USA Cycling at the Olympic Training Center
Black Water USA - Afghanistan
The Arthritis Foundation
University of Western Michigan
University of Colorado
Whistler Ski Resort
City of St Paul, Minnesota
Telluride Public Schools
Holiday Inn - US Capital
New Haven Register - Connecticut's second largest Sunday newspaper

Contest has ended

For more details, contact us via e-mail at admin@apconnections.net or give us a call at 303-997-1300, extension 102. We look forward to hearing from you.

ResNet 2008 will take place from June 21-25 on the campus of UNB in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Just like last year, it's sure to be a great time.

Check out the official ResNet 2008 page for more details. We hope to see you there!

FISPA, or the Federation of Internet Solution Providers of the Americas, is made up of companies who provide a wide range of services including Internet access, Web hosting, Web design and an ever-increasing number of other services which use the Internet to facilitate solutions.

Let us know at admin@apconnections.net.

We first met this company at the FISPA conference last month, and they have some interesting ideas for ISPs looking to gain some incremental revenue. NebuAd combines web-wide consumer visibility with micro-targeted ads delivered at the right time in the buying cycle. This network-level approach enables behavioral targeting to finally attain its true promise of a greater scale of impressions, and greater relevance to drive increased revenue per impression.

While we don't have any firsthand experience with their services, their ideas seemed intriguing. If you've worked with them in the past, or do so in the future, let us know what you think.

A long time ago, back in 1993 or so, I was the Unix and operating system point person for the popular AT&T (i.e. Lucent and Avaya) voice messaging product called Audix. It was my job to make sure that the Unix operating system was bug free and to trouble shoot any issues. At the time, Audix sales accounted for about $300 million in business and included many Fortune 500 companies around the world. One of the features which I investigated, tested, and certified was our RAID technology. The data on our systems consisted of the archives of all those saved messages that were so important, even more so before e-mail became the standard. I had a lab setup with all sorts of disk arrays and would routinely yank one from the rack while an Audix system was running. The RAID software we'd integrated worked flawlessly in every test. We were one of the largest companies in the world and we spared no expense to ensure quality in our equipment, and we also charged a premium for everything we sold. If the RAID line item feature was included with an Audix system, it could run as high as $100,000. Flash forward to the future. We get a call that a customer has lost all their data. A RAID system had failed. It was a well-known insurance company in the Northeast. Needless to say, they were not pleased that their 100 K insurance policy against disk failure did not pan out. I had certified this mechanism and stood behind it. So, I called together the RAID manufacturer and several Unix kernel experts to do a postmortem. After several days locked in a room, we found was that the real world failure did not follow the lab testing where we had pulled live disk drives in our lab. In fact, it failed in such a way as to slowly corrupt the customer data on all disk drives rendering it useless. I did some follow up research on failover strategies over the years and discovered that many people implement them for political reasons to cover their asses. I do not mean to demean people covering their asses, it is an important part of business, but the problem is that the real cost of testing and validating failover is not practical for most manufacturers. Many customers ask, "If a NetEqualizer fails, will the LAN cards still pass data?" The answer is, we could certainly engineer our product this way, but there is no guarantee for fail safe systems.

Here are the pros and cons of such a technology: