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Darren Bonawitz
Darren Bonawitz attended Kansas State University where he majored in Electrical Engineering with an emphasis in Communication Systems.

Greg Elliott
Greg joined 1102 GRAND in 2008 where he has been active in attracting bootstrapping startups to Inc. 500 and Fortune 500 companies from around the region and the world

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Archive for June, 2009

Wake-Up Call Needed after Feds Bust International Telephony Hacking Ring

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

So I have read a few of the articles over the past couple of weeks about the global phone system hacking ring that was recently busted up. The good news is this ring has been stopped. The bad part is that it happened after $55 million of long distance theft transpired. If you didn’t hear about this, the short version is that hackers used brute force to essentially hijack telephone extensions of 2500 corporate phone systems. Oversimplifying things quite a bit, the thieves then proceeded to reroute long distance minutes to overseas call centers and profited through the sale of those minutes. Beyond the issue of the crime at face value, it appears that a good portion of the profits were then transferred into the hands of Islamic fundamentalists.

So how in the world did this happen? First of all, toll fraud is not a new crime and was even more lucrative back in the days of sky high domestic and international long distance. Remember those days when mom would call the grandparents and sound like a speed reader trying to sync up on life while dad stood there tapping his watch and wondering if a second mortgage may be in the future? It seems like a distant memory in these days of unlimited minutes with free long distance on cell phones.

Anyway, I think the issue stemmed from two things: (1) people do not perceive toll fraud as a major threat any longer. In fact, I bet call accounting records are rarely kept let alone reviewed by very many companies these days, and (2) the recession nearly a decade ago saw separate telecom and IT departments at most organizations become a thing of the past. From my experience, I witnessed a lot of telecom staff being let go and the task of maintaining the phone system passed onto the IT department. As IP phone systems have matured, there is definitely some value in doing this anyway, but the problem is that these departments were generally not skilled/versed into the nuances of telecom and more importantly were already overworked and often under budgeted. So they never had the chance to really drill down and learn about things such as toll fraud, call accounting reports, etc.

One ironic thing I read had to do with default passwords. It turns out that the brute force necessary to hack some systems was not so brute after all. Well known default login and passwords were all that was necessary. This was left unchanged by many of the same people who cast judgment on the average employee who buys a SOHO wireless router for their home and just plugs it in and goes without changing the login/password or setting up security measures. So besides not judging non-technical employees, what is there to learn from this fiasco? There are several things but two items that stick out in my mind are (1) the industry needs to heed this as a wakeup call and realize that the threat of network attacks are not limited to data networks. Voice networks pose their own risks and challenges, and (2) Executive management at companies need to realize that security is not a luxury but rather a priority and start budgeting more money to address issues proactively rather than reactively. Why do companies have to be burned before they perceive any value in this space?

By Darren

Tags: 1102 GRAND, Bandwidth, Bandwith, Boyd Group, cabinets, cage space, Caged Space, carrier hotel, carrier neutral data facility, Carriers, Co-location, co-location services, collocation provider, Colo, colocation, cross connect, data center, Data Center Security, data management, Data Suites, Disaster Recovery Solution, facility, Green IT, greening it, Interconnection, Internet Hub, Internet Service Prodiver, meet me cage, meet me room, Midwest data center, networking events, peering, raised flooring, raised floors, Raw Space, server, telecommunications, Telephony Hacking Ring, Web Hosting, whitepaper
Posted in Data Center Security | No Comments »

Rainy day golf tournament

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

All viable collocation facilities are going to have varying degrees of the necessary critical infrastructure across the space, power, cooling, connectivity, and services categories. At 1102 GRAND, we believe there is also another component that is often overlooked when evaluating facilities and that is the team who owns and operates the data center your organization is considering. At the end of the day, it all comes down to people, and the 1102 GRAND team loves helping connect our tenants, vendors, and service providers to each other. People purchase products and services, recommend service providers to peers, and create innovative solutions to real world business problems. That is why 1102 GRAND puts together regular networking events for our tenants, vendors, and others in the industry. Our goal is to help facilitate business by bringing entities together both from a business development and physical interconnection standpoint. 1102 GRAND is more than a major Midwestern hub for the internet… we are a hub for commerce, and we hope that you will choose to be a part of the experience we are building here one interconnection at a time.

