Category Archives: Data Storage Management

NetHosting Deploys R1 Soft Remote Back-up Service

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NetHosting, a global provider of Cloud, Dedicated, and Virtual hosting solutions, has rolled out an efficient, easily operated back-up service to provide users with added data security and peace of mind against human error, computer failure, and other forms of data loss.

The efficiency of the R1 Soft Remote Backup product can be found in its ability to differentiate between data that has not been changed since the previous backup and data that needs to be updated. When a scheduled backup occurs, only data that has been modified is sent to storage. In this way, the user’s allotment of storage space is never wasted on storing multiple snapshots of the same data.

“With R1 Soft, backing up data is a painless process for us and for the customer,” stated NetHosting CEO, Lane Livingston. “Its sheer versatility makes it stand out as a must-have product for anyone that has ever been concerned about the security of his or her data, which naturally equates to just about everyone.”

R1 Soft enables NetHosting customers to enhance the standard backup process of MySQL data to include a plug-in that interfaces directly with MySQL and produces live, up-to-date MySQL data for users to access as often as necessary. Another feature unique to R1 Soft Backup is the ability to restore database data in individual records, granting users the convenience of narrowing down their backup to specific files.

“R1 Soft also comes with an extremely robust Graphical User Interface, granting our users tools for customisation and automation of their backup,” added Mr. Livingston. “All of these features make this product the ideal protection solution for one of the most valuable assets of any company or website: data.”

NetHosting has delivered custom hosting solutions for nearly fifteen years. Serving enterprises of every size, its products include a broad range of cloud hosting and storage options as well as dedicated, managed, and virtual hosting services. Housed within a state-of-the-art PCI certified data centre, each service is packaged with a 100% uptime guarantee and the personal support of a Dedicated Expert.

Web host Open Hosting launches KVM-based Cloud Platform

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Web hosting provider Open Hosting announced earlier this week that it has launched its new KVM-based cloud hosting platform which offers improved features and functionality to our customers.

The new OHI platform offers customers the ability to instantly create servers, resize capacity to meet IT demands and scale based upon their unique and specific project needs.

In addition, OHI allows customers to run the software of their choice, including Microsoft Windows, and has no restrictions on the customers’ required level of access.

All customers receive full control to install, scale and customise cloud servers that fit their specific needs.
The new platform includes a web control panel and API, advanced Linux KVM virtualisation, OHI servers are persistent that behave like “real” physical servers and storage, automatic redundancy, fully independent, scalable resources, and the ability to run it on any os and software.

The platform also offers guaranteed CPU, RAM and storage allocation, the ability to collaborate and share through OHI’s online community, server drive image library, automated 24-hour monitoring and 100 percent service level agreement.

“Our team had been studying the cloud hosting market for some time prior to acquiring Open Hosting and quickly realised the hosting market was moving toward a much more flexible, on-demand model with utility pricing,” says Dave Cummings, Open Hosting’s CEO. “While OHI has been at the forefront of Utility or on-demand pricing, this new, updated KVM-based platform provides customers with incredible flexibility and scalability, allowing them to take full-advantage of the best the cloud has to offer. OHI Cloud Hosting is now as easy and a close to running a physical server as can be.”

Open Hosting says it provides the same computing resources and networking services as traditional dedicated host, but “in a flexible, instantly-scalable form” with “more efficient billing and usage models.”

Amazon AWS plans to add Oracle 11g to Cloud Hosting Services

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Cloud services provider Amazon Web Services announced on Tuesday its plans to add the Oracle 11g database to its web hosting services this year. The company says this addition will enable users “to perform relational tasks and development work on an on-demand hourly basis.”

The company plans to launch the database in the second quarter of 2011, but for now has published an Amazon Relational Database Services running Oracle Database web page to educate potential users about the service. The website also enables those interested to sign up to be notified when the service goes live.

“Customers were really excited when we launched Amazon RDS for MySQL because it allowed them to run familiar MySQL databases while offloading the operational responsibilities and capital costs associated with physical servers and data centres,” Raju Gulabani, vice president of database services at AWS said in a statement.

“Enterprises asked when we will offer the same functionality for Oracle databases. We are pleased to share that we are not only releasing it soon, but are ready to have conversations with interested customers so they can plan for future deployments.”

AWS says it will manage ongoing maintenance and provide a dashboard view of operations to enable enterprises to scale their computing and storage capabilities.

While it currently offers the MySQL database, AWS says Oracle 11g will give developers more time to spend on applications over maintaing and scaling systems and allow IT teams to streamline database administration.

With various licensing options available, AWS allows Bring Your Own Licence and those without licences can take the services on a pay-by-the-hour basis.

AWS says customers could take a reserved database instance to save costs. This method allows a one-time payment is offered at a significant discount to its other hourly plans.

