Web Hosting Panel : cloud computing

1&1 Dynamic Cloud Server Enhances Scalability for SMBs

'Net Features : wm-webhosting — 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....(read more)

CloudAccess Integrates Identity and Access Management

'Net Features : wm-webhosting — 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...(read more)

Cache Anything and Speed Up Load Times

'Net Features : wm-webhosting — 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...(read more)

High Storage Instances Come to Amazon EC2

'Net Features : wm-webhosting — 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...(read more)

Riak CS Lets Users Replicate Data Globally

'Net Features : wm-webhosting — 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...(read more)

Remote Support for Private Clouds from RackSpace

'Net Features : wm-webhosting — 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...(read more)

DreamHost's Cloud Storage Service Goes Beta

'Net Features : wm-webhosting — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 18:15:00 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...(read more)

AWS Comes to CoreSite's New York Datacenter

'Net Features : wm-webhosting — 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...(read more)

Coporate Performance Management Growing in the Cloud

'Net Features : wm-webhosting — 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...(read more)

Enterprise Cloud Adoption Rates Continue to Rise

'Net Features : wm-webhosting — 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...(read more)

Windows Azure Comes to Web Hosts

'Net Features : wm-webhosting — 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...(read more)

Cybera ONE Embeds 3G and 4G into Cloud Security Platform

Michael Garrity — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 22:00:00 GMT

An announcement by Cybera about its Cybera ONE cloud-based security platform makes it the first such solution to integrate 3G and 4G connections into its full suite of security, remote backup and recovery services.

The Cyber ONE solution gives customers a managed Firewall, Wireless IDS, Virtual Private Network, security information and event management for one fixed annual cost. The integration of 3G and 4G connections is meant to help network security administrators eliminate the need to utilize various products from several vendors. Moreover, cellular backup helps ensure that networks remain connected even when their primary connections are down, reducing the likelihood of fraudulent transactions and improving security and reliability.

This package of embedded wireless capabilities provides a host of new features for Cybera One users, including the following:

- High-speed wireless service as Primary access, so companies don't need to use (or pay for) DSL, satellite, cable broadband or T1 connectivity
- Fast service provisioning and self-installation
- Maximum operational uptime with fast failover capabilities and seamless failover/failback across multiple medium

In addition, companies will be able to get rid of those costly, insecure and often cumbersome 3G/4G connectivity devices, such as USB sticks, routers, antenna cabling, satellites or dial-up services.

Rackspace Acquisition Improves SharePoint Capabilities

Michael Garrity — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 23:00:00 GMT

One of the world's most prominent cloud computing companies, Rackspace, just acquired SharePoint911, a SharePoint consulting, training and "JumpStart" service.

The move is an important because Rackspace customers will now be able to take better advantage of SharePoint hosting solutions in addtion to the company's expert services in the enterprise market.

Rackspace initially ventured into the managed SharePoint market back in 2008 by providing a special service helping customers deal with the perceived complexities of managing a SharePoint environment. The service caught on and was a success for Rackspace, which immediately understood the value of working with SharePoint but also realized that such a powerful solution necessitated the aid of a trusted advisor who knew how to best manage and use the software. This reasoning was the catalyst to the acquisiton of SharePoint911.

"For several years, Rackspace has focused on providing managed SharePoint infrastructure," says Rackspace chief technology officer John Engates. "We are thrilled to have the world-class expertise of SharePoint911 on our team to give us greater application delivery service capabilities. SharePoint911 will add the talent and expertise to our teams to make SharePoint deployments easier for our customers while increasing their scalability and performance through better integration of the workload and infrastructure."

SharePoint911 has been around for eight years and has long been lauded for its technical excellence and leadership in the SharePoint community.

Nimbula Offers Free Cloud Operating System Software

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 21:00:00 GMT

Cloud Operating System Nimbula announced that its Nimbula Director product is now available for free and as a public beta. If you ever wanted to run your own cloud computing service then today is your luck day.

The software delivers a cloud operating system software much like Amazon EC2. Nimbula Director features include policy based authorization (enabling secure multi-tenancy), topology-independent distributed network security and monitoring and metering. Nimbula Director also provides automated deployment and cloud management to scale and facilitates easy migration of existing applications into the cloud by supporting multi-platform environments and flexible networking and storage.

"We are fortunate to have a strong community of IT professionals who have helped us shape Nimbula Director over the past few months,” said Willem van Biljon, Co-Founder and VP of Products at Nimbula. “We look forward to a greater number trying out the public beta of Nimbula Director and providing valuable input so we can deliver the best final product possible. Nimbula Director is the first example of Nimbula delivering on our mission to provide an industry leading Cloud Operating System."