Web Hosting Panel : web hosting, web hosting panel week 7 2012

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.

SunGard Pairs with AWS for Cloud Offering

Michael Garrity — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 21:13:00 GMT

Software and technology services company SunGard's cloud computing division, SunGard Availability Services, is partnering up with good ole Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide its customers with highly available cloud backup via Amazon Direct Connect for both AWS and SunGard customers in 2012.

Initially, SunGard Availability will provide LAN-like connectivity from AWS's U.S. East Coast data centers by leveraging Direct Connect so that the company can provide customers with bi-directional disaster recovery services from both cloud service providers without having to transfer data over the publically used Internet.

SunGard customers will also be able to use Amazon S3's Storage Gateway to write customer data bi-directionally and asynchronously between the SunGard Enterprise Cloud and AWS's storage infrastructure, ultimately providing customers' data with an additional layer of protection.

And that's not all; SunGard will also use AWS to offer customers a broader set of cloud solutions for production and testing/development environments, which means users will be able to select from a series of different cloud platforms based on the needs of their applications.

Cloudscaling Introduces Open System for Cloud Apps

Michael Garrity — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 22:51:00 GMT

Cloud-ready applications provider Cloudscaling is greatly expanding its services by offering the first ever open cloud system intentionally designed to run cloud-based apps.

The new Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution, known as the Cloudscaling Open Cloud System (OCS), is based on OpenStack's open source cloud project, so it is able to leverage the company's expertise from various software deployments. This helps OCS offer private and public clouds the same cost, performance and scalability benefits of Amazon Web Services, while eliminating vendor lock-in, proprietary protocols, closed hardware platforms and excessive enterprise liscensing fees.

Cloudscaling OCS is made up of three primary elements. The first is Open Cloud OS, an OpenStack-powered operating system for production cloud deployments that extends OpenStack software and offers management, scalability, security and performance.

Next is Hardware Blueprints, which provides tested and proven depolyment configurations for computing, storage and networking equipment that will help companies meet specific price, performance and availability targets.

Finally, OCS offers CloudBlocks, integrating Open Cloud OS software with Hardware Blueprints to define modular cloud building blocks.

OCS is a big step for Cloudscaling in pushing the use of cloud-ready apps, which are more elastic than traditional applicationss and can support higher peak loads.