Last one to leave…

I’m entering Law school at 34 years old.  Fully 10 years older than the average law school student.  However, as I’ve indicated before, this is a very logical progression for me, and a distinct advantage for me.

As a younger man, I was a truly average student.  I received very average grades.  As an adult I fully understand why I was so average.  I believe two of the largest hindrances to success are procrastination, and time management.  As a mature adult my skills at handling these two problems are exponentially greater than they were as a young adult.

If you were to ask 24 year old Al what his priorities were, he would give you a list, and it would all be rubbish.  24 year old Al didn’t know what having REAL priorities means.  How can a 24 year old, without a true responsibility in the world.  With only a handful of years of life experiences, truly have a solid value judgment on anything?  Truly my priorities were to play video games, and hang out with my girlfriend!  Ask 34 year old Al, with 2 kids, a wife, a business, and a decade plus of life experiences, what his priorities are, and you get an answer which truly has weight.  I believe that my priorities now outweigh the negative forces of procrastination, making procrastination not an option.  Doing something now, doing it right and doing it well, means so much both for me AND my family, that there is no room for procrastination.

As for time management, I believe this is only something I could learn with time, and with greater responsibility.  There is always time for things when your 24, and if it doesn’t get done, then the ramifications truly are minimal.  I mean when your greatest asset is your $900 car, and your heaviest responsibility is showing to work on time in the morning, how serious can anything be?  My time managing my business has instilled a much tighter, more advanced form of time management, that at any other time in my life I would not have even managed to understand the concepts, much less implement and live by them.

I’m very excited to be taking this journey into becoming a lawyer.  I know that I can complete it, and I’m fairly positive I couldn’t have completed it as a younger person.  I also know what this will do not only for me as a professional, but I know this is important for my family.

I’m scheduled to take the LSAT in June.  This gives me ample time to study for the test.  I’m still kind of feeling my way around the test and how to study for it.  I’ve taken one timed practice test and only scored a 143.  The average for Ave Maria is 152.  I’m positive the next time I take the test I’ll score at least 5 points higher simply for having taken the test once.

I scored the lowest in the logic games section.  I’ll admit that I enjoy the logic games, and they are a challenge in several ways for me.  In order to fix my deficiency I’ve purchased a handful of books and other materials.  I’ll outline them below.

• LSAT Logic Games in a Box by Kaplan.  This, so far, has been my best investment.  The games do a good job of progressing you through the different types of games, and build upon methods of solving them.  I can do it during down times at work, and it doesn’t become tedious
• LSAT toolkit for Iphone.  This has an actual practice test in it, and a pile of extra logic questions to work through.  I’m kind of happy with this purchase.  They do an awful job of providing answers to the questions.  They rely on users to answer the questions via a link to a web site.  Often these answers are convoluted, and do little to actually show you a good method for coming to a quick and efficient answer.
• Master the LSAT ebook by Jeff Kolby.  I really like the methods Jeff has used to layout solutions to the games, and his sound advice on tactics and strategies on how to take the test.  The ebook on Iphone is rather difficult to just kick back and read, because he offers lots of little area’s to test yourself and its difficult to answer the questions and find the answer key to verify if you are correct.

My plan as of right now is to lightly hit both my ebook, and the logic games in a box over the next 2 months.  Work daily to both expand my skills, and not lose any abilities.  I will probably take a practice test every week to couple of weeks.  I plan on hitting it seriously during the final month.  1-2 hours per day for 4 weeks.  My goal is to score in the upper 160s minimum, however I’d LIKE to get something over 170.  I think anything over 152 will work fine, but I’d like to excel, and not just skate by.

I sincerely believe I’ve been working my up to this decision for my entire adult life.  From my early years providing technical support, to my middle years running and operating a technology business, they have all built to the decision I made to become a lawyer.

Now I have 2 kids, a wife and a business.  These are not your normal starting point for law school, but I’ve never been one to follow the path most traveled.  I wont say this has served me well, but it has prevented me from making some very common mistakes.

I’m enrolling in Ave Maria Law School in Naples Florida.  This school fits very well with my personal preferences and my religious views.  The program will take three years, and I’m sure cost way more money than is ethical, however  I am extremely excited despite these two dreary facts.

