'Net Features : cloud computing

1&1 Dynamic Cloud Server Enhances Scalability for SMBs

Michael Garrity — Mon, 06 May 2013 19:10:00 GMT

Web hosting company 1&1 Internet recently upgraded its 1&1 Dynamic Cloud Server that will make the solution more flexible and cost efficient.

The biggest change to the server is an increased focus on scalability that allows it to meet a customer’s performance requirements at any time. This is primarily through the inclusion of dynamically adjustable resources, including Processor Cores (vCore), RAM (GB) and Hard Disk Space (GB) that can be configured up or down by the users, themselves.

In addition, 1&1 Dynamic Cloud Server customers can add up to 99 virtual machines (as required) without migration under a single contract, as the new updates come with no fixed contract, at all; instead, costs are dependent upon the configuration in place, so users only pay for the resources they require and use. There are no basic fees, setup fees, minimum contract terms or transparency of per-hour costs.

All servers are available in both Linux and Windows configurations, which are installed automatically, and include full root access, 2000 GB of traffic, unlimited on-demand Snapshot Backups, Parallels Plesk 11 and a $60 starting credit; they also come with fail-safe security through redundant cores and storage.

These changes to the 1&1 Dynamic Cloud Server give small and medium-sized businesses the opportunity to leverage high performance for just short periods of time, while only paying for the actual requirements they use.

CloudAccess Integrates Identity and Access Management

Michael Garrity — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 16:30:00 GMT

Cloud-based unified security solution provider CloudAccess has recently announced version 3.0 release of its CloudIDM/AM system, featuring seamless, “unique” integration between enterprise identity management and access controls (i.e. single sign-on and access management) from the cloud.

In addition, CloudIDM/AM 3.0 comes with multi-directional password synchronization between the system’s identity management solution, Active Directory and/or Lightweight Director Access Protocol (LDAP), as well as a federated gateway that allows access to an application or website, a dynamic self-service portal and centralized GUI-based workflow automation.

"We've taken the next evolutionary step to integrate the key capabilities of provisioning, multi-factor authentication and role-based workflow management with an advanced single sign on for SaaS and legacy applications and manage it all from the cloud," said Kevin Nikkhoo, CEO of CloudAccess.

Because of a proliferation of SaaS applications, increased complexity with “bring-your-own-deivce” and general user mobility, many organizations these days are suffering from more and more vulnerability gaps. As a result, regulatory agencies have made it a legal requirement to continuously monitor and report on user access. So, straight out of the box, the newly updated CloudIDM/AM system will include the streamlined ability to automate compulsory reporting in a way that satisfies the compliance governance for a variety of agencies, including HIPAA, PCI, FFIEC, NIST FERC and Sarbanes-Oxley.

Since it is a cloud-deployed SaaS solution, CloudIDM/AM 3.0 doesn’t require any hardware or software to install, and it will integrate with other scalable security solutions, like SIEM and log management systems. Plus, the whole suite can be monitored in real time from a single dashboard.

CloudIDM/AM 3.0 is currently available for direct sale, or through various reseller channels.

Cache Anything and Speed Up Load Times

Michael Garrity — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 17:05:00 GMT

One of the most common methods that webmasters use to speed up their sites is to cache content (such as HTML pages, JavaScript, images or CSS) to reduce bandwidth and server load and speed up delivery.

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of content that can’t be cached, and when websites need to utilize that it can be problematic for performance and user experience. CloudFlare, a provider of cloud-based services to help secure and accelerate websites, is looking to alleviate this problem for its users by “caching the uncacheable” through a new Web optimization software called Railgun.

CloudFlare users are already at an advantage, because the service will not only cache content, but also deliver it to users from its various datacenters around the world. However, according to the company’s blog, “only about 66% of content is cacheable,” meaning the remaining 34 percent has to be recovered from the server of origin. That is why the company developed Railgun, which can cache dynamically generated and/or personalized Web pages using a scheme that reduces bandwidth and speeds up the loading process.

Railgun starts the acceleration process for non-cached pages by speeding up the downloading of the initial HTML, which must happen before the rest of a page can even begin downloading.

Primarily, though, Railgun is able to send Web pages across the ‘Net much more quickly because it will compress them to an astonishingly smaller version, which it’s able to do by looking at changes on a page “from download to download.” It will reduce the pages to just 0.65 percent of their original size to ensure that they travel faster from the origin server to the user’s screen, no matter where they are.

This new service is currently only available for CloudFlare Business and Enterprise customers as a part of their service packages.

