2002
WELL-CONNECTED AWARDS B Y D A R R I N W O O D S
ervice providers barreled into the vices have diminished or disappeared. EDS offers good managed Web-host-
21st century with hapless aban- For example, storage providers have be- ing services. And Loudcloud can bring
don, multiplying and hatching inge- come almost extinct because most cor- a ray of sunshine to your outsourced
nious new services to sell to hungry cus- porations are keeping storage and B2C needs as well.
tomers. But a sagging economy in early backup systems at their own sites.
2001 necessitated that most enterprises But don’t feel too sorry for the THE DOWNS AND UPS OF DSL
hold back on purchasing services. xSPs—they are busily devising new Given the spectacular failures in the
Those providers that survived the ways to make money. For instance, DSL market last year—Excite being the
long, cold winter are still hunkered services that were once offered free most high-profile—you might think
down waiting for the sun to reappear. are now being sold. Case in point: DSL is dead. Excite started out as a
We’ve seen market forces at work Yahoo, which recently announced it search engine, but the company
here before—in the late 1990s merg- will move POP customers from free expanded into new markets as op-
ers and buyouts in the dial-up busi- e-mail services to fee-based accounts.
ness led to the emergence of the One notable growth area is support
broader service-provider market. In services. As Linux becomes the server MANAGED WEB
2001, however, there weren’t any platform of choice for enterprise cus- HOSTING SERVICE
high-profile buyouts, just plain outs. tomers, some of the problems encoun- WINNER: EDS Hosting Services,
tered in the OS go beyond what the Electronic Data Systems, (888) 889-
THE NAME GAME typical IT person can handle. In our 1392, (972) 605-6000.
Last year we talked about the frantic tests, Caldera gave us the best service www.eds.com/webhosting
search for letters to replace the “x” in and ably answered our questions (see FINALIST: Managed Application
xSP (see “Proliferation of Providers “TEAMwork Pays Off for Linux,” at Infrastructure Provider, Xand Corp., (914)
Leads to a Mixed Bag of Services,” at www.nwc.com/1309/1309f3.html). If get- 592-8282. www.xand.com
www.nwc.com/1210/1210f15.html). But ting providers to take on some of the
today many of the alphabet-soup ser- workload is an option at your company, OUTSOURCED
B2C SOLUTION
WINNER: LoudCloud, (408) 744-7300.
www.loudcloud.com
FINALISTS: Digitas, (617) 867-1000.
CALDERA TEAM SERVICES: As Linux how to access technical support. Caldera also
www.digitas.com
goes mainstream, Linux support will encouraged yearly on-site visits and sent us
NaviSite, (888) 298-8222, (978) 682-
become critical. Caldera blew us away with weekly status reports via e-mail regarding all
8300. www.navisite.com
its TEAM (Technical Expertise Account support activity. Our account manager
Management) support service. routinely called us after an incident to ensure
LINUX SUPPORT
The TEAM tech staffers are accessible our problem had been solved.
SERVICE
and responsive—and go the extra mile that The average time to a solution for a non-
makes for a successful long-term support critical incident was one hour. Caldera also WINNER: TEAM Services for Linux,
relationship. The main leg up Caldera has offered us Web access via its Online Caldera, (888) GO-LINUX, (801) 765-
on rivals—and on most service providers— Manager feature, a value-add to the TEAM 4999. www.caldera.com
is that it assigns each customer a technical service. A wealth of information, from FINALISTS: HP Support Services for Linux,
account manager who serves as a single, configuration to security issues, was at our Hewlett-Packard Co., (888) HP-LINUX,
accessible point of contact. fingertips, and we were able to submit (905) 206-3913. www.hp.com/linux
In our tests, Caldera sent us a welcome incident reports, check the status of ongoing Linuxcare Enterprise Support Solutions,
e-mail containing information pertinent to our incidents and search Caldera’s knowledge Linuxcare, (888) LIN GURU, (415) 354-
fictional account and detailed instructions on base for solutions to other problems online. 4878. www.linuxcare.com
72 NETWORK COMPUTING I 5.13.2001 I www.networkcomputing.com
portunities arose. The loss of Excite customer switches placed in a ring most supporting SONET OC-12 or
wasn’t about DSL alone—it was about around a city or metroplex, a MAN higher interfaces to the core network,
an entire portal business that offered uses SONET to operate more effi- usually with extended protocol support.
