Amazon AWS has announced the launch of their newest edge location in Sydney, Australia to serve end users of Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Route 53.
According the AWS, “This is our first edge location in Australia and with this location Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Route 53 now have a total of 33 edge locations worldwide. Each new edge location helps lower latency and improves performance for your end users. We have launched 8 new edge locations in 2012 and we plan to continue to add new edge locations worldwide.”
“An edge location in Australia has been frequently requested by our customers so we are excited to add this location to our global network. If you’re already using Amazon CloudFront or Amazon Route 53, you don’t need to do anything to your applications as requests are automatically routed to this location when appropriate.”
Parallels today announced expanded access of its Partner Program specifically for smaller and growing web hosters and website designers. Parallels’ unmatched depth of valuable expertise, best practices, tools and other go-to-market resources are now available to hosters seeking to grow their businesses by delivering cloud services.
“Smaller and growing web hosters and design firms now have access to the best resources available for accelerating their revenue and profitability,” said John Zanni, Vice President, Service Provider Marketing and Alliances, Parallels. “Key benefits of our program include expertise on how to implement proven strategies and tactics for improving customer value through better operations and for delivering a broader set of hosted services and applications.”
New access for Parallels Partners includes:
A new Member level, specifically designed for small web hosters who
are seeking business growth and who aspire to achieve advanced partner
benefits as their revenue and customer base expands.
The introduction of the Bronze Partner program level for Europe and
North Africa (EUNA).The Bronze Partner program is designed for high
impact web hosters who typically operate on a local or regional level,
and who can benefit from tools and resources to help them grow their
businesses to the next level. Membership in the Bronze Partner Program
has proved popular with similar-sized hosters in North America, with
membership tripling over the past year.
All members of the Parallels Partner Program can take advantage of recent enhancements and resources centrally located on the Parallels PartnerNet portal, including:
SMB Knowledge Headquarters – tools, whitepapers, research and webinars
help service providers gain insights on SMB cloud usage and cloud
services opportunities. Based on its interactions with thousands of
service providers, and its ongoing series of SMB Cloud Insights™
research, Parallels is the single best source for information on
trends and actionable recommendations for targeting, marketing and
selling cloud services to SMBs.
Best Practices – assets, case studies, templates and other
go-to-market resources provide proven strategies and tactics for
service plans, pricing, offerings, promotions, bundling and upselling
cloud services.
Parallels Partner Forums –partners can interact with Parallels and
other service providers to overcome challenges and better realize
market opportunities. Partners can benefit from sharing and learning
best practices and techniques to become more proficient in their
sales, marketing and support activities.
For more information about signing up for the Parallels Service Provider Partner Program, visit http://www.parallels.com/spp/partnerprogram
DRFortress, a Hawain colocation and cloud services provider, today announced that it has launched DRFcloud, a local, pay-as-you-use, cloud computing services based in the State and available throughout the Pacific Rim. This new service, offered in partnership with IaaS pioneer, Appcore, follows the successful start of the Nirvanix cloud storage service. Continuing to demonstrate leadership in the shift to the cloud in Hawaii, both the DRFcloud and the Nirvanix cloud storage hybrid node are maintained at the DRFortress datacenter in Hawaii with redundant mainland nodes for disaster recovery purposes.
“DRFortress has demonstrated extraordinary vision in delivering the first ‘On-Demand, Pay-by-the-Drink’ Cloud Storage and now the same for Cloud Computing Services to Hawaii,” said Marc Staimer, president of Dragon Slayer Consulting. “Hawaii IT organizations are now able to cost effectively take advantage of the cloud services revolution knowing their data and applications will be always be available regardless of local conditions.”
“Previously, Hawaii organizations interested in pay-as-you-use cloud computing were forced to use a Mainland provider, buy hardware boxes and pay maintenance fees or commit to a long term contract with a local virtualization firm,” said Fred Rodi, President, DRFortress. “With our new DRFcloud computing service, we have revolutionized Hawaii’s cloud market by introducing no contract, pay-as-you-need, on-demand utility computing. Clients only pay for the computing power they actually use. In this time of tight budgets businesses and government agencies are increasingly turning to cloud computing as a means of providing flexible computing resources while lowering capital expenses.”
Cloud computing is the most significant advancement in information technology today. According to leading industry analysts, the size of the cloud computing market is expected to be $150 billion by 2013. To gain significant share in this market, DRFortress is employing industry-leading technologies in the new DRFcloud service. With this service, entities of all sizes can implement their own private networks using virtual servers with nothing more than a few mouse-clicks. Companies can self-provision this new service instantaneously online through the DRFortress secure management portal at www.drfcloud.com.
“We are pleased to partner with DRFortress to bring local speed, turn-key cloud solutions to Hawaii and the Pacific Rim,” commented Brian Donaghy, Appcore CEO. “Now service providers and IT departments will be able to use Appcore Onsite™ to launch applications and cloud servers on demand with the click of a single button.”
While security is often mentioned as the number one issue holding businesses back from moving to the cloud, DRFortress addresses this concern by selecting technologies and partners who are able to deliver enterprise-class security and reliability proven in real-world production environments. In addition to DRFortress’ world-class secured datacenter, the company’s partners—Nirvanix and Appcore—have extensive processes and architectures in place to meet customers’ regulatory and business needs.
NordicPhotos image agency has released PixPuffin, a cloud-based photo management system for medium sized and small businesses. Web-based, without any need for additional software or servers, it is the first of its kind and specially designed to administer the image library of today’s companies and organizations. The system has been in constant development for over 11 years as the core system overseeing NordicPhotos’ own image library. Based in Iceland, the system is cloud hosted on greenqloud’s 100% renewable energy servers, making PixPuffin the first completely eco-friendly image management solution available.
