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Rackspace Cloud Powers WWDC 2009

Last week, Rackspace’s cloud hosting solution helped to deliver live blog coverage of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference 2009.  Hosted at blog site live.gdgt.com, the robust platform easily handled 4.7 million page views in under two hours.

Ryan Block, live.gdgt.com co-founder, was able to present a real-world demonstration on the power and value of cloud computing through his blog using Rackspace’s Cloud Sites solution.  With the help of his photographer, he was able to simultaneously capture and upload images in real-time to the Cloud Files service, which is automatically integrated into the site.  This activity all took place while serving an estimated 656 page views per second to worldwide viewers with minimal cost and hassle.

Mr. Block said the Rackspace Cloud enabled his team to quickly iterate and scale their live coverage without needing to make major investments in hardware or operations.  He says that the Rackspace support staff went above and beyond to help prepare for the event, providing essential input and attentiveness to maintain availability despite the unbelievably heavy traffic load.

The Cloud Sites solutions sells for $100 per month while Cloud Files is available on a pay-as-you-go basis with service starting at $0.15 per GB of data.  With Cloud Files, customers have the option of serving content files leveraging the Limelight Networks CDN (content delivery network) in real-time without any extra efforts and only paying for what they need.  Rackspace customers also get the benefit of 24/7 Fanatical Support for any questions of concerns they may have about their hosting account at no additional cost.

The approximate cost difference between the DIY hosting approach opposed to deploying Cloud Sites or Cloud Files for this type of event portrays the cost benefits of cloud computing.  Physical space, hardware, software and management costs for a state of the art data center capable of handling such a traffic load would cost tens of thousands of dollars.  When utilizing Rackspace’s cloud solutions, it is likely to only cost a couple hundred dollars.

The Rackspace Cloud delivers on-demand website, application and storage hosting backed by some of the best support in the industry.  Through a suite of cloud solutions in Cloud Sites, Cloud Files and Cloud Servers, the Rackspace Cloud gives knowledgeable IT managers and developers the ability to reduce the high-cost investments and hassles associated with dedicated hardware, all while allowing them to easily scale their hosting resources.

About Rackspace

A leader in the industry of hosting services, Rackspace Hosting is changing the way businesses around the world approach their IT operations.  The company provides a number of solutions including computing-as-a-service, incorporating the latest innovations into a highly flexible offering that makes computing more reliable and affordable.  Rackspace specializes in solutions that enable businesses and IT teams to be more efficient.  Distinguished by its award-winning Fanatical Support, the company continues on its mission be one of the best service providers in the world.  The Rackspace portfolio includes a number of hosted IT services such as Managed Hosting, Cloud hosting, email and application hosting.

Yahoo Releases its Distribution of Hadoop

Internet powerhouse Yahoo, just made its distribution of Hadoop available while hosting the Second Annual Hadoop Summit.  Under the Apache Hadoop project, Hadoop is a distributed file system and parallel execution environment that allows users to process large amounts of data.  Acting on requests from the user community, Yahoo decided to open up its investment in quality engineering for the benefit of the larger ecosystem and aid in the innovation of open collaborative research and development.  Its distribution of Hadoop has been thoroughly tested and deployed on the world’s largest Hadoop clusters.

Justin Erenkrantz, Apache Software Foundation President, noted his excitement to see how the Apache Hadoop project has progressed over the last few years.  He says the foundation is looking forward to witnessing the community’s growth accelerate with Yahoo’s continuous support and commitment to quality, factors that will ultimately attract more contributors to the Apache Hadoop project.

Mike Olson, CEO of Cloudera, states that the general availability of Yahoo’s Hadoop source code will make its own distribution of Hadoop more robust and scalable.  He says Cloudera will continue to work with Yahoo to implement the tried and tested source code into its commercial distribution.  According to Olson, the Cloudera distribution of Hadoop is an enterprise-ready version complete with key tools, utilities, customer service and technical support, features designed to help enterprises deploy and maintain the Hadoop platform for larger scale data processing and management needs.

Considered one of the pioneers, Yahoo has led the way in development and is now the leading contributor to the Apache Hadoop project.  Doug Cutting, Hadoop founder, joined Yahoo in 2006 and the company immediately began making significant investments in developing the project.  Hadoop currently underpins several of Yahoo’s properties, including Yahoo Search, Yahoo mail and a variety of its content and advertising services.  In Yahoo data centers, Hadoop runs on well over 25,000 servers and analyzes billions of web pages, petabytes of storage and billions of new records on a daily basis.

