Category Archives: Tools

DediPower Launches Mobile Apps for Instant Access to Hosting Tools & Reports

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DediPower, a UK-based private hosting company, is launching brand new iPhone and Android mobile apps to provide access, flexibility and greater convenience to Cloud and Managed Hosting customers.

The only enterprise hosting provider in the UK to provide the tools required to manage hosting platforms remotely via a smart phone, DediPower is setting a new benchmark for hosting services while underpinning delivery of its “Support with Passion” through enhanced customer communication and improved infrastructure management.

According to Chris Miller, CEO DediPower, “As well as driving innovation in server architecture, DediPower constantly strives to improve customer service and provide extended support. Many of our clients are regularly out of office or flexi-work, so it makes sense to have a dedicated mobile customer portal that allows them to monitor and control their platforms remotely, wherever they were straight from their phone.”

DediPower’s new mobile applications provide flexible access to a range of management tools and services, defined by the type and nature of the hosting platform. They allow users to view and monitor servers and bandwidth as well as deliver support tickets and respond to notifications remotely.

Miller adds, “At DediPower, we’re renowned for maintaining 24/7 system availability – and that means instant access to our customer facing support services too. For DediPower, it’s all about delivering world-class value, convenience and peace of mind to all of our clients – irrespective of budget, resource or system complexity.”

Experts in Cloud, Enterprise and Managed Hosting, DediPower offers a full range of bespoke hosting services backed by extensive SLAs from its UK and internationally based Tier 3 Enterprise Class Datacentres. For further information visit http://www.dedipower.com.

DediPower, backed by its philosophy of “support with passion”, is a leading international provider of IT hosting and cloud infrastructure solutions. With data centres in the UK, North America and Asia, DediPower supports thousands of customers including Sony, Virgin, Eidos, NHS, Bluhalo and Lovemoney.com with the latest technology to reduce costs, improve service levels and maximise their online potential. It is ranked among the UK’s 50 Fastest Growing Private Tech Companies by the Sunday Times Microsoft Tech Track 100. DediPower is headquartered in Reading Berkshire, UK. For more information, visit http://www.dedipower.com or follow DediPower via Twitter, twitter.com/dedipower.

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.

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.

Atlantic.Net Adds cPanel/WHM on Cloud Platform

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Web hosting provider Atlantic.Net yesterday announced that it has enhanced its cloud computing offerings by offering cPanel/WHM on its cloud and hosting platform.

“We’re excited to continue to expand our cloud computing offerings,” Josh Simon, director of data center services for Atlantic.Net said in a statement. “Combining our cloud servers with cPanel/WHM truly simplifies the management of standalone servers, allowing Web hosting resellers and Webmasters across the globe to focus more time on their core business and less time managing their infrastructure.”

Atlantic.Net says that with cPanel/WHM, it will improve security, flexibility and speed of its platform. It also provides customers with an efficient, cost-effective solution that helps businesses manage their hosting and cloud computing needs.

“We recognize this is a great opportunity to work with an established and savvy technology company like Atlantic.Net,” said Aaron Phillips, vice president of operations at cPanel. “cPanel/WHM has gained major market share on cloud computing platforms because of its speed, ease of deployment and security options. We look forward to delivering Web hosting automation to Atlantic.Net’s cloud computing platform.”

Atlantic.Net is offering its customers a free trial of CPanel/WHM with free setup on its website.

cloudControl selects New Relic RPM as Web App Management Tool

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New Relic, Inc., a leading software-as-a-service provider of application performance management (APM) solutions, and cloudControl, a leading cloud hosting platform for PHP web applications (and contributor to this blog), today announced that cloudControl is providing the proven application monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities of New Relic RPM Bronze to all cloudControl customers at no cost. Additionally, cloudControl customers are eligible for discounts on upgrades to RPM Silver and Gold premium subscriptions at preferential prices in cloudControl’s Add-on Marketplace.

“As organisations continue to rely on cloudControl as a trusted platform for deploying business-critical web applications, it’s important that we provide them with the very best resources to help them be successful,” said Philipp Strube, co-founder of cloudControl. “Partnering with New Relic to enable application monitoring and troubleshooting will make it easier for our customers to deploy, maintain, and ensure superior-performing web applications.”

cloudControl’s PHP Platform as a Service solution helps developers to focus on the important part of their work – developing exciting web applications. Developers can easily deploy PHP apps on cloudControl’s platform without having to administer the underlying hardware. By partnering with New Relic, cloudControl will enable its customers to not only develop and host web applications in a high performance and scalable managed environment, but also to monitor and improve application performance.

“New Relic and cloudControl share a common philosophy that the very best solutions for deploying and maintaining web applications in the cloud should be fast, easy and reliable,” said Bill Lapcevic, New Relic’s vice president of business development. “By offering effective SaaS-based production application monitoring as part of their proven deployment platform, cloudControl is providing tremendous benefits for organisations that want manageability for the cloud while eliminating administration overhead.”

The New Relic RPM Bronze Add-on is available to cloudControl customers at no cost in the Add-on marketplace, which offers additional resources for customers wishing to scale and optimise applications deployed on cloudControl. Developers can get started right away by selecting the New Relic add-on and deploying it on one of cloudControl’s free developer accounts.

About cloudControl
Based in Potsdam, cloudControl is a leading provider of cloud hosting services for deploying PHP web apps. Their highly optimised and reliable stack harnesses the scalability of Amazon EC2. CloudControl’s solution is fully managed, completely eliminating administration hassles. And because it’s pay as you go, customers can scale up and down at any time and only pay for the services they use. Additionally, cloudControl offers their Add-on Marketplace, where customers can obtain complementary solutions for scaling and optimising their apps. Among others, these include MySQL, Memcached, MongoDB and New Relic RPM.

About New Relic
New Relic, Inc. is the leading software-as-a-service provider of application performance management solutions that enable developers and operations teams to quickly and cost effectively monitor, troubleshoot, and tune application performance in real time. More than 6,500 organisations use New Relic RPM to monitor and optimise more than 110,000 production application instances, including customers 37signals, AT&T Interactive, Atlassian, Gilt Groupe, Groupon, IGN, Intuit, REA Group, Sears, Shopify, Shutterfly, and Simon and Schuster. New Relic also partners with leading cloud management, platform and hosting vendors including Amazon AWS, Blue Box Group, Brightbox, cloudControl, Engine Yard, Eucalyptus, GigaSpaces, GoGrid, Grid Gain, Heroku, Joyent, Microsoft Windows Azure Platform, Morphlabs, Network Redux, PHP Fog, Red Hat, RightScale, SpeedyRails, Stax Networks and VMware.

Nimsoft Unveils New Tool for Rackspace Cloud Monitoring

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Nimsoft have announced the availability of Nimsoft Cloud Monitor, a new tool for monitoring Rackspace cloud-based servers.

Nimsoft leveraged its extensive experience with cloud hosting and collaborated with Rackspace to develop this new tool – which enables customers to track usage, performance and availability of cloud-based servers hosted by Rackspace.

“Cloud-based hosting services are gaining increased adoption because of the cost and flexibility advantages they provide,” said Dennis Callaghan, senior analyst, enterprise software at The 451 Group. “The more organisations are able to integrate performance and availability monitoring of cloud infrastructure services with monitoring of the rest of their IT environments, the better equipped they’ll be to maximise the benefits – as well as the overall performance and availability – of the cloud services they use.”

Nimsoft Cloud Monitor complements the Nimsoft Monitoring Solution (NMS), which enables organisations to monitor and manage a wide range of diverse applications and services, from the data center to the cloud, with a single easy-to-deploy solution.

“Organisations running applications on the server infrastructure hosted by Rackspace need to continually verify that those servers are performing optimally and pro-actively head off any problems that could potentially impact service levels,” said Gary Read, Nimsoft CEO. “With our complimentary Nimsoft Cloud Monitor tool, administrators gain this essential visibility into their cloud infrastructure – while still enjoying all the economic and operational benefits of Rackspace hosting.”

Nimsoft Cloud Monitor offers a broad range of useful capabilities, including:

  • Intuitive, customisable dashboards display key performance metrics, including server bandwidth, disk space, number of bytes in storage accounts, and more.
  • Configurable alarms notify users when problems or potential performance-degrading issues occur.
  • Resource usage monitoring provides current and historical utilisation metrics so users can better understand and control on-going Rackspace cloud costs.
  • Performance monitoring delivers specific metrics and vital insights into the responsiveness of servers and the overall infrastructure.

Nimsoft Cloud Monitor is available via complimentary download at http://www.nimsoft.com/rs/monitoring.php. The Nimsoft Cloud Monitor will be licensed on a no-charge basis for a limited time and the license will terminate upon the conclusion of the free period; additional terms and restrictions apply. The software requires an active Rackspace account to operate and the Nimsoft license does not include any Rackspace services or third party systems required to operate the software.

NB This offer is made to end users located in the United States only.

Nimsoft provides Unified Monitoring solutions for virtualised data centers, hosted and managed services, cloud platforms, and SaaS resources. The Nimsoft Unified Monitoring architecture eliminates the need to deploy a new monitoring solution for outsourced services, public or private clouds, or SaaS implementations. For more information, visit www.nimsoft.com or to see Nimsoft Unified Monitoring in action, visit the Nimsoft public portal at www.unifiedmonitoring.com.

Caspio Simplifies Data Analysis in the Cloud

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Caspio, Inc., a leading platform-as-a-service without coding, have launched new Advanced Reporting features that allow users to create more powerful reports for real-time data analysis in the cloud. Caspio’s step-by-step wizards provide a simple way for anyone to publish spreadsheet and database information as an interactive report on their own website for users to quickly explore, share and analyse critical business information in real time.

“The amount of information people have to absorb in today’s business environment is staggering. That’s why we have made it easier for customers to start with any set of data and point-and-click their way to powerful reports accessible to authorised users or the general public,” said company founder and CEO, Frank Zamani. “The new additions, combined with our built-in online database and application builder, allow for a new breed of highly intelligent web and mobile applications.”

