Monthly Archives: July 2012

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Parallels Plesk Automation Preview Launches

 

We hope you will consider evaluating the initial Public Preview of Parallels Plesk Automation (PPA).  But, you’re probably asking yourself why is Parallels creating a product like this, and why should I care?

 

Parallels believes that for hosting companies to thrive and succeed, they must stay ahead of the curve. Because of this, we’ve invested considerably in technologies such as support for IPv6, nginx for improved server performance, the flexibility of running Windows Server, your choice of a variety of Linux flavors, and even more features and capabilities that are currently available in our Parallels Plesk Panel 11 product. This investment continues to pay off not just for Parallels, but also for our vast ecosystem of hosters and other service providers who continue to build their businesses with us.  For several years, we’ve been working on what we believe will be the leading-edge hosting infrastructure management and control solution for growing professional hosters: Parallels Plesk Automation.

 

Before I joined Parallels in 2009, the company acquired a number of smaller hosting automation systems.  Many people in the hosting industry questioned these moves, wondering if these products would ever enter the mainstream of Parallels’ product line.  Whatever the perception you might have had at the time, Parallels Plesk Automation grew out of these technology acquisitions

 

By working closely with the customers of these hosting systems, Parallels realized that hosting efficiency is important not only to the largest hosters, but also to small and growing hosters.  Many hosters who started to centralize IP pool management,  e-mail and spam management (not to mention the growing need to manage Linux and Windows Web hosting from a single management node), never wanted to return to the inefficiency of having all hosting services on every single server in their clusters.

 

Don’t get me wrong:  single server products like Parallels Plesk Panel and cPanel fulfill an important purpose.  They are easily installed on a server, so they are a great way to manage a server or to start a hosting business.  Their simplicity makes them a good business for dedicated and virtual server providers – almost like the “do you want fries with that?” question at a fast food drive-thru.  So, infrastructure hosters can easily sell hosting automation software with each server they sell.  However, many existing web hosters using Parallels Plesk Panel and other single-server hosting automation software find that after growing to a few servers, they hit an upper-boundary in ease of management and operational efficiency.

 

The evolutionary challenge in Hosting Automation has been to find a simple, affordable, easily-explained, easily-sold, and easily-bought way to achieve management and growth efficiency.   Putting mail, DNS, databases, and web hosting on every single server in a cluster – which has been the norm – is not that path.

 

By working closely with the vocal and passionate customers of the companies Parallels acquired, we have tried to make Parallels Plesk Automation a unique product that bridges “easily sold and easily bought” with “enables efficiency and growth”.  As I said, many hosters who have tried and experienced hosting clusters with centralized hosting roles (mail, web, etc.) will never go back to all-on-one-server systems – and for good reason.  But, these same hosters need fair pricing, flexibility, and good, fast support.

 

Parallels Plesk Automation takes the learnings from our close interactions with these leading edge small to mid-sized hosters, applies it to the evolution of Parallels’ hosting technologies, and packages it in a way that is easily-bought, easily-sold, and comes at a fair price.  Then we add free and unlimited support.  

 

To explain further:

 

– Learnings from leading edge small and mid-sized hosters:  Simplicity is very important.  Centralized management in multi-server environments must be easy to install and configure, easy to migrate to, and easy to run and manage.   Support for third-party and in-house billing systems must be flexible and open.

 

– Evolution of Parallels Technology:   Parallels Plesk Panel is a simplified yet effective Web hosting system which evolves into Parallels Plesk Automation  to leverage the “industrial strength” hosting management backbone of Parallels Automation, our flagship software for large service providers and hosters.  So, small and growing hosters now have access to the Parallels Automation backbone like our much larger telco and large service provider partners.  And, in future releases, this allows hosting businesses to grow from Shared Hosting into VPS, Cloud, and SaaS hosting.

 

– Easy-to-sell, easy-to-buy, at a fair price:   The beauty of single-server hosting systems (such as Parallels Plesk Panel, cPanel, etc) is that they are priced and sold per server.  This is easy for the buyer (you know how much you’ll pay) and easy for the seller – typically a datacenter – because it can be attached to each server sold.  Parallels Plesk Automation (PPA) will continue to follow this model.  Any leased Parallels Plesk Panel Unlimited Dedicated server license can convert into a PPA node.  Servers in a Parallels Plesk Automation cluster simply require this same type of Parallels Plesk Panel license – which is sold per server – but DNS and DB Servers require no license.  To make it simple, the PPA Management Node software will be a free download from www.parallels.com.  If it is installed on a server with valid license (Parallels Plesk Panel Unlimited Dedicated), you are good to go. 