Giving away prizes from our great sponsors during lunch

golfTourney 1 Rainy day golf tournament

Our most recent event was our 4th annual golf tournament held June 9th at Deer Creek Golf Club in Overland Park, KS (a suburb of Kansas City). Although rain and hail kept us from playing, we saw a strong turnout of registered players. We could not have done it without our ongoing support from event sponsors including: Fluke Networks, Cogent Communications, Media Venture Partners, Stallard Technologies, Graybar, Time Warner Cable Business Class, LanTel, K&W Underground, Kim Wilson Construction, K-PowerNet, Westhues Electric, KCNAP, Apex Systems Inc., Missouri Network Alliance, Bick Group, ATNI, DAMAC Products, The Kansas City Business Journal, Multiwave Digital Solutions, and Jennings PR.

In addition to the sponsors above, the following organizations registered to participate in the tournament: Acknowledge, Asurion Insurance Services, Balance Point, Black & Veatch, Coffman Group, Commercial Capital Company, Core Mechanical, DataEdge, Examinetics, FuseMail, GSI, Holland International, Hovey Williams LLP, KNK Telecom, JamesNetworks, LK Communications, MDL Technologies, Mersoft, NIC, North American Savings Bank, Occu-Tec, Polsinelli Shughart PC, Ruxter, ServiceMark Telecom, ShoMe Technologies, Sprint, State of Missouri, SureWest, tw telecom, University of Phoenix, US Fiberworks, Verizon Business, and Westlake Ace Hardware.

The rain kept us off the greens, but everyone still got to network

golfTourney 2 Rainy day golf tournament

Despite the stormy weather that kept everyone inside, the turnout was fantastic and a good time was had by all. Hot dogs and hamburgers were enjoyed and prizes were given out as well. Several people commented that without golf, more networking opportunities were available throughout the day.

Stay tuned as the tournament is rescheduled for June 23 at Deer Creek Golf Club.

by Greg Elliott

Tags: 1102 GRAND, Add new tag
Posted in Networking | No Comments »

Benefits of Midwest Data Centers

Monday, June 8th, 2009

Choosing a location for a data center or collocation presence is never an easy one. There is always the balancing act between uptime and affordability. One trend is apparent; however, the Midwest is clearly the most cost-effective location and should at least be considered when evaluating locations. While the Midwest may not be the best location for all businesses due to individual internal goals at a particular company, the region certainly has its merits.

Areas of the U.S. most affected by hurricanes

hurricane Benefits of Midwest Data Centers

Locating data centers in the Midwest is popular for several reasons including the lower costs for items such as power, real estate costs, construction, and labor. In addition, the Midwest has advantages in geography itself. Nearly all of the major fiber routes go through the Midwest in order to connect the east and west coasts. That means that many areas have access to a large number of providers within a given area. In addition, since network latency is related to distance, the latency is lower from the Midwest to either coast than it is from one coast to the other. Much of the Midwest is also located away from many of the natural disasters and other data center threats including: earthquakes, hurricanes, wild fires, and rolling power blackouts.

Areas of the U.S. most affected by Tsunamis

tsunami Benefits of Midwest Data Centers

When evaluating all of these criteria, it is no wonder that most data center location studies are largely comprised of Midwest locations such as Kansas City in their Top 10 lists. In fact, in the Boyd Group’s 2008 report, Kansas City was listed as the 2nd most affordable major market data center location. As the carrier hotel and internet hub for the region, we welcome the opportunity to discuss how we can help your organization and share what sets our facility apart from others in the Midwest.

