E-Oasis Alerts

As an electrical engineer growing up in the power industry, I was fortunate to be around much of the electrical power infrastructure that most of us take for granted. From coal-fired power plants, hydroelectric, and gasification, I also had the good fortune to learn about high voltage transmission, substations and switching, and SCADA first-hand.

It’s obvious that a major shift is underway for electrical generation in North America. Wyoming, specifically, deserves closer inspection.  Let’s connect the available dots to understand why Wheatland Wyoming is positioned to benefit from wind energy development.

Dot #1: Wind! Wheatland, Wyoming  sits within the windiest point in the nation according to the NREL map, but developers are stuck without available transmission capacity.

Dot #2: Trifecta! Not insignificant is the environmental, land use, and siting issues with building new transmission lines.  The fact that Wheatland has the greatest access to existing transmission corridors and the fewest environmental conflicts gives them the trifecta of wind, transmission, and environmental attributes to thrive in the new energy economy.

The Wyoming Infrastructure Authority is actively promoting the Wyoming Colorado Intertie project to find a market for Wyoming wind.  This tie starts at the Laramie River Station just outside of Wheatland.

Dot #3: Transmission! Basin Electric, who operates the Laramie River Station,  already has a transmission line from Gillette at the Dry Forks power plant to Colorado  planned.

Dot #4: Market Access! Xcel Energy  actively participates  in the High Plains Express transmission line  planning. This line starts at Dave Johnson and connects at the Laramie River Station and is expected to bring wind power from Wyoming and Eastern Colorado and New Mexico solar to demand-needy areas.

Every wind developer knows that the closer their project is to a transmission corridor and a major substation to connect to, the more economically viable it becomes for development.

Dot #5: Infrastructure! Wheatland has the existing infrastructure to be the Forward Operating Base for all types of wind development including construction. The town has already benefited from significant improvements in schools, roads, and services during the 1977 to 1980 construction of the $1.6 Billion Laramie River Station (LRS) power plant just outside of Wheatland.

Dot #6: Stimulus! At a recent conference in Denver regarding the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), Nick Muller (Executive Director of the Colorado Independent Energy Association)  stated that Wyoming Wind is ahead of Colorado in areas of wind development. Approximately $3.2 Billion in loan guarantees is ear-marked from the ARRA for the Western Area Power Administration. Transmission line improvements are high on everyone’s list of projects for the Western States.

Dot #7: Stimulus Again! Part of the ARRA includes money to demonstrate carbon sequestering. Basin Electric already has proposed a large-scale carbon capture demonstration project to be done at its Antelope Valley Station. If successful, the implications for Basin’s other plants including Laramie River Station are obvious. Wheatland will benefit from a huge investment in carbon capture at Laramie River Station.

Dot #8: Training and Education! Laramie Community College, located in Cheyenne, WY has been designated as a regional training center for Wind Energy. The University of Wyoming, in Laramie had previously announced in 2008 the building of the UW Wind Energy Research Center.

You Better Hurry

The locals are organized and understand what is at stake. A few of the Wind Energy Associations include:

• Bordeaux Wind Energy Association
• Glendo Wind Energy Association
• Slater Wind Energy Association

It’s clear that Wheatland is sitting favorably within this wind corridor with its nearby Laramie River Station figuring to be the next likely major  interconnection point  for wind energy transmission and the town already possesses the infrastructure to take on the coming boom in wind development.

Platte County is Capable of 2,000 megawatts of Wind Energy

Early adopters will snatch up the available inventory of housing and industrial buildings while later arrivals will spur construction projects. To get an idea of the scope, some estimates place 100-200 construction jobs per 100 megawatts built and 2-6 permanent jobs for the same metric.  For Platte County, that translates into 40 to 100 permanent families and a staggering 2,000 to 4,000 construction families.

All the dots lead to Wheatland as a primary geographical focal point for the new energy economy.

About the Author:

Blaine Berger is the President of E-Oasis, a business and technology veteran with 25 years of experience. You can contact Blaine via e-mail at blaine@e-oasis.com or follow @eoasis on Twitter. You may also leave a comment on this blog.

