a street for utility construction or maintenance you will normally have construction observers and safety observers from not only the company opening the street, but also each company with conduit or utility infrastructure in the immediate area of digging.

But some of the other carriers that put in one or two conduits, they are the ones at risk, like for example an MCI, Verizon, or a QWEST in some cases they typically put in just the two conduits… And you could rip through that even if its encased in concrete before you realize what you are doing.

The conduits are just this big, versus this big (Eric shows a note book size to represent two conduits vs. his desktop to represent WilCon’s conduits).

Pacific Tier: Do you consider yourself the only truly neutral facilities-based carrier in downtown LA?

Eric Bender: I think others consider themselves neutral, but they have other motives as well. I don’t care if I sell dark fiber or lit transport. We can do either, and it doesn’t matter to me which one they want. We have so much fiber, and the infrastructure to continue pulling more and more fiber that I’m never worried about running out of capacity for dark fiber.

A Level 3, or a QWEST, or an XO, they run a network, and they’re obviously not neutral. DWP (LADWP), they’re somewhat neutral because they don’t seem to care whether you take fiber or lit services. I don’t know what they do with lit services or on the network side of things – honestly. We’ve leased from them (LADWP) dark fiber to get access to some off-net buildings, and they’re very easy to work with. They are very rigid, and have no flexibility (LADWP is a public utility), but they’re easy to work with.

We’re probably, as a straight, neutral, not really care who you connect with, we may not be the only one (neutral fiber network), but one of the only ones that would be neutral.

Pacific Tier: One Wilshire is traditionally a center of communications in Los Angeles. Some people think it is a high risk location because there is so much on the 4th floor and other parts of the building. Some people think that it is meaningless – that it doesn’t have that much value. Do you think the 4th floor of One Wilshire today is a critical piece of infrastructure, or do you think it is something that is just there, that could be bypassed when and if ever needed?

Eric Bender: I think at this point it would still be considered a critical facility. A lot of carriers and other companies have facilities or locations elsewhere, but because of the way they’ve built their networks from the beginning, One Wilshire has always been the central point for them.

They may not have grown and expanded there, or they may have moved things off to other locations, such as 600 W. 7th, 818 (W. 7th ), or even outside of LA, and use a company like us, or some other carrier to make that interconnection or virtual connection between their two facilities. One Wilshire tends to have been their primary facility.

I think that over the years that’s more applicable to legacy carriers, the bigger carriers, the ones that have been around for a long time.

I think the Internet type of carrier that’s either VoIP or an Internet company, content CDNs (content delivery networks), and those – One Wilshire’s not as important to them at all because in my limited technical knowledge it is easier to reroute that traffic to other servers – they have more mirror facilities than a switch would have on the telecom side of things.

Pacific Tier: Is there a business continuity plan, or disaster plan, in the event One Wilshire or another facility like 60 Hudson (New York), or the NAP of the Americas (Miami) anybody has thought about or put on the shelf in the event one of those critical facilities has a catastrophic failure?

Eric Bender: I am not aware of any common, for the greater good, where all the carriers have participated in developing that, or working out some kind of contingency plan. That’s actually a really good question.

You’d think that after 9/11 where the infrastructure was so significantly damaged that in various other markets such as LA, Chicago, that there would be some kind of a group of organizational effort to have dealt with that. I am not aware of one. They may have one, but I am not aware of it, and they never invited me to participate.

Pacific Tier: Is WilCon positioned, in the case of a worst case scenario in Los Angeles, to assist the community and assist the industry in recovering to an alternate facility if that occurred?

Eric Bender: Sure, I mean, our infrastructure that we built, and that we control and own, is all primarily downtown LA, so… in a worst case One Wilshire becomes untenable, well a lot of our fiber doesn’t all home run into One Wilshire, but a lot of it does go in and turn around, coming back out again.

There would be disruption, but it could be brought out and bypassed. We have diverse paths into most buildings that we connect so we can certainly do it.

Not in LA, but when in the Mediterranean last year when they had the three or four cuts, (several of) our customers were impacted. I sent them an email and said I doubt there is anything we can do here , but if there is anything you need that we can help you with, let me know and we can work with you.