access to chat rooms and news. ciently than a traditional point-to- MSS products bring voice and data to-
Don’t lose hope for DSL, though. point network. But with SONET, gether in one box. But while IADs have
SBC has become the largest provider of MAN providers are locked into a rela- traditionally been based around frame
DSL, with more than 1 million of us tively expensive nonpacket-based sys- relay or ATM, the MSS will do both,
signed up, not including the customers tem. RPR creates a packet-based net- plus SONET.
of smaller Tier 2 providers that use work that operates in a ring fashion MSS equipment is well-suited for
SBC’s networks to deliver DSL to their and offers quick failover and better service providers that want to eliminate
customers. To improve on the speeds use of packet-based network band- the multiple devices they need in their
SBC can provide, the company is width than SONET does. PoPs (points of presence). Most of
spending $6 billion on its Project RPR will replace Ethernet in many these devices aggregate different Layer
Pronto initiative (see “FCC Grants situations where failover is essential. 2 protocols into a SONET or ATM
SBC Permission for Pronto Project,” at Ethernet is capable only of failing over stream. One box is easier to maintain
content.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB2000 or switching to an alternate route with and can provide more services to cus-
0908S0013). Pronto pushes the the use of Spanning Tree technology. If tomers because voice services can be in-
DSLAMs closer to the customer by de- a connection goes down, it could take a cluded with data.
ploying fiber from the CO directly to a Spanning Tree network several seconds Voice integration from soft switches
neighborhood. This can cut dry copper to find an alternate route. RPR does it is taking time to catch on, with enter-
runs from miles to just thousands or in 50 milliseconds or less. prise customers looking instead to de-
even hundreds of feet, increasing trans- The RPR standard is still a work in ploy their own IP PBXs. Although soft
mission speeds dramatically. progress, but a few vendors, including switches offer high-end PBX features
Luminous, are creating products. to companies on tight budgets, they
WANTED: CHEAP TECHNOLOGY When the RPR standard reaches its carry the stigma of being nothing
Service providers need inexpensive final form (projected to be by March more than Centrex systems that now
technology to stay alive. And we don’t 2003), metro providers will benefit use IP. Placing the PBX at the service
mean technology they can sell to their greatly from the technology. Not to provider seems like a reversion to the
customers but technology within their be left out, enterprise customers op- old days of Centrex systems, but these
own networks. SONET has been a erating campus networks will find ad- devices offer many more features and
mainstay of the carrier/service provider vantages in RPR because it offers generally operate the same as a locally
market and some enterprises for 18 Ethernet over a ring topology without placed PBX.
years now. It has grown from 155 Mbps the expense of SONET or packet
to 64 times that in operational systems over SONET. Darrin Woods is a technology editor of
with 10-Gbps speeds. Systems in devel- Although packetized voice services NETWORK COMPUTING. Darrin has
opment increase that another four continue to languish in the service worked as a WAN engineer for a telecom
times, to 40 Gbps. Still, while SONET provider world, they are not forgotten. carrier. Send your comments on this arti-
has held its own against many new A new breed of switch, the MSS (mul- cle to him at dwoods@nwc.com.
technologies, it may have met its match tiservice switch), is emerging from
in RPR (Resilient Packet Ring). Cisco and other vendors. Although
RPR (IEEE 802.17) is designed to MSSs are being touted as the penulti- » Not all service providers are in the red.
offer service providers that operate mate convergence device, they really Read about those that are making money, at
MANs an alternative to deploying aren’t anything new—just IADs (inte- www.nwc.com/1310/1310rd2.html.
SONET networks. A collection of grated access devices) on steroids, with
» “Loudcloud Updates Customer
Management Portal” (InternetWeek,
April 2, 2002) www.internetwk.com/story/
INW20020402S0002
COMPANIES
Cable & Wireless Recently made purchases that should bring additional services like content delivery to » “NetResults: Week in Review”
customers. www.cw.com (InternetWeek, March 29, 2002) www.
Caldera International Need Linux support? This is the company for you. www.caldera.com internetwk.com/story/INW20020329S0006
TECHNOLOGIES » “Setting Standards for SLAs” (Infor-
OC-768 Ratified in February, offers speeds four times those of today’s OC-192. www.oiforum.com mationWeek, Jan. 31, 2001) www.information
week.com/story/IWK20020131S0012
Resilient Packet Ring (RPR) Combines ease of Ethernet with resiliency of SONET. www.rpralliance.org
74 NETWORK COMPUTING I 5.13.2001 I www.networkcomputing.com