"PENGUIN POWER" NEWS ARTICLE The following excerpt was taken from the April, 2000 edition of Linux Online at www.linux.org. It showcases the success that the Xensei Corporation enjoyed under Jeff's management, due to his unique and innovative work in the specialized high-availability web hosting market.

Penguin Power Credited for 100% Network Availability

NORTH QUINCY, MASS: Wednesday, April 5, 2000: Jeff Morris, President of the Xensei Corporation, announced today that they have reached a service level milestone that will allow them to begin rolling out high-availability web hosting, an emerging service level that has now become business-critical for eCommerce. High-availability hosting is required by successful eCommerce sites to ensure that their site will be "up", or open for business for a pre-determined percentage of time-often guaranteed in a service-level agreement (SLA).

He commented that, "Our customers have certainly appreciated the increased reliability of our hosting service as network availability has increased to 99.982% over the past year, and 100.000% over the last 90 days." [Since publication of this article, Xensei has now achieved 99.999% availability over the past year, and 100.000% over the last 90 days.]

There are multiple grades of high-availability hosting-they are named according to the number of "nines" in the uptime percentage. 90% is one nine or Class I, 99% is two nines or Class II, 99.9% is three nines or Class III, and so on. Class V is 99.999% and means that the site is down only 5 minutes per year as opposed to a Class I which means that your site is down for 876 hours per year (or 73 hours per month). Most hosting providers are currently providing Class I or lower hosting. Few offer the guarantee of an SLA.

The class of the high-availability hosting, whether or not it is guaranteed by an SLA, as well as the terms of the SLA, are the factors involved in determining how much a company should be expected to pay for their contract. The cost and accountability of the service provider increases exponentially as the number of nines increase.

Class I hosting is most appropriate for companies interested in maintaining an Internet presence that is informative in nature. Class II hosting is recommended for companies who are outsourcing their e-mail system or doing P.O.S. retailing over the Internet. Class IV hosting is required by companies involved in Manufacturing, Utilities, Telecommunications Customer Service, or whose business is strictly eCommerce. Class V hosting is business critical to health systems, satellite navigation, reservation systems, banking (EFT and ATM transactions) and financial securities trading. Class VI (99.9999%) hosting is used by defense systems in launch readiness.

Business owners and business investors should both be aware of the level of hosting that has been contracted for. Startups seeking angel or venture capital should include that information in their business plans.

Being able to offer and guarantee the results of this high-end service requires the provider to develop a heavily redundant, fault-tolerant network, with backup power supplies and 24/7 monitoring. "Developing and maintaining a network with guaranteed reliability has been made possible by the 'Penguin Power' of the Linux operating system," stated Morris, who is also Xensei's CTO (Chief Technical Officer). "NT servers just are not as reliable, as flexible or as easy to administer. Linux has allowed us to develop and maintain one of the highest levels of service in the industry for several years."

Laura Adams, Director of Business Development and a former NT administrator, agreed, "Linux is amazing. No need to install all the service packs every time the admin makes a change, he doesn't have to reboot it once a week, and it never goes down at 3:00 a.m. for no apparent reason."

Since being founded in 1994 as a local ISP providing dial-up access, the Xensei Corporation has been gradually developing a wide range of eCommerce services and investing in an infrastructure which has allowed them to provide an increasingly high level of availability. Their commitment to developing higher levels of service than the market currently demands has allowed the company to position itself early in a market with few competitors.