 

– Enhanced Support:  Plus, because Parallels now offers Free Priority Support for all Parallels Plesk Panel Unlimited Dedicated licenses, you will experience a level of support you may have never expected or experienced from Parallels before.

 

So, it has been a bit of a journey for Parallels in creating Parallels Plesk Automation.  We believe it is a journey toward the future –and we firmly believe that evaluating and moving to Parallels Plesk Automation is the first step on the path to setting up your hosting company for growth and efficiency (not to mention taking your business to the next level).  We’ll explain more of PPA’s growth benefits and plans in the future. 

 

For now, we are proud to be able to offer free Public Previews of Parallels Plesk Automation. This follows four invitation-only private previews, so we’re quite far along on this.  We hope this Preview helps you set up a real-world test in your own environment.  Also, we hope you’ll give us feedback on what you like and what you don’t like, which will positively influence our product direction.

 

Based on your feedback and the success of our previews, we expect Parallels Plesk Automation to release during Q4 of 2012.

 

To apply for the Preview, just visit: www.PleskAutomation.com

 

All the best,

 

Craig Bartholomew

Vice-President, Control Panels and Shared Hosting

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The Pivot to SDN: Enabler or Impediment?

If you’re like me, you’ve already grown tired of the word “pivot” when used to describe a shift in a company’s strategy, a politician’s lies, or an industry’s focus. Yet indeed it appears as if the cloud computing industry’s focus has suddenly shifted, er, pivoted, from processing and storage to networks.

VMware’s $1-billion+ Nicira acquisition, followed quickly by Oracle’s sort-of-related Xsigo acquisition has turned our heads. Suddenly, the network is the most important thing, and SDN is the new star peaking through the clouds. Never mind that is a LAN technology, not really SDN. A network by any other name…

Fortunately, the letters “SDN” don’t have nearly as snappy an appearance or sound as “cloud,” so we miserable scribes, analysts, and marketeers are in no danger of having to pivot anytime soon.

There’s more good news here in that it’s high time we started talking more about the network, specifically the Internet, aka the “cloud” in “cloud computing.” Network failovers have been the culprit behind the recent AWS blackouts – and this has not been the fault of the Internet, but rather the way we’re managing it.

The new focus on networking virtualization software is no doubt making people at Cisco nervous. It seems to me this shouldn’t be the case except for those in the organization who have to plan long-term market growth – SDN in theory should make Internet plumbing vastly more efficient, thereby reducing future demand for it. But we’re so far from optimizing network traffic, and the anticipated growth in traffic fueled by small devices and video should maintain a strong demand for Internet tubes, pipes, valves, and fittings for a long time.

The real challenge to the big vendors and to enterprise buyers is to future-proof plans that may look like they’ll become obsolete before they’re deployed. This is a great time for analysis paralysis within the world of cloud computing.

So the question to me is, does SDN pivot mean that potential bottlenecks which impeded plans are now removed, or has it added a layer of complexity that will further impede plans?

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Yahoo’s Rejected CEO Takes Hurt Feelings & Leaves

Yahoo’s short-lived interim CEO Ross Levinsohn, who was replaced by the board two weeks ago by a bright shiny blonde from Google, said Monday that he’s leaving the company.

He didn’t say if he had a destination.

He wasn’t expected to stay after Marissa Mayer got there.

As CEO Levinsohn succeeded in defusing the ill-considered infringement suit his fired predecessor Scott Thompson lodged against Facebook and calmed the water roiled by Thompson’s sudden departure caused by phony academic credentials.

The board, led by proxy fight victor Dan Loeb, who discovered Thompson’s fib, traded the media and advertising executive for a technologist it’s expecting to make Yahoo’s web sites more relevant.

Levinsohn, who worked at Fox Interactive Media where he bought MySpace and cut a huge ad deal with Google as well as HBO and AltaVista, joined Yahoo in late 2010 to run its media sites and Americas ad sales.

