I arrived in Austin Sunday night to get ready for a factory tour on Monday, a kickoff dinner and then two days of briefings from Dell executives, including Michael Dell himself! Dell’s ISG business is growing at a very fast pace and continues to build momentum and focus within the broader organization.

We had a nice overview of the product roadmap, including some of the exciting enhancements Dell is making to their storage products such as the MD3000 and the new EqualLogic PS5000 series iSCSI solutions.

I really enjoyed the Council meeting and it reminds me all over again; what I admire about Dell is the way they and Michael Dell himself stay close to the customer. The entire purpose of this event is to “get it right” and determine meaningful ways to embrace change (including change in the manufacturing process) in order to make their customers more successful. Ah shucks, you may say that all companies behave this way… well I must tell you that is not true and at times, I find it difficult as we continue to grow to stay as close as I would like to all of our customers varying needs and directions.

This concept of gathering, internalizing and embracing customer feedback is a simple principle of Business Success stories. Always trying to improve the pace of change and build meaningful sticky relationships with customers. Dell’s very successful Ideastorm site where customers post product feedback and are active participants in the Dell community is a great example of how to do this right. No other hardware vendor that we have worked with or attempted to work with has ever gone to the extent of embracing change that Dell has during our 5-year relationship.

From the custom factory integration services to the attention to detail in the order and manufacturing, and logistics processes, Dell helps us execute for our customers and I must admit that we could not have built the business as quickly or efficiently without Dell!

So thank you Michael Dell for building a business that embraces change and is focused on helping your ISG customers succeed.

Oh, and for 2009 I plan to stay at TechEd US for both weeks. I want to start spending more time with developers -- they need some security love too :)

When I'm not traveling, I like to work from home some days rather than endure the trek from Seattle to Redmond (although it's much better now that our own employee transit service has expanded into my neighborhood -- the existence of which is sad commentary on the availability and reliability of Seattle's public transit companies).

This means, of course, that I need fast and stable network connections. Comcast with their PowerBoost is working very well for me. But I just can't find a decent wireless router at all. My Lenovo T61p (with Intel 4965abgn adapter) just won't stay connected to my D-Link DIR-628 and IT'S DRIVING ME CRAZY! (Yes, I've tried various driver versions, from both Lenovo and Intel.)

My house is in an area with a lot of wireless activity -- sometimes I can see nine or ten SSIDs. I'm running draft N on 2.4GHz (which occupies two non-adjacent channels, currently 1 and 4), and I suspect the problem is collision interference. I could shift the router to 5.2GHz, which I probably would help, but then the rest of the computers in my house won't connect. Why, you ask? Well get this: the DIR-628 is part of D-Link's RangeBooster N family. So I stayed in the family and got two DWA-542 adapters for the desktop computers. Yet they only do 2.4GHz! Silly me, I assumed that being in the same family means full support of the router's capabilities.

I'm very tempted to replace my router again -- and I'm thinking that the best option is to get one with dual radios. That way I can move my T61p to 5.2GHz and replace the desktop adapters, while still having single-channel 802.11b/g on 2.4GHz for the Wii and my PlayStation Portable.

Now my request: tell me about your experience with home routers. What do you really like, and why? What should I buy?

IBM announced today that it was spending US$300 million to build out 13 data centers in 10 countries in 2008 - IBM refers to these sites as "Business Resilience service delivery centers". These centers will certainly help IBM deliver more of its traditional IT recovery services but they will also support the next generation of IT continuity services - repeatable, scalable, productize services such as online backup and virtual recovery.  These types of services don't require massive capital investment in an inventory of heterogeneous server and storage platforms, instead the service provider can focus its efforts on building a scalable pool of virtualized servers and shared storage built with industry standard components.

Online backup is an important service because it provides an affordable information protection service for small and medium businesses and it's even useful for enterprises as a means to backup PCs corporate-wide as well as small servers at remote locations. In addition to the $300 million that IBM is spending on its new resiliency centers, late in 2008, it acquired Arsenal Digital Solutions, one of the major players in online backup.

In addition to online backup, recovery services using software-based replication to a cloud infrastructure will also open up new opportunities. These services will provide a much a better recovery time and recovery point than tape-based services but won't cost nearly as much as custom services based on storage-based replication and dedicated hardware. The cost of these services is more than most small and medium, even some large enterprises can or are willing to pay for. SunGard was the first to announce such a productized service, Forrester expects all the traditional DR service providers to bring similar offerings to market over time.

These cloud-based service offerings are important for several other reasons, first, it could help stem the tide of enterprises who are just so fed up with the traditional disaster recovery services model that they take DR back in house, second, it could convince, more medium size businesses that they can afford more advanced IT continuity solutions and lastly, it will help protect their market against new competitors who can simply partner with cloud providers such as Amazon S3 and Google to offer similar services.

IBM is not only using its expansion and acquisitions to stay competitive, it's also also hoping that customers will recognize the value of IBM expertise, process and best practices in BC.

What do you think? Does the reputation and expertise of BC and IT Continuity service providers like IBM and SunGard critical in your decision-making or can new players enter the market? Do these lower cost services that offer better RTO and RPO renew your interest in service providers or do you still plan to keep DR in-house?

I welcome your thoughts.

A team of superheroes known as "the Squadron of Justice" protect America with their awesomeness and superpowers!

Finally, a team of heroes has decided to defend all that is good and just on our networks. It's not anymore Marty Roesch of Snorting fame, it's not Markus Ranum, it's not Thomas Ptacek, it's not me either.

It's the Squadron of Justice.  Stay tuned.

For many users of Vista, its just another reason to not like it.

How does it apply to you, the casual user? It should convince you to insure your online safety. Use a alternate Browser like Firefox. Simply because its less of a target for exploits so far.

Make sure your MS updates are current. Practice good surfing, stay away from sites that may harbor porn, malicious ads and such. Make sure you have a reliable AntiVirus, AntiSpyware and Firewall program up.

And wait for the patch to fix the exploit.