Anti-Threat, General, Networks

It’s no wonder. With so much hype at the intersection of the economy and all manner of magic that is supposed to save you money, it’s easy to simply dismiss the cloud as all hat and no cattle.  The Cloud is Loud and Proud and not going to diminish for some time.

After reading Randy Bias’s post on Cloudcenters from GoGrid, I have to admit I’m rooting for the cloud. What stands out in the GoGrid description is the understanding of the Enterprise IT zeitgeist and the real-life concerns that must be overcome to use a cloudcenter.

I still believe there are two major impediments that bar the Cloud from any widespread adoption by the Enterprise:

1. Performance – Users want good response time. Most Enterprises can’t afford the bandwidth required to locate their computing off-premise (i.e. “In The Cloud”) and still deliver a satisfactory user experience.  Something has to change (cheaper bandwidth or different approach for desktop to application computing).
2. Security – Corporations can’t even keep their own on-premise data properly classified or secured. “Encryption at Rest” is the natural minimum requirement. Which leads you back to Performance.

Keep your eyes on GoGrid and read the Cloudcenters post right now to understand how a Cloudcenter looks remarkably similar to your existing data center.

Source: GoGrid’s Cloudcenter

DataCenters, General, Networks, Technology

Cloud computing enjoys the current marketing hyperbole cycle and vendor marketing departments know that. Everyone wants to be the leader in the cloud.

However, like “Web 2.0″ before it, it’s questionable if the term “Cloud Computing” can be used in any meaningful way. There are efforts to create a taxonomy of meaning to keep track of all the objects living in the cloud.

Cloud Computing = Off-Premise Computing

The only delineation seems to be if the computing takes place on-premise or off-premise. If it’s off-premise, then marketing will brand it Cloud Computing. You’re reading this blog in the Cloud which makes E-Oasis and you a Cloud user.

Practically, Enterprise businesses will continue to rely on their on-premise computing. The reasons are easy to understand. Let’s look at just two:

• Performance – Users want good response time. Most Enterprises can’t afford the bandwidth required to locate their computing off-premise (i.e. “In The Cloud”) and still deliver a satisfactory user experience. The math is simple. A typical user desktop has a  dedicated 10/100/1000 mbit/sec connection to their servers versus a shared Internet connection that is typically less than 45 mbit/sec and more often around 5 mbit/sec. Common tasks like file sharing in an Enterprise would be glacially slow. We won’t even discuss redundancy (i.e. multiple Internet connections to the cloud).
• Security – Corporations can’t even keep their own on-premise data properly classified or secured. Do you believe they will allow third parties to manage this important function? They’re not and they won’t.

If you use off-premise computing, it’s just a matter of time before your marketing department highlights that fact in a Proud Cloud Press Release. Take some comfort that this term will fall back to earth as soon as another one can take it’s place at the hyperbole feeding frenzy.

A $100 Billion Dollar Market?

Don’t forget that the First International Cloud Computing Expo is happening on the 19th of November if you just can’t get enough Cloud. After all, we have experts predicting that this is a $100 Billion dollar market. Did that get your attention?

That should be an easy number to achieve and may even be low. After all, Cloud Computing is just the sum of all off-premise computing. To achieve any meaningful adoption rates for the Enterprise, the pipes connecting the Enterprise to off-premise computing must both get fatter (more bandwidth) and cheaper. Way cheaper.

General, Networks, Technology

Since posting about the Comcast Broadcast storm, a steady stream of e-mail continues to arrive about Comcast’s other troubles…specifically DNS. Preston Gralla asks Why can’t Comcast run DNS? I don’t know why Comcast continues to have DNS issues, but you can switch to a free DNS provider such as OpenDNS.

I’m still trying to figure out other Comcast business mystery decisions. For example, Comcast decided in Colorado that it will only issue 5 usable IP addresses per business account. That makes it impossible to recommend Comcast business to businesses. Somewhere there’s a Comcast business executive that understands businesses use static IP addresses and are willing to pay for them. Not offering an option to buy more is treating your business customers like your consumer customers.