High Storage Instances Come to Amazon EC2

Michael Garrity — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 21:09:00 GMT

Amazon Web Services (AWS) wanted to give its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) users a present, and what better way to celebrate the holidays than with family – a new instance family, that is.

The cloud computing services provider from Amazon recently announced High Storage instances for EC2. This additional instance family is optimized for applications that required rapid access to large amounts of data, while also providing AWS customers with 35 EC2 Compute Units of computing capacity, 117 GiB of RAM and 48 TB of storage across 24 hard disk drives. Moreover, these instances are capable of delivering more than 2.4 GB of sequential I/O performance per second.

In other words, because High Storage instances provide such massive amounts of direct attached storage per instance, they are ideal for data-intensive applications like Hadoop workloads, log processing, data warehousing and parallel file systems for processing and analyzing large datasets in the AWS cloud.

High Storage instances follow eight other EC2 instance families, including Cluster Compute and High I/O instances, to help meet the evolving application requirements of Amazon EC2 customers. Like the others, High Storage instances were designed to enhance the performance and efficiency of even the most demanding applications. They also power the new petabyte-scale data warehousing service Amazon Redshift and can help Amazon Elastic MapReduce customers process larger quantities of data more resourcefully, who helps significantly lower costs.

AWS customers can immediately launch High Storage instances through the AWS Management Console, Amazon EC2 and Elastic MapReduce Command Line Interfaces, AWS SDKs and various other third-party libraries. However, at the moment this new instance family is only available in the US East Region; they will be made available in other AWS Regions “in the coming months.”

Mobile & Cloud, Top Trends for 2013

Michael Garrity — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 15:45:00 GMT

As the new year approaches, its time for small and medium-sized businesses to start getting connected to their customers in the cloud, as well as on mobile devices, according to a new trends report from cloud services solution provider j2 Global.

In compiling its report, the company found that mobility, cloud expansion and integrated business services will be “the three key trends that SMBs must be ready for in 2013.”

2011 saw a massive boon in smartphone sales – so much so that the mobile devices actually outsold PCs that year. That trend continued this year, and in 2013, j2 Global foresees companies getting more mobile-savvy, with mobile “tools” spanning industries, generations and job types and being leveraged for more than just basic communication needs.

j2 Global also points out that while many SMBs have long used smartphones and/or tablets for email and Web browsing, they must now start incorporating a wider array of other mobile business apps to increase their ability to stay connected and available and improve productivity. This can include workflow apps like mobile faxing or communication applications for VoIP calling, for example.

However, mobile isn’t the only major trend that SMBs need to adapt to as we rush into 2013. They’ll also have to start heading up into the cloud, as it provides various advantages for business owners, including faster deployment and a lower cost of ownership. And the good news for SMBs is that cloud-based technology provides a lowered cost of delivery and mobility, so they’ll save money in the long run.

The report predicts that cloud computing and As-a-Service technologies will soon become the default way that SMBs leverage technology, as they provide a lower barrier to entry, greater flexibility and virtual/remote capabilities and do away with the space and location restrictions that arise from on-premises solutions. Plus, these technologies will offers SMBs access to competitive, cost-effective and efficient advantages only available with the cloud. In fact, j2Gobal predicts that with the evolution of the cloud market, SMBs will adopt the tech more quickly, “putting at least 2 in 3 SMBs in the cloud in 2013.”

Finally, the company has discerned that integrated systems will become a much bigger part of SMB operations over the next year, as they provide greater efficiency through unified tools and systems that work collaboratively to drive results.

These fully integrated business solutions will begin to overtake disconnected systems throughout 2013. For example, email marketing will soon become one of the first applications to be completely integrated into CRM services, allowing sales and marketing teams to more easily execute campaigns and track the results from within a single application. Likewise, social capabilities will also become integrated into business platforms to help drive a faster sales cycle and lower acquisition costs; in addition, marketers will be able to manage social media campaigns more easily from their CRM services.

The new year is shaping up to be a banner year for SMBs, as long as they’re willing to adapt to and incorporate these emerging technologies into their operations. Mobile devices, integrated systems and the cloud are all going to play an increasingly bigger role in the way businesses operate over the next 12 months – is your company going to be ready?

Riak CS Lets Users Replicate Data Globally

Michael Garrity — Sat, 08 Dec 2012 14:46:00 GMT

Customers can now replicate Riak Cloud Storage (Riak CS) data across multiple data centers to assure its users that they can avoid disruptions from outages and serve content faster to multiple geographic locations, all while building upon its existing compatibility with Amazon S3.

