At the recent Next Generation Data Center conference, Amazon's CTO, Werner Vogels, suggested that a key issue with data center's is that staff spend 70% of their time on tasks that fail to differentiate the company from competitors. He mentioned the recent power meltdown at 365 Main as an example of how key staff have to spend a lot of time on UPS, fire suppression, and other infrastructure.
I suspect many of our clients, especially the shared hosting variety, fall victim to the same pitfall: they spend a lot of time and effort on tasks that do not differentiate their businesses.
I've been focused on this a lot lately as we try to move rackAID's services to the next level. I've been trying to pinpoint the differentiating services we offer and focus our staff's efforts on those tasks. It does not make much sense to have someone here enter a reboot ticket at a provider when their skills would be better utilized sorting out a new deployment or performance issues on your server.
Along these same lines, I've realized the real value in what we do is not that we can run yum or up2date to get your server updated. There are plenty of Linux newbies that can do those tasks. The value in what rackAID brings is the high-level consulting and operational assurance we can deliver.
There is another server management company that charges a third of what we charge for an update and monitoring service. I always wondered how they could charge so little. I recently learned the answer.
Besides rebooting during an outage, they do not do anything unless you ask.
Unless you open a ticket and ask them to update your server, they do not update it. I was surprised at this. Running yum and up2date is trivial. The complicated part is in knowing if the patch is relevant to the system, if it will break your control panel, if it will break your application or if it poses a real security risk to your operations. Learning these details takes expertise, time and resources.
Ensim, for example, has a notorious history of not working well with OS updates. We've seen systems become nearly unusable after a simple OS update. As a result, we maintain an active "skip" list of OS components that we know conflict with Ensim. When you start multiplying the various versions of Ensim with the number of OS's, you soon realize that we have to have about a half dozen or more test systems. We have to monitor updates, spot potential issues and resolve them before we roll out the patches.
This research is one way that we differentiate our services. We don't have to compete with the $30.00/month offering because it is not the same service. The operational assurance you gain is not the same. If you are on vacation, do you really want to have to stop and submit a ticket for an OS update? Do you want to spend time perusing the forums to find out if the latest fix from Plesk will interfere with your modified PHP installation? Probably not, which is why you may want to select rackAID over a company that simply provides techs on-demand.
Over the past few weeks, we've been discussing some changes in our services. You will likely see new products and services roll-out soon. Once again these services capitalize on our strengths and continue to differentiate us from our competitors. For a small business, it simply does not make sense to waste staff's time on issues that don't add real value to your business. Sometimes working to find partners and outsourcing non-differentiating tasks can make the best use of your staff's time. The end-result is a better service/product for your clients.