The new features deliver dynamic reporting and data visualisation capabilities that enable non-technical users to easily add calculations, summaries and grouping to traditionally flat data, all without any programming.

Advanced Reporting Features Include:

  • Calculated Fields – Intuitive wizards make it easy to define calculations and add custom formulas to reports.
  • Totals and Aggregation – Roll up data in various ways using common aggregations like sum, average, min, max, count and a complete list of functions.
  • Data Grouping – Information can be visually organised into expandable groups to simplify data categorisation.
  • Embedded Deployment – Exclusive to Caspio, the embedded deployment technology allows users to seamlessly embed applications on any website, CMS, blog or mobile site just by pasting the provided deploy code.
  • Dynamic Dashboards – Ability to create web-based dashboards displaying multiple reports and charts on the same page.
  • Unlimited Users – With its flexible “unlimited user” pricing and proven scalability, Caspio is an ideal solution for organisations looking for both internal and large scale public-facing applications.

A pioneer in cloud computing since 2000, Caspio bridges the gap for non-technical business users to create powerful web-based and mobile applications and deploy them seamlessly to any website, eliminating development time and infrastructure costs. Today, the Caspio platform powers over 400,000 web applications for Fortune-500 companies, small-to-medium sized businesses, government agencies, universities, and over 80 percent of the largest newspaper websites in North America.

Advanced Reporting features are available now in Caspio packages starting at $79.95 (about £50) per month, with generous capacity for unlimited users and 20 applications to start. For details, videos, and information on other recent features, visit www.caspio.com/support/product-updates.asp.

Caspio, Inc. is the world’s leading leading do-it-yourself platform-as-a-service. The company’s philosophy is to empower business users to create and deploy online databases, forms, and applications easily and without programming. Caspio’s platform-as-a-service replaces coding with intuitive point-and-click wizards, enabling users to rapidly produce web database components for capturing, publishing, and managing data online. Caspio shrinks development time from weeks to hours, and from thousands of dollars to a small monthly fee. A free 14-day trial is available at www.caspio.com.

New security in the cloud

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Joyent, a leading global provider of cloud computing solutions, and GuardTime, creator of the patented Keyless Signature technology used to validate the world’s data, today announced a partnership that delivers unprecedented security enabling enterprises to safeguard some of their most valuable assets in the cloud: code, logs and data.

GuardTime’s Keyless Signatures (http://www.guardtime.com/) provide proof of signing authority, time of the signature, and integrity of all data located in the cloud. The signature never expires and its verification is based solely on mathematics, eliminating the need for secrets, keys, or human intervention.

As part of this partnership, Joyent customers will be able to purchase GuardTime SmartMachines, which will allow organisations to:

  • Secure an application by signing its gold master code, preventing compromised applications from executing
  • Safeguard the SmartMachine’s logs (eg administrative, policy, configuration, or events), making accidental changes or malicious tampering impossible to conceal
  • Protect data backups, turning private and public cloud storage into safe, tamper-evident archives

“This partnership delivers unparalleled security and authenticity in a massively-scaled cloud environment,” said Jason Hoffman, Founder and Chief Scientist of Joyent. “Organisations can now access a mathematically driven solution that cannot be compromised by human error or breached by cyber miscreants.”

“The integration of our unique Keyless Signature technology within the Joyent SmartMachine gives organisations the unprecedented opportunity to trust their applications, logs, and data in the cloud,” said Mike Gault, CEO of GuardTime. “We are thrilled to be joining forces with Joyent to provide independently verifiable proof of operating integrity in the cloud for both cloud-based service providers and cloud-consuming institutions around the world.”

The partnership was made possible by Singapore’s Infocomm Investments Pte Ltd (IIPL), which brought the two companies together. IIPL is also an investor in GuardTime. Dr Kuo-Yi Lim, CEO of IIPL, said, “The GuardTime-Joyent solution addresses a key security concern on the public, private or hybrid cloud. We believe that this collaboration will bring security in cloud computing to a new level and in turn spur the development of the cloud computing industry in Singapore.”

The GuardTime SmartMachine will be available from December, 2010.

About Joyent:
Joyent is the premier Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider, offering cloud computing solutions worldwide since 2004. Delivering billions of page views per month, Joyent’s Smart Technologies improve performance, scalability, manageability and security for thousands of web and mobile applications. Serving a network of service providers and thousands of customers, Joyent is the only company that runs a major public cloud infrastructure, builds the technologies that power that infrastructure, and uses those technologies to enable multiple third-party public, private, and hybrid clouds. For more information, visit: http://www.joyent.com.

About GuardTime:
Founded in 2006 by cryptography experts Dr. Märt Saarepera and Dr. Ahto Buldas along with Internet visionary Joi Ito, GuardTime provides an infinitely-scalable and completely-available Keyless Signature engine designed to deliver authenticity and integrity for the data that the world relies upon: as it sits on disk, moves throughout the network, and is used in the Cloud. Visit http://www.guardtime.com for more information about delivering operating integrity for your public and private clouds.