The cloud storage service from Basho Technologies will now allow customers to spread their stored data over a series of data centers located around the world, and the integration of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure guarantees high availability. Basically, Riak CS customers will now be able to replicate their stored data on any data center they want on their own terms, in addition all of the benefits of using AWS, just to sweeten the deal. This solution also reduces some of the risks commonly associated with AWS.

Moreoever, these new replication capabilities will break large data objects into smaller blocks that will be streamed to the underlying Riak cluster, where they will then be replicated for high availability. A manifest for each object will be maintained, allowing the service to retrieve each block from the cluster and present the full object to the end-user. Global information, bucket information and manifests will all be streamed in real-time from a primary implementation to a secondary site for multi-site replication, and objects can be replicated in either “full” or “real-time” sync modes.

Riak CS, built upon Riak, the open source distributed NoSQL database, was just released by Basho last year, and the Amazon S3 integration, which provides Riak CS customers with access to S3 tools and frameworks, was only announced early in 2012.

Automate Email Processes from the Cloud

Michael Garrity — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 19:00:00 GMT

The UK’s Parker Software company is best known for its live visitor tracking/live chat solution WhosOn and Email2DB, an email parser and business process automation solution, but the company is looking to flesh out the latter solution with the release of Email2Cloud, its new cloud-based email automation service.

Naturally, Email2Cloud is based on the Email2DB software, and the solution will automate a customer’s crucial business process to run when they receive incoming emails, which can include Twitter responses, Web page changes and database changes.

Email2Cloud will work similarly. The solution reads email messages, database records, Twitter feeds, Web pages, Excel spreadsheets, RSS feeds and “other sorts of messages,” and then extracts any useful information to add to and update a customer’s database(s) and trigger automated actions.

Parker Software’s newest solution can integrate with many widely used CRM, ERP, CMS and POS systems, including SharePoint, Salesforce, Dynamics, PayPal and QuickBooks, using Email2Cloud will allow businesses to synchronize their emails and find specific information from within these emails, which enables real-time automation thanks to tighter integrations with the company’s processes and systems, thus making them more effective.

Email2Cloud is built upon the Microsoft Azure cloud platform to ensure a high availability and resiliency within a fully managed cloud-based solution. As an added bonus, the system is even able to scale without downtime, so it works equally well for both small and enterprise-level businesses.

Customers can easily set up and configure Email2Cloud through a simple drag-and-drop process, where regular expressions are used to match information from emails and simple validation through email or SMS to approve workflows.

Remote Support for Private Clouds from RackSpace

Michael Garrity — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 19:15:00 GMT

The open cloud company Rackspace ranks high among major players like Amazon and Windows in the cloud computing industry, which is an impressive feat. But the company isn’t about to rest on its laurels, as it just announced a slew of new features and enhanced support offerings for its Rackspace Private Cloud Software.

Rackspace just launched Private Cloud Software in August and already thousands of businesses and organizations from more than 125 different countries have downloaded it.

These new additions have been collectively named “Alamo” and incorporate “Folsom,” the latest release of the OpenStack Cloud Software platform that came out in September and included nearly 200 new features. This is the same platform that powers the Rackspace Cloud.

Alamo has allowed Rackspace to extend its service portfolio for the Rackspace Private Cloud, particularly with a new support level – Core Software Support – that includes remote access support for the Private Cloud Software stack all day long and every day of the year. Core Software Support will allow the cloud company’s engineers login to a customer’s private cloud environment to install, configure, patch and troubleshoot, as needed.

Some other new features are highly scalable Block Storage that turns external storage into an additional storage volume and Object Storage powered by OpenStack Swift that allows customers to create “massively scalable” storage resource pools for storing files, with server images taking advantage of commodity hardware to provide reduced costs. It also provides new Monitoring that includes Graphite and Collectd applications to extend monitoring and alerting capabilities. All of these new features were designed to work in private cloud environments.

DreamHost's Cloud Storage Service Goes Beta

Michael Garrity — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 17:10:00 GMT

DreamHost, the Web hosting and cloud computing company, is diving into the cloud-based object storage industry with its new DreamObjects service, which is built upon the open source Ceph file system originally developed by – who else? – DreamHost.

In addition to the Ceph file system, DreamObjects was built on a variety of other open source tools, including the Ubuntu Linux 12.4 OS distribution from Canonical and the open source Chef tool for automated provisioning and configuration. DreamHost will also be contributing code back to these open source communities.

Over 300,000 developers and entrepreneurs, across the world, currently make up DreamHost’s customers, and the company has been designing much of DreamObjects’s functionality based on that audience’s needs thanks to initial feedback.