And actually two of the customers said “yeah we need to reroute some connections to put it on a different side of their ring (in the Med and Pacific) that we could do in about five hours with a couple pairs of fiber for them, and they were able to reroute their traffic, or some of their traffic, and lessen the impact of those (submarine fiber) cuts.

Pacific Tier: So WilCon would consider yourselves a very flexible, agile part of a recovery plan, and would not be rigid in your provisioning process, and that you would work with the community to recover from a disaster?

Eric Bender: I agree with that!

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This ends the third segment of this series. In the next part, Eric will discuss more of the future of Wilshire Connection, including his visions for expanding WilCon into new markets.

The entire interview is available online.

Previous entries in this series include:

  • Part 1 – Wiring Los Angeles, an Interview with Eric Bender, President of Wilshire Connection
  • Part 2 – Wiring Los Angeles Part 3 – WilCon Manages Infrastructure Risks

Filed under Internet and Telecom, LA Life Tagged with , , , , ,

Wiring Los Angeles Part 2 – WilCon Takes to the Streets

November 8, 2009 Leave a comment

This is the second part of an interview with Eric Bender, President of Wilshire Connection. In this segment Eric talks about the period in 2000 preceding the Democratic Nation Convention, and the aggressive industry build out of conduit, fiber, and telecommunications infrastructure in the downtown Los Angeles area.

Pacific Tier: At what point do you think the city of Los Angeles figured out this would be a really good thing for LA, and it would bring more business and money into downtown?

Eric Bender: I don’t think they ever came to that conclusion. What happened was in 2000 the Democratic Convention was going to be down at the Staples Center in downtown, so I think it was in early 2000 or at the very end of 1999 the city called a meeting and notified all the telecom carrier that had been active or Eric Bender President Wilshire Connectionbuilding or doing things that as a part of the preparations for the convention that they would be repaving the streets, resurfacing certain streets, and there was going to be an absolute five year moratorium on any digging or street construction work as a result of this. They wanted the streets to look pretty on TV, and that was fine.

So I don’t think they thought about how much money, or how beneficial the telecom network was going to be to the city, they realized they would need to do something for this convention. The result of that was that it threw somewhat of a panic into the carriers that were in the infancy of building out their networks, and building throughout LA, and it forced a massive infrastructure improvement project, because there was a very limited amount of time before the city was going to shut everything down.

I think the convention was in July or August, and by the end of May everything had to be done. So, we really had about four or five months to build everything and our network probably tripled in size during that period of time. We were one of the only companies that had an active permit that we had pulled for a small segment that we were building that hadn’t started construction yet because it was not that critical to us at the time.

But because of us having an active permit for about a two block, few hundred feet, maybe five or six hundred feet of conduit the city realized they had a major problem that these companies had to be building, had to be constructing – they couldn’t just shut them down for five years. The city did understand that was a problem.

So they said you can build, we will expedite and streamline the process and anyone who has an active permit, well everyone can tag along with that permit. We’ll just change it and build out from there.

So, with our little permit, and the little segment, I think it was on Grand from Wilshire down to 7th St., and then a little bit more. We basically parlayed that and built it up to 5th St., then up to Figueroa, and literally tripled our network. So we became the lead builder from that permit on a tremendous amount of other conduit that was built in the city.

Basically they couldn’t keep up with all the activity because there were intersections in downtown LA where there were three backhoes digging for three separate projects. We were doing one, QWEST was doing their own, they didn’t really want to participate much with anyone, and MCI, MFS didn’t want to share conduit so they were doing little things.

And I remember at 7th and Grand there were three different construction crews and project going on at the same time, and for me it was just a wonderful time because we had this permit, so we had a lot of leeway, and I would walk the streets, stand on the street corner, and these other companies, you know Level 3 and QWEST actually did participate, XO… You know I would say “we’re going down this street to this building,” and they’re going “I’m going that way,” and we’d shake hands. “I’m taking two conduits in yours, you’re taking a conduit in mine…”

I don’t like to use the term “wild, wild, west,” but it was really a very wild and fun time. My best times were just walking around with all the construction going on, with all the lane closures and all the activity. The traffic was backed up, cars were beeping, and would be driving by and I would just be standing there looking at the big hole in the ground with a big smile on my face. It really was the best time.