To demonstrate the community collaboration of the Hadoop project, Yahoo hosted the second annual Hadoop Summit on June 10 in Santa Clara, California.  Co-sponsoring the event was Cloudera, Amazon Web Services, IBM, Sun Startup Essentials and Lightspeed Venture Partners.  The event brought hundreds of members from the Hadoop user and developer communities together to learn and share ideas with each other.  The Hadoop Summit focused on all the advancements made in the development and deployment of the project and its related technologies.  It also touched on case studies of the applications being created and deployed on Hadoop as well as discussions on the platforms’ future directions.

Yahoo’s distribution of Hadoop is available via the Yahoo Developer Network.  Cloudera’s distribution, which includes the Yahoo source code, is available at cloudera.com.

About Yahoo

Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, Yahoo is a globally renown internet brand and leading web hosting provider.  The company is dedicated to empowering its community of customers, users, publishers, advertisers, and developers by establishing indispensable services based on trust and reliability.  The Yahoo brand is currently one of the most trafficked internet destinations in the world.

HostMySite Hosting.com Merger Births Two New Cloud Solutions

Recently merged web hosting provider HostMySite.com/Hosting.com, have combined two powerful solutions to strengthen its presence in the hosting marketplace.  Made immediately available, the two new products dubbed as Cloud 9 Enterprise and Cloud 9 Private provide customers with access to shared and dedicated cloud hosting, IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) and PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) environments.  The Cloud 9 Enterprise solution offers enhancements that include on-demand provisioning, interconnecting to private cloud environments and rapid deployment of disk and computing resources.

Prior to the merger in May of 2009, both providers operated their VMware-based cloud hosting solutions independently.  Thanks to their strikingly similar infrastructures, scalable platforms and dedication to support, the integration process was seamless, going off without a hitch.

Art Zeile, HostMySite CEO, revealed that the company will continue to integrate HostMySite and Hosting.com cloud computing solutions at a fast pace to deliver highly sought after, client-centric services to the virtual and cloud markets.  He says the name Cloud 9 was chosen because it is already an established cloud hosting band.  According to Zeile, these two new solutions will provide customers with an unparalleled level of flexibility and control.

Cloud 9 Enterprise provides customers with an on-demand cloud hosting solution via a secure web portal, giving businesses the ability to quickly deploy virtual servers and modify their resources on an as-needed basis.  The service is quite comparable to a virtual private server yet offers the additional benefits of high availability and adaptability.  Cloud 9 Enterprise doesn’t require any contracts, allowing customers to provision and incorporate resources such as RAM, storage and RAM online in a matter of minutes.

Cloud 9 Private delivers virtual, clustered environments at a price considerably lower than traditional dedicated server solutions.  The service provides an enhanced level of scalability, fault tolerance and security in an isolated environment occupied by a single tenant.

News of the merger was HostMySite.com’s first major announcement since acquiring Hosting.com.  Company reps are confident that several business clients will make use of the Cloud 9 Enterprise and Cloud 9 Private solutions to extend their internal cloud environments to geographically distributed infrastructures in its SAS 70 Type II certified data centers.

HostMySite/Hosting.com is said to be working closely with the VMware platform to deliver enterprise-class cloud hosting solutions to businesses of all sizes.  The company is actively participating in the VMware vCloud Initiative and working side by side with VMware to launch trial-offer cloud hosting services for virtual appliances and general hosting needs.  Enterprise and small to medium sized businesses can leverage the benefits of the VMware virtualization platform via both the Cloud 9 Enterprise and Cloud 9 Private solutions.

About HostMySite/Hosting.com

As a fully merged entity, HostingMySite/Hosting.com provides enterprise-level dedicated and colocation hosting, managed hosting, cloud computing, disaster recovery and business continuity services to a global base of customers.  The company operates multiple world-class data centers in California, Delaware and Kentucky with another facility currently being constructed in Denver, Colorado.  The HostMySite/Hosting.com infrastructure is designed to support business clients who run mission-critical operations and demand a high level of availability.

Mezeo Takes Part in Cloud Storage Gathering

It seems as if everyone in the IT world today is singing the praises of the “cloud.”  This has been reflected by experts at the Hosting Transformation Summit Europe in London, England desire to have a closer look at cloud storage, easily the fastest growing facet of the cloud computing market.

Bill Pitts, senior Vice President of global sales at Mezeo Software Corp., participated in the panel called “Storage Opportunities: Cloud vs. Conventional.”  Pitts touched on the issue of while traditional NAS and SAN-based storage capacities have continuously expanded, users are increasingly demanding capabilities these solutions simply can’t provide.  Shedding light on how cloud storage has rapidly become a mainstream solution, Pitts says that the cloud is being widely accepted and adopted by end-users and service providers alike.  Aside from helping providers stay relevant in their respective industries, cloud storage also allows these companies to offer new capabilities to their existing clients and essentially expand their market reach utilizing the same solutions.  Pitts highly recommends that service providers and those who are still unsure of the benefits tap into the cloud storage market, and tap into it fast.