General, Lessons Learned, Networks

SunRocket, a VoIP provider, ceased operations and stranded all of its customers. Unfortunately, many of those customers pre-paid for their service. That means not only did their phone service stop functioning, they are unlikely to see any refunds for pre-paid service. And while Vonage is often mentioned as a replacement option, it looks like Packet8 actually did the heavy lifting to become the preferred provider.

See Rich Tehrani’s post on the topic for details.

Assessments, General, Lessons Learned, Networks

A quick web search should give you a taste for both the horror and success stories that a Vista upgrade brings. Before your IT staff decides that Vista is your standard, make sure they didn’t forget to test these items:

1. Does Vista work with your VPN solution? (Specifically, does your VPN software even support Vista and did they test it?)
2. Does your Vista machine still print correctly to all of your printers? (You know the drill…did it actually get tested?)
3. What’s the roll-back plan? (No excuses for not imaging user machines in case a roll-back to XP is necessary).

Assessments, Lessons Learned, Networks

I’ve been getting reports about Comcast slowness in this area for several weeks. Taking a closer look,a quick speed test confirmed that performance is awful. A look at the cable modem revealed that quite a bit of traffic was inbound without anything else plugged into the modem. A sniffer trace revealed that nothing was attacking the modem. Instead, all of the traffic is broadcast traffic coming from the Cadant Cable Modem Termination Device sitting on the Comcast network.
The Cadant device has broadcast storm protection, so perhaps the device is misconfigured or over-configured? Time to kick this over to Comcast support. Stay tuned.

Assessments, Networks

E-mail form spam seems to be growing in popularity where automated programs fill out web e-mail contact forms. There are various opinions about why they do this including exploiting vulnerabilities for doing injection or using the form to send the spam directly.

However, for the cases I’ve inspected, I’ve observed that there is no injection attempt and there is no spam message to send nor are there any offending links to post (the kind you get with trackback spam). Some of the e-mail addresses, however, do appear to be legitimate. So what’s going on?

Could this be an attempt to poison black hole databases using automation? The vulnerable web form then sends the opt-in notice to an unsuspecting real e-mail user who in turn may report the offender. Maybe.

Or is this just a version of on-line graffiti where your e-mail opt-in database gets filled up with nonsense and you unsuspectingly use that list in subsequent campaigns?

Whatever the reason, if you have an e-mail web sign-up or opt-in form, it’s time to protect it from automated fill-in before you have to manually prune your e-mail list database.

Captchas (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha ) are a common way to protect your web sign-up form.

Assessments, Networks

Cisco announced it will acquire WebEx for $3.2 billion dollars. Now it’s time to play the Connect the Dots game where everyone struggles to understand the deal on a number of levels and backs up the speculation with a series of dots (including unrelated dots) to bolster their thesis.
1. Did they pay too much?

2. Are they brilliant or clueless?

3. Who is next?

4. Who does this threaten? Who does this help?

I’m enjoying the TechChrunch speculation from readers where you can decide which dots you’d like to connect to understand the deal.
My take is that Cisco has a history of acquisitions and the track record is mixed on their brilliance and valuation of the companies. Today, they bought a great brand name. Let’s wait and see what they do with that purchase or if it becomes yet another tombstone in their acquisition graveyard.

Assessments, General, Lessons Learned, Networks

The main message of CIO Insight’s article is that NAC could require expensive network upgrades and is not ready for prime time. The market will ultimately decide if NAC makes an impact or falls back to earth failing to escape gravity.

Before deploying a NAC solution, ask yourself some questions to determine if you’ve even picked the low hanging security fruit:
1. Does your organization classify its information so the appropriate protection can be applied? (Policy)

2. Do you have a firewall and is it properly configured? (Perimeter Security)

3. Do you have an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) and is it properly configured? (Alarm System for Threats)

4. Do you have up-to-date virus scanning on all of your machines? (Local Threat Detection)

5. Do you practice Separation of Duties in your Information Technology (IT) Security Practices as an internal control? (Audit Control Procedures)

6. Do you actively budget for Information Security protection? (IT Budget Item)

Finally, what security problem are you trying to solve with NAC?

Because NAC has been with us two short years, test your NAC solution against that question.

Assessments, Networks