Pacific Tier: Did you have any catastrophic backhoe cuts or anything disruptive during consutruction? 

Eric Bender: We, during our construction our guys, we never had an incident where we hit any other conduit. There was a water or a sewer line that got hit, and nicked, and that was something that that was not actually on the infrastructure plan. And it wasn’t marked on the street so it wasn’t our problem so much.

There was a close call with a gas line. But nothing happened. But for the most part (Eric knocking on his wooden desk) they did a good job.

The toughest part to build, which we were actually the participant in and XO was the lead builder on 7th, I think somewhere between Olive and Grand, it shows you the history of LA but, back when they had the street cars, the RED Line, YELLOW Line, and all these other street cars, they never really demoed (demolished) those out.

They just over the years paved over and over and over. As they were excavating and going down the road, the path where they were going, and which later became obvious because of the railroad, they had to rip through all the railroad ties. It was terrible.

Because of that, then they had to get an archaeologist because you know you have bricks from the support for the railroad, because they are historical. I don’t know what they would do with it, it is in the middle of 7th St (a major road in downtown LA) and Grand Ave, that can’t, you know set up a museum in the middle of it, but it shut the project down. The city had some very peculiar rules that you cannot dig on Sundays that go back to the old blue laws basically, no construction activity on Sundays.

Some streets they won’t let you work during the week, you know it goes back to the days when downtown was a main shopping area, so you know, so you couldn’t dig during the week. You could only dig on Saturdays from nine (a.m.) till three (p.m.) which means you get about from ten till two because you have clean up and everything.

So some projects that should have been done within a week took like eight weeks to get done. So the city tried, but they were not the easiest. The only company that got to work on Sunday was QWEST, because, well, nobody is really sure exactly what happened or how, but they did have several projects where they were working on Sundays.

====

This ends part two of the “Wiring LA” interview series. Part Three will explore some of the risks of building such a dense concentration of telecom projects within the downtown LA area.

The entire interview is available online.

Previous entries in this series include:

Part 1 – Wiring Los Angeles, an Interview with Eric Bender, President of Wilshire Connection

 

John Savageau, Long Beach

 

Filed under Internet and Telecom, LA Life Tagged with , , , , , ,

Wiring Los Angeles with Eric Bender, President of Wilshire Connection

November 7, 2009 1 Comment

Downtown Los Angeles is among the most densely connected telecommunication hubs in the world. A dozen buildings in LA’s city center house the world’s largest Internet networks, Laying Down Telecom Conduits and Cabletelecommunication carriers, content management networks, and entertainment companies – interconnected through a complex mesh of submarine fiber optic cables, terrestrial cables, and internet exchange points.

With more than 500 networks and carriers operating within the LA city center, one company stands out from the crowd as a leader in bringing the global telecommunications and Internet community together. Eric Bender is president of Wilshire Connection, a facility-based carrier focusing on providing neutral, high capacity fiber optic cable interconnecting the most important buildings in Los Angeles.

Wilshire Connection (WilCon) has a vision to free the LA telecom and Internet-enabled community from the burden of developing a highly meshed inter-building infrastructure, allowing each company to focus on bringing value to their global network interconnections and relationships. Eric Bender, President of Wilshire Connection, is the man behind WilCon’s dramatic success in wiring Los Angeles.

This interview will cover, in a multi-article series, the history of modern telecommunications in downtown Los Angeles, the role Wilcon played in LA’s redevelopment, the period of rapid and chaotic build out prior to the Democratic National Convention in 2000, the risk of high density telecom infrastructure, and the future vision of Eric Bender and Wilcon.

Pacific Tier: Today we have Eric Bender, President of Wilshire Connection. Eric, can you tell us a little about yourself, and how Wilcon came around?

Eric Bender: Sure, we founded Wilcon, Wilshire Connection back in 1998. I am one of the founders and one of the partners, and have run the company pretty much from the beginning. I’m a real estate guy by background. I graduated from college and have always worked in the real estate field, whether its commercial property, management, brokerage, home build, whatever…

Back in late 1996 I started working for a Hong Kong based family which was acquiring some office buildings in downtown LA, one of which was 611 Wilshire Blvd which was directly across the street from One Wilshire. Back at that time telecom deregulation had just been passed, the 1996 Deregulation Act, and there was a boom of CLECs formed and started. Nextlink, the precursor to Level 3 (Kiewit and Sons), MFS was expanding into a variety of things, Worldcom, a variety of these companies were just starting up in that time frame.