Peak Web Hosting offers solution to holiday server slowdowns

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Peak Web Hosting, a managed hosting and private enterprise cloud provider, have announced its expansion into the Equinix, Washington DC (DC5) International Business Exchange (IBX) data centre campus to optimise the performance of online shopping during the peak holiday season.

The holiday season online traffic peak brings with its celebrations much higher system loads and server errors, network slowdowns and occasional outages. The problems always seem to arrive when traffic is at its highest and staff is on vacation. The surge in e-commerce traffic bogs down countless online retailers and reveals shortcomings in back-end infrastructure and system redundancy. By leveraging bi-coastal data centres with multiple ten-gigabit connectivity options, Peak Web Hosting provides its customers with the redundancy and capacity to accommodate the largest swings in network traffic.

“We take uptime seriously,” explains CEO Jeffrey Papen. “Since its inception, Peak Web Hosting has delivered the scalable, redundant solutions critical to the capacity planning requirements of enterprise production environments, especially at this time of year.”

Despite the recent and challenging economic times, Peak Web Hosting has continued its North American expansion to satisfy customer needs. The clients moving into new data centres are looking for enterprise-class services to provide their organisations flexibility, capacity, and a 100%-uptime commitment. Having access to fully managed hosting and private enterprise cloud environments on both coasts allow clients to take advantage of mission-critical services where uptime and performance are priorities. Peak Web Hosting employs a highly redundant local computing architecture that is easily deployed in multiple data centres.

Founded in 2001, Peak Web Hosting provides comprehensive, managed hosting and private cloud services to enterprise-level clients. Find out more at http://www.peakwebhosting.com.

Imperva Reveals Enhanced Data Security Strategy

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Imperva, a leader in data security, yesterday unveiled a comprehensive strategy to help cloud providers, enterprises and small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) protect sensitive data against external and internal threats and comply with regulations such as PCI, SOX and HIPAA. Additionally, Imperva spinoff ‘Incapsula’ will help web hosters give SMBs affordable web application protection. The Incapsula web application firewall service gives small businesses an easy and affordable way to manage website security and performance for any domain that they own even if it is hosted by a third party. For hosters and other service providers, Incapsula enables website security to be extended to an entire customer base. Imperva will resell this service to complement Incapsula’s own sales efforts.

“Cloud computing has created a paradigm shift in the way organisations view their data center architecture,” explained Imperva CTO Amichai Shulman. “Imperva is stepping up to the challenge of protecting cloud-based data from hackers and cloud insiders with a comprehensive data security solution.”

“Incapsula’s service helps web hosting companies provide SMBs with an easy, affordable way to defend their web applications against external hackers,” explained Gur Shatz, CEO of Incapsula. “Given the nature of today’s indiscriminate, bot-based attack methods, small businesses are subject to significant cyber attacks and require enterprise-class protection.”

Subscribing to Incapsula’s web protection service is a simple five-minute process that does not require installation of hardware or software, just a simple DNS change. Incapsula inspects all incoming traffic to any subscriber’s website, keeping hackers out while accelerating outgoing traffic. The Incapsula service is suitable for the SMB and cloud market, requiring minimal setup with service beginning in the first quarter 2011. The list price for this service is expected to start at $50 per month.

Incapsula complements Imperva SecureSphere’s cloud capabilities, such as those leveraged by web hosting company, FireHost. “SecureSphere gives FireHost a scalable web application security platform that can handle our rapid customer growth. As part of our core service, all customers are protected from web attacks using the SecureSphere Web Application Firewall. We’re also excited to offer premium data security services for HIPAA and PCI compliance based on SecureSphere Database Activity Monitoring and File Activity Monitoring products,” explained Chris Drake, CEO of FireHost.

Imperva’s high-level cloud capabilities include:

Attack Protection and Access Control for the Cloud: SecureSphere Web Application Firewall (WAF) provides market-leading protection for cloud-based web applications against complex and sophisticated attacks. SecureSphere WAF enables a quick and easy route to PCI 6.6 compliance and the ability to instantly mitigate known application vulnerabilities.

Data Access Auditing for the Cloud: SecureSphere Database Activity Monitoring (DAM) and File Activity Monitoring (FAM) provide sensitive data access auditing for cloud-based databases and file-sharing systems.

SecureSphere supports all major cloud deployment models and is available by deploying physical or virtual SecureSphere appliances within a cloud data center:

  • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers:
    IaaS providers offer state-of-the-art flexible and secure cloud data centers. SecureSphere enables IaaS providers to offer web attack protection and regulatory compliance readiness to their customers and generate incremental business. Imperva customers include Savvis and FireHost.
  • Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers:
    PaaS providers offer application development and delivery platforms that accelerate time-to-market of new applications and services. SecureSphere enables PaaS providers to give their customers web attack protection as part of the underlying platform.
  • Software as a Service (SaaS) providers:
    SaaS providers deliver cloud-based business applications for sales, financial, HR and other functional areas. These applications host large amounts of sensitive data across many organisations. As organisations adopt cloud applications to streamline their IT operations, SaaS providers are expected to ensure data security and address regulatory compliance — as would be the case for on-premise data.
  • Enterprise Private Clouds:
    Private clouds are a replacement or an extension of the traditional data center and must address the security of publicly facing web applications. SecureSphere Web Application Firewall (WAF) provides the industry-leading protection against Internet attacks targeting web applications and enables rapid mitigation of web application vulnerabilities.