Areas of the U.S. most affected by Wildfires

wildfire Benefits of Midwest Data Centers

By Darren

Raised Floors May Not be Necessary in Modern Data Centers

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

One of the most common questions we hear when prospective customers tour 1102 GRAND collocation rooms is why we do not utilize raised floor systems throughout our facility. If we ask these people if that is important to them, they often answer “yes” although they are generally unable to detail the reasons why. It seems that many individuals just believe raised floors are a required component to all data centers, which is definitely not the case. While raised floor systems are installed in several data centers throughout our facility, many of our spaces are non-raised with specially designed anti-static floor coatings. In fact, raised floors are often not the standard in telecom facilities and there are many experts who believe they are unnecessary in modern data centers.

When raised floor systems were originally developed, they served several purposes including:

Establishing a plenum of cold air that could be distributed to cabinets via perforated tiles
Providing a pathway for electrical cabling
Providing a pathway for connectivity media (coax, fiber, copper, etc.)
Providing a pathway for condenser or chilled water lines
Providing the ability to ground equipment to the raised floor grid

After installing electrical and data cabling along with water lines under the floor, the air flow efficiency of the under-floor plenum is reduced (often significantly if operators are not careful) which is obviously counterproductive. Consequently, it is often recommended that raised floor spaces should be a minimum of 24” (36” recommended) in order to provide adequate cooling to today’s IT equipment. That is one of the reasons that many newer raised floor data centers utilize at least overhead data cabling and often cooling lines that are installed above the rack.

Proponents of raised flooring systems often tout the fact that raised floors can cool higher power densities, and I cannot argue that there is some truth to this if designed properly. With that said, physics also says that cool air drops rather than rising which favors an overhead cooling solution and placement is critical to the success of either raised or non-raised floor environments. Moreover, if a data center is not utilizing tools such as blanking panels which help prevent air mixing, it is entirely possible to have a non-raised floor data center outperform a raised floor space in terms of cooling efficiency.

There are also definite drawbacks to raised floor systems as well including the fact that they are more difficult to keep clean underneath, limits to the amount of air that can be forced through a perforated tile, and the fact that many raised flooring systems simply cannot handle the weight of today’s heavy racks when fully loaded. Unforeseen collapses have been well documented due to everything from too many tiles being removed at a given time to earthquakes.

Just being on a raised floor does not mean limitless cooling capabilities either. There are still limits to how much a raised floor data center can cool with traditional perimeter computer room air conditioners (CRACs). That is why many newer types of cooling solutions are becoming more common in higher density environments, and the majority of these active solutions do not require raised floor by design. So if anything, the trend is moving away from raised floor systems even in high power density environments.

So I guess my point is that there is so much more to consider than simply whether or not a data center has raised floor. With regard to flooring, prospective buyers need to evaluate and question several other elements including power and data cabling distribution, the height of the raised floor if they feel it is a requirement, the power density limits in comparison to the equipment they wish to install, etc. In closing, please remember that 1102 GRAND utilizes raised flooring systems and non-raised floor solutions. So I am certainly not an anti-raised floor person. I am, however, a major proponent of utilizing the correct solution and helping guide customers to the offering best suited for their particular application.

By Darren

Tags: 1102 GRAND, Bandwith, Boyd Group, cabinets, cage space, Caged Space, carrier hotel, carrier neutral data facility, Co-location, co-location services, collocation provider, Colo, colocation, cross connect, data center, Data Center Security, data management, Data Suites, Disaster Recovery Solution, facility, Green IT, greening it, Interconnection, Internet Hub, Internet Service Prodiver, meet me cage, meet me room, Midwest data center, networking events, peering, raised flooring, raised floors, Raw Space, server, telecommunications, Telephony Hacking Ring, Web Hosting, whitepaper
Posted in raised floors | No Comments »

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Archive for June, 2009

Wake-Up Call Needed after Feds Bust International Telephony Hacking Ring

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

Rainy day golf tournament

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

Giving away prizes from our great sponsors during lunch

The rain kept us off the greens, but everyone still got to network

Benefits of Midwest Data Centers

Monday, June 8th, 2009

Areas of the U.S. most affected by hurricanes

Areas of the U.S. most affected by Tsunamis

Areas of the U.S. most affected by Wildfires

Raised Floors May Not be Necessary in Modern Data Centers

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009