For a lot of different reasons One Wilshire had become kind of a focal point for telecom, primarily because it is a 30 story building, had very clear line of sight to the east, and back in the day when microwave transmission was the primary factor, (One Wilshire) had great eastward pointing microwave capabilities. And because of this many of the deregulated companies had got into One Wilshire.

Because our building 611 Wilshire was directly across the street, and only 50% occupied, and One Wilshire was still an office building that only had a meet me room component to it, – that was really it, from a real estate side of things we said “we have all the space, you have all these new companies coming and can’t do it, send them over to us, we’ll fill our building with them, and let’s put some conduit between the buildings together as a virtual extension of (the meet me room) of One Wilshire.

Additionally we put in some conduits that the One Wilshire building actually provided for.

A year or two later we had bought, and were converting other buildings in downtown (700 Wilshire, 818 W. 7th St.) and saw a need to have those buildings connected back to 611 and One Wilshire.

Standing on the street corner thinking about it we decided that we should become a facilities-based carrier. We went and got our authority from the state to become a carrier, CLEC, and I can’t remember the other authorities we received. Then we decided that’s how we are going to do it. We started digging the streets building the network and connecting the buildings, our own buildings, together.

We decided as a way to fund the build out, because at the time, 1997 and 1998 a lot of buildings had empty space in downtown LA, they all saw what was happening not only with our buildings, but other buildings that had empty space, and saw how telecom was taking massive amounts space. And the reality was landlords wanted telecom companies as tenants because they paid higher rent, they paid for their own improvements to build out their space, they paid for their own utilities, the buildings did not have to provide janitorial, nor provide much in the line of services.

So we created, as part of our model with Wilshire Connection, the ability to connect all these other buildings into our network. This tied them back to One Wilshire and all these other telecom buildings. And that was our methodology of raising funds to build our improvements to our infrastructure.

Pacific Tier: So what role do you believe Wilcon played in the development of downtown LA as a telecom center?

Eric Bender: Well, trying to be as modest as I can, we probably played the primary role in that, because, several buildings are telecom buildings today because we were building our network and including them. They may have become a telecom building in some way differently, but the fact that we connect them into our network which covers and ties all the building together on a neutral basis was really the instrumental part, including 600 W. 7th St, 800 Hope, 818 W. 7th St., which has Level 3′s gateway, Equinix, and others – brought these buildings back to One Wilshire and to each other – together they became the success that they are.

Pacific Tier: What was your criteria for selecting the buildings that you POPed (built a point of presence) or entered, or dropped cable?

Eric Bender: We were note really picky. At the time we were building the network it depended on which buildings came to us, what they were willing to contribute to the cost of (build out), and how important it was to them to be connected to the network.

Pacific Tier: The actual process of laying conduit in downtown Los Angeles, did the city support you?

Eric Bender: Not initially, it was quite challenging. Part of it was because a lot of this activity was new and we were building our network, planning our network to cnnect the buildings. But you had the other companies that were building their networks, such as Level 3, MFN (actually they came a bit later), MCI was adding a lot more conduit and buildings, and others. The city was not prepared, I don’t think, from an engineering perspective and plan check to deal with all that, so they were backed up, and you had companies like Level 3 which was building a network throughout the entire city basically.

The city’s engineering department that reviewed the plans – you would go in and the entire office would be stacked four, five , six feet high with plans of what they were planning to build. And it took months and months, 6 to 8 months at times.

This is the end of part 1 of our interview with Eric Bender. Additional segments to the interview will discuss the actual buildout of Wilscon’s network prior to the Democratic National Convention in 2000, the risk of having such high density infrastructure in downtown Los Angeles, and future plans for Wilcon and Eric Bender.