I’ll try and keep the blog updated with my travails as much as possible.

Improved Capabilities

Have you ever eaten at a restaurant with a ‘bottomless’ whatever?  Bottomless, soupbowl, or maybe a bottomless pasta bowl?  Cloud computing is kind of like that, its bottomless computing, now matter how much you need, there is always more available.

During my years of operating a data center,the fear  was always present that should one of our customers actually make it, should they be successful, we were at times days, or maybe even weeks from ramping up our infrastructure to meet the needs of that winner.  In the mean time all of our customers would suffer.  Now this never actually happened, and we have ALWAYS provided extremely high quality services to our customers, but the reality is, no matter how well you plan, life happens, and one customer with a little luck, and a spot on Oprah could be disaster.

Cloud computing eliminates this worry.  Our infrastructure is now so large, so scalable, that Fat Albert himself could walk into our restaurant, and eat himself full.  We could have an army of Fat Alberts and please their appetites.

One last really neat benefit of cloud computing, if a customer walks in the door, and they only require something low cost, small scale, we can do that too!  Because you only pay for what you use, starting small is more affordable than ever.  If you require a Windows server, with a single application, and only a few gigs of bandwidth, it can be had for under $100 per month, with no hardware costs!

Cloud Computing insures that your opportunities never outgrow your infrastructure.

Lower Cost
Over the years that I owned my data center I often lamented that there had to be a more affordable way to provide data services.  The infrastructure cost always ate away at me.  The servers, power supplies, cables, racks, floor space, were things that we owned, operated, and maintained, but were completely redundant 1000′s of times over.  I also had a dedicated internet pipe that was expensive, extremely underutilized 90% of the time, and was not altogether reliable.   I knew out in the wold somewhere someone had made all these investments, and was desperate to sell me the use of these resources, at a price, and a rate that was better than I was paying.

I didn’t know over the years I was vainly trying to find a cloud services provider, but that was exactly what I needed, and wanted.  Once these cloud services came to exist, and I began to learn how they worked I realized that my dreams had come true.  I could purchase computing resources, on an as needed basis, eliminate all of the infrastructure costs, and do it all at fractions of the cost of my own data center.

Our costs have plummeted.  I’ll just outline a few of the basic things we no longer need, that never attributed to the bottom line, and since eliminating them have brought dollars directly into my pocketbook.

• Data center space
• Cooling
• Electricity
• Network administrator
• Servers
• Network equipment

The dollars from these 6 items amount to approximately $75,000 to $100,000 per year in expenses.  This is no small number for my business.

Improved Reliability

What can go wrong in a data center?  Lets look at a small handful of issues that can affect a data center,

• fire
• flood
• theft
• internet failure
• power failure
• cooling failure
• server failure
• maniac employee’s with hatchets

This is just a brief list of things that can bring down a data center.  Now most data centers have these problems fairly well covered.  I would dare to say almost all large scale cloud computing providers indeed have these covered in triplicate.  A small business, with a limited budget, in a remote corner of the world?  I can guarantee you they don’t.

Let’s take a brief tour of the typical data center at the typical small business.  Lets say this business does between 10 and 20 million dollars a year in business.  Has office space that holds approximately 20 staff, a large warehouse, and maybe a light industrial area that produces widgets.

As we enter the building the first thing we notice is the large bolt on the door, and the lack of intrusion detection on either the door, or the walls.  We then proceed through the building, passing offices, machinery.  We walk into an office where sits the IT department.  On one side of the room are a pile of servers, neatly sitting beneath the fire suppression system (aka a sprinkler head.)  On the other side of the room sits the IT staff, earplugs inserted in order to keep from going insane due to the constant hum of the server equipment.

I could go on, but you get the point.  Does this sound like a good situation for the most important asset your business has, its data?  How many small events could happen daily to bring your entire organization to a halt?  A maintenance guy replacing a light bulb bumping the sprinkler head, which then douses your entire operation with 100′s of gallons of water.  A car wreck outside the building taking out the power pole for a day or two.  Or a thief breaking in and stealing every server in the building.