Among the primary features of the DreamObjects service is API compatibility with other major object storage services (including Amazon S3 and Rackspace Cloud Files). It will also come with easy-to-use interfaces and simple pricing schemes that come standard with the service.

Pricing starts at seven cents per GB per month, and can dip below five cents per GB per month for some monthly prepaid plans. To transfer data from the service it will cost seven cents per GB.

Initially, DreamObjects will be offered as a public beta, and interested users can sign up on DreamHost's website. The company also plans to offer a free two-month trial of DreamObjects with 10GB of storage and 20GB of transfer data, only charging the regular rates for overage beyond the trial-sized resources.

AWS Comes to CoreSite's New York Datacenter

Michael Garrity — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 09:00:00 GMT

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is going metropolitan. For the first time, AWS Direct Connect will have a presence in New York thanks to a new partnership with datacenter provider CoreSite.

CoreSite provides datacenter products and interconnection services to over 750 customers, including enterprise-level organizations, communications providers, cloud and content companies, financial firms, media and entertainment companies, government agencies and more. And now, the company boasts AWS Direct Connect availability in its New York datacenter.

This move helps CoreSite meet the increasing customer demand for access to the AWS cloud, and will help improve its ability to service digital content communities, financial organizations and managed service providers, as Direct Connect allows customers to directly access cloud services using a secure private network connection. Direct access provides increased scalability for throughput and a more consistent network performance for reduced network costs. It also helps reduce bandwidth costs while increasing capacity.

More than anything, this decision makes it easy for CoreSite customers to establish a dedicated network connection from their location to the AWS cloud without accessing the public cloud over the Internet. This leads to improved application performance and enhanced security – two of the biggest concerns for companies using the cloud.

Customers can access Direct Connect using a standard, single-mode fiber 1 Gbps or 10 Gbps Ethernet cross connection or an Any2 Internet exchange connection, which can be ordered through the MyCoreSite online customer portal.

CoreSite has been offering AWS Direct Connect from its Los Angeles datacenter since late last year.

Corporate Performance Management Growing in the Cloud

Michael Garrity — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 03:00:00 GMT

Cloud corporate performance management (CPM) is a niche subset of traditional CPM that was created when cloud computing began to be a major aspect of the day-to-day business processes of many enterprises. So naturally, it’s an industry that has seen impressive growth over the last year.

Host Analytics, one of the world’s premier cloud CPM companies, recently announced record company and customer growth for the first half of 2012, including revenues from Q2 that were 2.2 times higher than the same period in 2011. The company claims that its growth was spurred by a healthy mix of customer demand, product innovation and global expansion. Of course, it also conceded that a continued market trend toward cloud computing helped a bit.

In the first half of this year, Host Analytics saw a 25 percent increase in customer growth, including notable names such as Casual Male, Splunk, Angie’s List, Zoosk and more. This influx of new customers encouraged the company to expand globally, as well, opening an office in the U.K. and increasing channel sales to include Australia and New Zealand. It even grew internally, adding 12 percent to its employee headcount in just six months.

Most importantly, Host Analytics has brought a lot to the industry in the form of new product innovations. This includes the new Host Analytics Business Analytics toolkit for finance that combines CPM and business intelligence (BI) in a single solution. It also released new features in its CPM suite for dynamic financial reporting, as well as an updated interface that provides more intuitive control.

The success of Host Analytics, in conjunction with its innovative additions of cloud CPM services, seems to point toward big things for this burgeoning industry. Enterprises looking to harness the cloud for their businesses should look into how they can benefit from using a cloud CPM solution.

Enterprise Cloud Adoption Rates Continue to Rise

Michael Garrity — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 22:30:00 GMT

We hear all the time about the rapidly growing adoption rates of cloud computing. Among enterprise customers, specifically, the cloud is quickly becoming more of a present reality than a technology of the future.

Bluelock is a certified VMware vCloudR Datacenter provider of Virtual Datacenters that are hosted in the public cloud, but more importantly, it’s one of the companies helping to drive this significant public cloud growth. Earlier this week, the company announced “continued strong enterprise growth,” adding a number of midsize-to-large enterprise organizations to its roster, including the VMware vFabricT Application Director, F5 Networks, eMeter and Codesigned, among others.

The company’s growth in its Virtual Datacenter revenue now exceeds 50 percent in a year-over-year comparison.

In addition, Bluelock has been named to the list of the “10 Most Powerful IaaS Companies” by Network World, made CRN’s list of the 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Vendors of 2012 and got a mention in the “Talkin’ Cloud 100” report from Nine Lives Media. In other words, the company is becoming quite the hot commodity in the world of cloud computing.