====

John Savageau, Long Beach

You can listen to the entire interview online at Pacific Tier

 

Filed under Entrepreneurs, Internet and Telecom, LA Life Tagged with , , , , ,

Smearing Cloud Lipstick on a Legacy Tech Pig

November 5, 2009 Leave a comment

The Cloud Computing Conference and Expo in Santa Clara has come to an end, leaving a fair share of opinion, skepticism, and robust Lipstick on the Cloud Pigdiscussion for the period of incubation leading up to the next conference. Many companies have adopted “Cloud-something or other” as their new name, and are aggressively bringing their products to market. We observed exhibitors displaying cloud network management software, cloud email and SMS messaging, cloud security – basically cloud everything.

According to the conference organizer (SYS-CON’s Jeremy Geelan), the conference exceeded all their expectations. Those expectations were to enlighten attendees on the state of cloud computing, train those who need to need to know more about clouds, and offer a forum to debate both the value and future of cloud computing.

I try not to be one of those expo attendees who find joy in tormenting booth staff, as often you will meet sales and marketing people who have no technical knowledge of their product, and are trying to simply collect cards and develop potential business from visitors and conference attendees. A model used over the past 100 years of industry conferences and expos.

However, of around 50 booths at the conference, only a handful of vendors could really be considered directly involved in development of cloud products or services. The rest either resell somebody else’s service, have tagged their legacy product with a “cloud” prefix of suffix, or simply set up a booth to have visibility or presence at the conference.

Now this is not a bad thing, in my opinion. As a cloud evangelist, a person who has dreamed about cloud computing, GRID computing, high performance computing, and network computing for most of my professional life, seeing the tag “cloud” plastered on just about everything makes me happy. It means the term and enthusiasm for cloud computing is no longer the domain of engineers, but is about to hit the “hype scale” that will drive the vision into the eyes and minds of just about everybody on the street. Without hitting this phase of “hype” development, cloud will risk dying or fading away like many of the other great ideas of our generation.

If that is what it takes to continue forcing companies to build faster, cheaper, and more agile cloud products; if that is what it takes to push governments to understand the value of virtualization and consolidation; if that is what it takes to push entertainment, social media, the financial community, and all industry information technology planning over to the cloud, then I will gladly buy the lipstick and distribute it freely to marketing companies to smear on the next startup’s branding plan.

Getting Past the “Geek”

As with all well-attended conferences, the most robust discussions took place in hallways, the exposition floor, and café tabletops. It is exciting to be in the early stages of technology shifts, as everybody has a different vision, different direction, and different opinion on the best way to create technologies, and apply them to business and social problems. Bringing back the Internet analogy of the 90′s, when email was considered a tools for geeks (circa 1992), and would never replace robust and mature technologies such as fax, cloud computing has a fair share of skeptics and “nay-sayers” as well.

Why? As engineers we are probably much more agile when jumping on the technology “first-mover bandwagon.” We are the ones with home entertainment systems which frequently pop circuit breakers, and occasionally attract local police departments to gently remind us we are being obnoxious and disturbing our neighbors.

Financial officers, operations staff, sales people, and other professionals are inherently reluctant to refresh technology and processes which work. To disrupt a business process requires a very compelling argument outlining and presenting the need for change, the risk of not making a recommended change, the potential outcome if the change fails, and the “pain point” technology refresh will solve when adopted.

Another example. Today most sales organizations have adopted some kind of CRM (customer relationship management) platform. It might be a SaaS product such as SalesForce.Com, Microsoft Dynamics, or other internal application. 15 years ago no sales person would willingly put their sales “funnel” into an online system, nor would they even give up their address book without a fight. Time has proven CRM systems are good for both the sales person, as well as the company, and facilitates the book-to-bank process. But it took a very long time to prove to both companies and sales people this process was valid, and still today has a strong lobby of reluctant old-timers who resist CRM.

Virtualizing IT applications and consolidating data centers makes sense. Economic, environmental, and performance sense. Let’s support the marketing efforts to bring cloud to the headlines. As engineers we need to be tolerant of those efforts, and understand without the marketing phase of cloud development it will take us longer to get into the DNA of future network and compute technologies.

And solve the final question, “which shade of lipstick is best for the cloud?”