Yahoo and Mayer acknowledged his contributions. Marissa wished him well and said in an e-mail that wended its way to All Things Digital that he “helped keep the company moving, closed important deals, and assembled a very talented team.”

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Transitioning to the Cloud

In the first quarter of 2012, FEMA reported 12 natural disasters throughout the country, including tornadoes, flooding, mudslides and severe storms from Florida to Alaska. The threats to your data are limitless – natural disasters, fires, water damage, equipment theft and hardware failure to name just a few. In the event of a disaster, if you don’t have access to an offsite copy of your data, or if you are unable to replicate it, the chances are it will be gone forever.
Deciding on the Right Provider Should Be No Different Than Buying a Car
Many businesses are opting to move their data to the cloud, citing benefits in time savings/automation, cost, security and access; however, some SMBs still maintain reservations about keeping their valuable data offsite and beyond their control. A recent Information Week Report indicated that only 23 percent of business technology professionals use cloud services as part of their application and data recovery strategies. Many others are confused by the number of online cloud backup companies and “free storage” offerings that are flooding the market; while others are concerned about those data storage companies who have proven to be “fly-by-night” entities that are here today, gone tomorrow.

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Amazon AWS, Amazon Web Services, Chaos Monkey, Free, Netflix, Open Source, Tools

Netflix Chaos Monkeys: “If You Love Something Set It Free”

Image representing Netflix as depicted in Crun...

Netflix has released its Chaos Monkey AWS “test-by-failure” tool as open source for all to use. The tool seeks to improve the resilience if the Netflix AWS cloud by forcing failure.

“We have found that the best defense against major unexpected failures is to fail often. By frequently causing failures, we force our services to be built in a way that is more resilient. We are excited to make a long-awaited announcement today that will help others who embrace this approach.

We have written about our Simian Army in the past and we are now proud to announce that the source code for the founding member of the Simian Army, Chaos Monkey, is available to the community. Do you think your applications can handle a troop of mischievous monkeys loose in your infrastructure? Now you can find out.”


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SYS-CON.tv Interview: A Checklist for Cloud Service Providers

“We are Europe’s leading operator of carrier-neutral data centers, and it’s a demand-driven dynamic that we are seeing,” stated James Tyler, Director of Marketing & Communications at TelecityGroup, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11-14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5-8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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Cloud Computing: Progress Introduces DataDirect Connect for ADO.NET R4.0

Progress Software Corporation on Monday introduced the new Progress DataDirect Connect for ADO.NET 4.0, the latest version of its suite of ADO.NET (ActiveX Data Objects for .NET) data providers that completely eliminates the need for database client libraries with a 100 percent managed, wire protocol architecture. This new release includes Microsoft Entity Framework support, Visual Studio LightSwitch support and expanded enterprise capabilities that enable developers to rapidly create, deploy and manage high-performance, mission-critical desktop and Cloud applications with ease.
As more .NET applications move to the Cloud, high performance and efficiency become even more important. The Progress DataDirect Connect for ADO.NET 4.0 data providers are a critical component to delivering on that goal, while significantly lowering operating costs for Cloud applications by using less memory and CPU cycles. The DataDirect Connect for ADO.NET 4.0 data providers deliver top performance, as well as significantly higher levels of security and authentication, reliability and failover, connection pool management and multi-database consistency not found in other drivers. This enables developers to create higher performing applications with greater uptime and better security.

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Cloud Computing: Prospering in the Identity Economy

“We’re helping store all the wonderful identity and personal data about you for cloud providers,” said Andy Land, VP of Marketing at UnboundID, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11-14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5-8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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Cloud Computing: A Dynamic Enterprise App Store in the Cloud

“UShareSoft has been progressing significantly since last year. We are providing a multi-cloud app store platform,” said Alban Richard, CEO of UShareSoft, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5–8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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SYS-CON.tv Interview: Private Cloud within the Public Cloud Architecture

“We’ve always been focused on Software as a Service. And Dimension Data, which was recently bought by NTT, has always been focused on on-premise cloud,” explained Treb Ryan, CEO of OpSource, a Dimension Data company, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5-8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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