A Bluelock Virtual Datacenter takes just a few minutes to set up using either vCloud’s Director-based self-service interface or Bluelock’s managed services team, and it allows customers to quickly build virtual machines (VM) with public or private catalogs of VM templates. Or, if they’d prefer, they can simply upload their own virtual machines that are already running in an environment.

These Datacenters also let customers subtract and add capacity as needed and offer pay-as-you-go pricing options. And thanks to the ability to upload and download VMware-compatible workloads, users can efficiently move VMDK files to and from Bluelock’s own public cloud.

Box Scores Big in Latest Round of Funding

Michael Garrity — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 10:35:00 GMT

The cloud computing industry is dominated by a few big names – Amazon, VMware, NetSuite, Salesforce, Dropbox, and, of course, Google always seem to take over the majority of the conversation.

However, somewhat quietly in the background, Box has been carving out its own space. The company offers simple and secure online file sharing, centralizes mobile data for customers, offers social workflow features for cloud collaboration, possesses the ability to cross-platform sync content for enterprise organizations, and even has customization options that make it compatible with a customer’s existing cloud infrastructure and applications.

It’s no wonder that major brand names like Clear Channel, Taylor Made, Procter & Gamble, and over 92 percent of Fortune 500 companies have adopted the Box platform.

And it looks like the company may soon be able to expand even further, as it just raised a startling $125 million in funding, led primarily by the General Atlantic investment firm. Other contributors were Bessemer Venture Partners, DFJ Growth, New Enterprise Associates, SAP Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, and Social+Capital.

Box has been experiencing record growth for some time now, with sales increasing by 200 percent year-over-year. In fact, the company doubled in average size during the first half of 2012. It also opened an office in London recently, which signifies a committed interest in expanding globally. With this huge increase in funding, it’ll be exciting to see what the company does next, and if it can propel itself into the upper echelon of cloud service providers.

Deploy Your Apps in the Rackspace Cloud

Michael Garrity — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 20:00:00 GMT

Cloud computing has provided app developers numerous new opportunities for deploying their creations and growing their audience.

AppFog is a multi-language Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) built for the deployment and management of cloud-based applications; basically, it provides a direct avenue for developers to publish their work in the cloud. It is an infrastructure agnostic service that provides solutions for Java, .NET, node.js, Python, PHP, MySQL, MongoDB, Postgres, and Ruby, among others, so it’s got something for almost every type of developer.

A reliable, scalable, and fast platform for both mobile and Web applications, AppFog currently deploys over 60,000 apps in the cloud that are used by tens of thousands of developers across the world.

Recently, the company announced a major partnership with cloud computing aristocracy. AppFog will begin collaborating with Rackspace so that its customers can deploy applications to the open Rackspace Cloud, which is powered by the company’s OpenStack operating system.

The AppFog solution is going to be available through the brand new Rackspace Cloud Tools Marketplace, a comprehensive catalog of third-party applications designed to be used in the Rackspace Cloud.

Now, AppFog customers can develop and deploy their apps to the Rackspace Cloud in a simple, efficient, and cost effective way. They’ll receive 2GB of free RAM when they create an account, and the service will take a pay-for-RAM approach after that.

The key to this partnership is interoperability; current AppFog customers deploying their work on other Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers can redeploy the apps to the Rackspace Cloud with zero-code migrations. This provides increased flexibility for AppFog users and helps them avoid vendor lock-in.

Windows Azure Comes to Web Hosts

Michael Garrity — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 19:00:00 GMT

Microsoft, once unquestionably the biggest name in technology, has fallen drastically behind the pack in most areas over the years. However, as of late the company has been making a major push to remain relevant, if not become a leader, in today’s hottest industries – not the least of which is cloud computing.

Earlier this week, Microsoft announced a new white-label-type version of its Windows Azure cloud platform for Web hosts using Windows Server.

The Service Management Portal (as it’s being called) will allow Microsoft’s hosting partners to provide their customers with an Azure-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) without having to tap into the Microsoft cloud. The service will use a standardized management portal, and will also come with extendable APIs. This will allow developers to connect their current hosted applications to their hosts’ other services, their own on-premises resources, or directly to Windows Azure.

At present, Microsoft is working on developing a collection of partnerships with various service providers, and has already named big time Web hosting and domain name company GoDaddy as the Service Management Portal’s pilot customer.

The service will also work with long-time Microsoft partner Apprenda; so, if Web hosts set up an Apprenda instance internally and plug it into the portal, their customers will be able to deploy their Web apps using the auto-scaling and other Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) capabilities of Apprenda from within the Service Management Portal.

For now, the offering is in a beta-ish Community Technology Preview mode.