John Savageau, Long Beach, from Sunnyvale, California

Filed under Internet and Telecom Tagged with , , ,

Insulating Innovators from Infrastructure with Cloud Computing

November 4, 2009 Leave a comment

The SMS message was desperate. AJ sent the plea “If I have to see one more picture of a cloud in a PPT I might lose it…” After two days of presentations at the Cloud Computing Conference and Expo, where companies tried to bring the audience up to an Intro to Clouds 101 level, some attendees were grasping for new ideas, new information, new reasons why companies should release their IT models currently based on strict FUD-Factor (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) compliance, to the new generation of cloud computing.

The “same slides, different day” approach was starting leave some Shelton Shugar - Yahooattendees a bit glazed, until Shelton Shugar, SVP of Cloud Computing at Yahoo! kicked off the morning with his keynote speech “Accelerating Innovation with Cloud Computing.” Shugar woke the audience up with an overview of how Yahoo! Is “walking the talk” with cloud computing deployments in their own network.

Yahoo! Mail, Sports, Finance, and other applications – all are using some level of cloud compute support based on HADOOP. Shugar detailed Yahoo’s support of the open source community through their “Open Cirrus” program. Not only aggressive cloud computing thought leadership, but actual industry leadership.

Insulating Innovators

Perhaps the most enlightening “sound bite” of the morning is Shugar’s statement that cloud computing relieves the developers from spending time on IT, allowing them to “focus time on their (business) problems, and not on the infrastructure.”

This is really significant. Having joined several presentations at the Cloud Computing Conference and Expo in Santa Clara, mostly repeating the same lines of reduced OPEX, CAPEX, energy savings, IaaS, PaaS, Saas, and so on, Shugar finally started bringing the ideas into a perspective business managers could relate to their own professional pain points, as well as open new ideas of what value this cloud “thing” might actually offer.

I remember in the old days (of the ’90s) while working at a telecom company breaking into the emerging Internet industry. We had a training section which consumed a lot of their schedule supporting remote access training for NOC (network operations center) technicians needing high level access to servers and routers. The training section maintained dozens of switches, routers, and servers in a computer room to support the training environment.

Each student needed practice working at the command line interface of network hardware, however in their day-to-day job they would never need to physically touch a network device, as the actual device could be located anyplace around the world – they simply need to practice troubleshooting and monitoring through remote access.

Looking around the conference hall at the Cloud Computing Conference, companies such as 3tera offer a provisioning tool that is able to automatically produce images of servers, switches, and routers within a virtual environment. You need a new LINUX box, you drag and drop a pre-configured LINUX image into your environment. It “spools” and is ready for access within about 2 seconds. From the user’s perspective, it is a physical LINUX server that could very well be mounted in the next room. The object functions exactly as a physical server would behave.

Within the virtual environment the instructor (or students) could spool up as many virtual images of the LINUX box as needed to meet the class’ training requirements. The instructor and training division no longer has to spend a lot of time each day wiping servers, reloading images, replacing failed memory or hard drives – any of the non-productive tasks that traditionally prevented them from spending their valuable time building better training curriculum, spending more time with their students, or delivering the course as an eLearning course anyplace in the company.

Now apply the same idea to any job where you have either knowledge workers or manual workers spending any amount of their time working on IT infrastructure-related tasks which do not directly produce revenue or some level of customer service (a broad category). Even better if you consider the supporting IT infrastructure may not even be in the same building, city, or even region. You may be getting your applications and IT support through a public cloud service provider (CSP) physically located in a different country!

The idea of insulating your knowledge workers from the IT infrastructure is one more item for our bag of 30 second cloud elevator pitches. It is great when such as simple statement can have such profound meaning. Looking around the auditorium, when Shugar may the statement and described the need to insulate our knowledge workers from the burden of IT infrastructure operations and management, I could see about 1000 pairs of eyes lighten, eyebrows rise a bit higher into the foreheads, and smiles appear on the faces of attendees who finally breeched the layer of skepticism and fog which had drawn them to the conference.

The rest of the conference will now be a much more free and productive use of their new enthusiasm for knowledge on cloud computing, what it is today, and what innovations they will be able to apply to cloud computing platforms and infrastructure in the future.

John Savageau, Long Beach (from the Cloud Computing Conference and Expo, Santa Clara, California)

Filed under Cloud Computing, Internet and Telecom Tagged with , , , , ,

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