For more information visit www.incapsula.com or www.imperva.com.

About Imperva
Imperva is the global leader in data security. With more than 1,300 direct customers and 25,000 cloud customers, Imperva’s customers include leading enterprises, government organisations, and managed service providers who rely on Imperva to prevent sensitive data theft from hackers and insiders. The award-winning Imperva SecureSphere is the only solution that delivers full activity monitoring for databases, applications and file systems. For more information, visit www.imperva.com.

About Incapsula
Incapsula is a cloud-based service that makes websites safer, faster and more reliable. Incapsula provides websites of all sizes with capabilities that so far, have only been consumable by the very large Internet websites. Founded by a group of industry veterans with rich backgrounds in web application security, online safety and identity theft, the company’s mission is to provide every website, regardless of its size, with enterprise-grade website security and availability.

Cloud Computing Adoption Survey

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Back in February 2010, Mimecast disclosed the results of a national survey, conducted during the autumn of 2009, across the US and Canada which revealed that 36% of respondents use cloud-based solutions for data storage, and that 73% of health care organisations that do so want to put more data on the cloud.

Mimecast have now launched a similar study for 2010, which you can find here.

Portion of industry using cloud-based solutions
Technology 53%
Financial Services 41%
Legal/Professional Services 37%
Retail 35%
Health Care 32%
Manufacturing 32%
Education 29%
Energy 24%
Government 19%

You can find out more about the survey results here.

It will be interesting to see the change in uptake from 2009 through 2010, and as soon as these results have been issued, we’ll post them here.

Amazon announces Read Replicas

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Yesterday, October 5th 2010, saw the launch of Amazon’s new Read Replicas for its Relational Database Service (RDS).

In essence, this is a way of automatically syncing data across many databases – as the diagram below illustrates.

Amazon RDS Read Replicas Diagram

The Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while managing time-consuming database administration tasks, freeing you up to focus on your applications and business.

For the full launch announcement, direct from Amazon,  click here.

Gladinet Introduces CloudAFS to Attach Cloud Storage to File Servers

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Gladinet LogoOnce again, Gladinet (http://www.gladinet.com), the world’s leading cloud computing solution provider, has just unveiled Gladinet CloudAFS(TM), a new approach to data storage management that attaches cloud storage to existing file servers and intelligently manages data transfer between the two tiers (local-cloud).

CloudAFS allows local storage to be used as tier one for fast access and delivers unprecedented storage space by using the cloud as tier two. IT professionals with storage expansion needs can now attach cloud storage to existing IT infrastructure to create a cost effective multi-tiered storage solution with low impact and faster backup or restore times.

“Tiering is not a new concept in enterprise data storage management,” explained Jerry Huang, Chief Executive Officer, Gladinet. “All data is not created equal. And since some storage mediums are much more expensive than others, organizations use hierarchical storage management to put the most important data on the best storage. By adding the cloud as a tier in the hierarchy, Gladinet CloudAFS changes that paradigm and ranks data importance according to use. In other words, the data that is most often used is kept close for fast access.”

In essence, Gladinet CloudAFS brings the cloud to the user instead of letting user take the risk of migrating to the cloud. It allows cloud storage services to be natively accessed from Windows, Mac and Linux clients through CIFS/NFS protocols or accessed from existing Gladinet Cloud Desktop clients. Full integration is provided for EMC Atmos Storage, Windows Azure Blob Storage, Amazon S3, AT&T Synaptic Storage, Nirvanix, Mezeo, and Google Storage, while access control is provided by native integration with Active Directory or NT Domains. Scheduled backups are also supported and can be based on folders or file types. And, as with other Gladinet solutions, security is a high priority: CloudAFS uses strong data encryption to protect data stored in the cloud.

Companies concerned about controlling costs will find CloudAFS to be an excellent fit. CloudAFS enables organizations to use the cloud as a cost-effective extension of their onsite storage. CloudAFS’s capabilities make storage capacity virtually limitless, without the constraints or expense of a physical IT infrastructure.

“Gladinet CloudAFS is a powerful solution that changes the way companies look at data storage,” said Huang. “Harnessing the power and storage capacity of the cloud to enhance existing file storage solutions is now a reality, thanks to CloudAFS.”

For more information:

http://www.gladinet.com

http://gladinet.blogspot.com