Coupled with web services APIs, the Mezeo cloud storage platform enables IT service providers to instantly enter the highly competitive cloud storage sector with their own fully-branded cloud storage solution.  The platform it currently offers is built on four different solutions: Cloud Storage with Web Services APIs, SaaS Cloud, Access Cloud and Personal Cloud Storage.  This suite of services allows customers to completely leverage the type of cloud solution that meets their storage needs best.

The Storage Opportunities panel was held on June 2, 2009, kicking off at 11:40 a.m. at the Hilton Tower Bridge in London, England.  The event was moderated by Simon Robinson, research director of storage at 451 Group.  Joining Pitts in the discussion was Sajai Krishnan of cloud storage startup ParaScale and a co-founder from Nirvanix. 

About the Hosting Transformation Summit Europe

Headed by Tier 1 Research, the Hosting Transformation Summit Europe is a major international  forum made for executives in the data center, web hosting and internet infrastructure markets.  Its overall focus is to deal with the economies of these specific markets and how each can position themselves to succeed.

About Mezeo Corp.

With its headquarters based in Houston, Texas, Mezeo Corp. is an industry leading provider of easily deployable cloud storage platforms.  Its solutions enable managed dedicated server providers, IT hosting providers, SaaS providers and converged telecommunications providers to instantly incorporate a profitable cloud storage service into their existing portfolio.  Mezeo’s cloud solutions include secure file storage, file sharing and collaboration, content tagging and genuine anytime, anywhere access for any Microsoft Windows desktop via Web 2.0 browsers and devices such as the iPhone, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile native client.   The company focuses on delivering solutions that are easy to deploy and maintain, highly scalable and secure.  Thanks to the immaculate design of its APIs, Mezeo’s cloud storage solutions are also highly extendible.

eHosting DataFort Plays Sponsors to Inaugural Data Center Forum

Although the data center industry has seen tremendous growth over the last few years, organizations are still faced with the overwhelming need to manage surplus data while having continuous access to real-time information and meet the increasing demands of the mobile force within corporate enterprises.  These topics and more will be discovered this week in the Middle East.

eHosting DataFort, managed IT hosting solutions and advisory services provider, will represent the data center industry as a sponsor for the first ever Data Centre Strategies Middle East Forum.  The event will be held from June 2 through June 3, 2009 in Abu Dhabi and is slated to address several issues related to the sectors behind development processes that affect the business, operation and planning aspects in the data center industry.

Featuring a who’s who lineup of international experts, delegates and speakers from leading organizations as well as owners, operations, investors and vendors, Data Centre Strategies Middle East Forum 2009 will see eHosting DataFort delivering critical insight on the state of the data center industry in the Middle East.  The company will particularly highlight on its expertise in providing managed data center solutions to its enterprise customers as well as clients in the telecom, government, semi-government and other critical sectors in the industry.

eHosting DataFort CEO Yasser Zeineldin, is slated to address the forum and also take part in the CEO Data Centre Middle East Roundtable.  He will discuss a variety of topical issues with senior representatives, touching on the growth, challenges, opportunities and outlook of data centers in the Middle East.  Zeineldin says the company is happy to be sponsoring the Data Centre Strategies Middle Forum 2009 and bring a wealth of industry leaders to the region.  As the leading managed hosting service provider in the Middle East, eHosting DataFort is looking forward to bringing together major executives from enterprises, government and various other instrumental sectors.

Philip Low, BroadGroup Managing Director, consulting firm and organizer of the forum, says that members of the forum welcome eHosting Datafort’s sponsorship, stating that Yasser Zeindeldin’s presence in the Data Centre Middle East CEO Roundtable will be a valuable experience.  According to Low, the active participation eHosting Datafort and other major players in the region providing content and insight in a rich networking environment encompasses the true value of the entire event.

About eHosting DataFort

A wholly owned subsidiary of TECOM Investments, eHosting DataFort is a leading IT management and advisory service provider.  With state of the art data centers, a highly reliable, scalable infrastructure and around the clock fully managed operations, the company leverages a wide range of network technologies and partners located in the GCC and MENA regions, North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific.  A number of ISO certifications based on the best international standards and global practices enables the organization to deliver managed IT solutions to some of the world’s largest organizations.  eHosting Dataa has garnered several notable projects with clients that include, Arcelor Mittal, Emirates Airlines, British Telecom, Panasonic, Khaleej Times, Arab Bank, the Dubai Financial Market and the Dubai e-government among others.