All of these scenario’s are carefully studied, remedied and managed when you entrust your infrastructure to a cloud provider.  From my businesses perspective we improved reliability simply by the fact that the best internet service available in the city doesn’t come close to match the multi-homed redundant services provided by our cloud provider.  We simply never have internet outages.

I like to described our data as being ‘gently nestled into the cloud.’

Up next in the series is a discussion on the cost savings of cloud computing.

Administration Staff

When I started my business I was blessed to start it with one of the most intelligent, and hard working systems administrators alive.  My partner could make things happen.  He could take the oldest junkiest hardware, and make it do back-flips and sing show tunes.  He could find a way to solve the stickiest software issues by shear will power.  He did all these things on the stingiest of budgets.

My guy is a luxury most people don’t have, or can’t afford!

When Zach finally left for greener pastures he was hired away at a salary close 6 figures.  I was left with an extremely complicated platform that services 100′s of clients!  Fortunately we had a plan.  We knew that cloud computing was the answer.  Within 6 weeks we had the entire operation moved into the cloud.

Since moving into the cloud we’ve not had the need to employ high level systems administrators.  As a matter of fact a tag team of my main tech, and I have been able to adequately support all of our customers, and do it in less time.

The way this works is, most of our complicated administration tasks are automatically handled by the tools provided by our cloud vendor.  Email, DNS, web servers, are now all managed in simple web interfaces.  The security of these tools is actively managed by the cloud provider.  We are free to work with our customers, manage their services, and not have to worry about the complicated administrative functions that those services require.

We also have a virtual server which we utilize for our more demanding customers.  This server was configured by the Maestro Zach on his way out the door, and has been administered by us.  However should we ever run into any sticky issues our cloud provider offers complete management services that goes down to the operating system and software levels!  We pay them when we need them, and they can manage every aspect of our server.

In my next entry into business and the cloud I’ll discuss how cloud computing can improve reliability.

I’ve operated an internet services business for over a decade.  We’ve been providing email, web site, database, and disaster recovery services utilizing our own hardware, open source software, and lots of blood sweat and tears.  The costs involved in providing these services were substantial for a business our size.  On top of all the hardware we owned, we needed a very high quality internet connection, and needless to say in the north woods of Michigan, quality high bandwidth internet doesn’t come cheap!

We struggled with these challenges for years.  We looked at how to utilize data centers in Chicago, or co-location services with various ISP’s in the region, and never really found the flexibility we needed to serve our customers. What happened that really changed our ability to move our infrastructure out of our office and lower our costs, improve our reliability, and in the end allow us to provide better service for our customers was the birth of cloud computing.

Over the next few days I’ll review some of the changes we’ve made and how they have affected business.  Moving into the cloud does have some drawbacks, and challenges, but I think you will find over the next several posts that these are far outweighed by the benefits of going cloud.

I’ve probably employed more ‘software engineers’ than all of my customers combined have ever met!  However despite that, I still feel that I’ve not ever employed enough to satisfactorily service all of my customers needs.  I know what it takes to to provide a high quality solution that works well, is reliable, and, most important of all, satisfies the customers needs.  This is a daunting task.  It requires smart, hard working, and very educated people.  Often it takes several of these smart/hardworking/educated people!

The dilemma for me as a solution provider is, how do I find these people, at the right numbers, with the right skills, for the solutions I implement?  Cloud computing to the rescue!

Let me give one good example of how cloud computing does this.  One of our best partners is Rackspace.  I don’t have the exact numbers, but I happen to know that Rackspace is one of the, if not THE largest employers of Red Hat certified engineers, in the world.  I like to ask my customers, when I’m discussing cloud solutions, “who do you trust more, me (or perhaps my competitor), or the 80 or so certified engineers at Rackspace?  I know who I trust.

I’m of the opinion that the experts should do the things that they do best.  They have reputations to worry about, and it truly is in their best interest to do the best job for you.  I run my business in the same way, I work with clients I know I can help, and I do a great job for them in the area’s I know best.  I MUST do well, or I will not survive.  That means, often, I recommend clients work with the companies that have the best skills.  I often recommend my clients work within the cloud, and harness the power of those 80 or so engineers.  Let those companies and their engineers make both of our jobs better, and often, save money in the process!