Between single user solutions and large, very expensive server based media management solutions, the creators of PixPuffin felt that user friendly and affordable image management solutions were somewhat lacking from the market. Businesses and organizations can save a great amount ofmoney every year by using a solution like PixPuffin, they can save time and prevent damages such as lost images and expensive copyright mistakes. Furthermore, they can improve or extend the use of their images, save on image purchase and make their marketing and PR presence better than ever.
For more information www.pixpuffin.comand www.greenqloud.com
“We have talked to almost 200 companies during the past few weeks and it surprised us how much of a problem image management is becoming within companies of all kinds,” said Arnaldur Gauti Johnson, Managing Director. “They are using more images than ever, but lacking systems to manage the images and the copyrights attached. Access to the images is also becoming increasingly important as many administrators in the company need to grant access to the media and clients as well as the employees and they must be able to control this access.”
Six Degrees Group has expanded its UK network capabilities with the acquisition of Datahop, an international datacentre interconnection business with 200 customers. Datahop’s network consists of a resilient, high-speed fibre ring that connects 21 points of presence (PoPs) in London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Paris.
Six Degrees Group’s expanded network will bring most of London’s datacentres on-net, including Telecity, Telehouse, Interxion, Level 3 and Iomart facilities. Datahop’s network brings 16 new PoPs onto the Six Degrees core network as well as extending the Group’s footprint into four Western European countries. Six Degrees Group run-rate revenues are now approximately £44m with EBITDA of over £11m.
Following the acquisition, Six Degrees Group will be investing in its network by undertaking a multi-million pound upgrade before launching a next generation VPLS-enabled datacentre interconnect fabric that will enable multi-gigabit port capability for distribution of its converged voice, data and hosting portfolio. The Group’s network now connects European and American financial centres with an unrivalled footprint in London carrier-neutral datacentres, and uniquely positions it with the ability to deliver high-speed network interconnects in London.
Daniel Lowe, managing director of Six Degrees Group’s managed data division, commented: “This announcement marks a significant step-change in the scale, reach and capability of the Six Degrees Group network. Datahop’s technologies will allow us to deliver higher bandwidth, and a broader range of services to our customers. Our ability to link people, places and clouds has been boosted significantly with the flexible service creation capability we now offer to the market.”
Six Degrees Group today announced that it has completed the acquisitions of two London-based managed hosting and cloud providers. Firstserv and Serverstream were both founded over 10 years ago and focus exclusively on the rapidly growing hosting market with a particular emphasis on the digital media, publishing and leisure sectors. Customers include Sunseeker, The Spectator and Port of London Authority.
Both Firstserv and Serverstream will be integrated into Six Degrees Group’s managed data division where they will add £3m of hosting revenues, representing a mix of managed hosting, cloud hosting (virtual private, private and hybrid) and complex web hosting. 17 highly-skilled personnel will be joining Six Degrees Group where they will focus on integrating and expanding the Group’s hosting platforms. The acquisitions are part of a series of strategic investments being made in the Six Degrees Group’s cloud offering.
Following these transactions, Six Degrees Group’s run-rate revenues now exceed £40m with underlying EBITDA of over £10m. The company continues to enjoy strong double-digit organic growth, underpinned by cross-selling.
Alastair Mills, CEO of Six Degrees Group, stated: “I am delighted to welcome both Firstserv and Serverstream to Six Degrees Group. This announcement sees the Group continue to focus on managed data services, particularly in the fast-growing cloud hosting sector. Our goal for 2012 is to become one of the top five hosting and cloud providers in the UK.”
Gordon Kenneway, MD of Firstserv, said: “This is an important day for all at Firstserv. Our employees will now have access to a larger, geographically diverse hosting platform with best-in-class compute and storage resources, which is also a very exciting step for our customers. I am looking forward to joining Alastair and the Six Degrees team to help establish their position as one of the UK’s fastest growing cloud companies.”
Jonathan Obadia, MD of Serverstream, commented: “We are excited to be joining Six Degrees Group. Serverstream has a strong reputation for delivering complex hosting solutions to mid-market customers and this merger enables us to continue our expansion with additional services, scale and geographical diversity. Our customers will continue to receive the same exceptional levels of service and support that they’ve become accustomed to, with the added benefit of access to
Aquantia, a developer of High Speed Ethernet connectivity solutions for cloud computing and large scale data center deployments, announced today it has completed a Series F financing of $35 million, with new investor RUSNANO leading the round, joined by current investors. RUSNANO will invest $25 million, and current and new investors will contribute $10 million to the financing round.
Aquantia successfully launched its industry-leading 40nm 10GBASE-T PHY chipset in 2011, as a critical ingredient to emerging LAN-on-Motherboard (LOM) platforms for new data center servers and switches. With Intel’s March 2012 launch of its Romley generation LOM server platforms, the 10GBASE-T interconnect market is now seeing an explosive uptick. According to Crehan Research, shipments of 10GBASE-T in Data Center switching and servers will see more than a seven-fold increase from 2011 to 2012, reaching a total of approximately 6.5 million ports in 2013, and almost 20 million the following year.
Aquantia will establish a new design center in Russia. The Russian R&D center will support the headquarter Silicon Valley R&D group in chip design and software development, as well as product testing.
“Aquantia is the only 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GE) silicon provider to meet our investment criteria in the high-speed data center interconnect space,” said RUSNANO managing director Sergey Polikarpov. “We believe big data and global data center traffic are going to see a tremendous swell in the next several years, and Aquantia’s technology is essential to improving server performance while realizing greater cost efficiencies. This is a premium opportunity for us to participate in the market growth and its rewards.”
“NEA is excited to continue to support Aquantia as the company expands operations to meet the ever-increasing demand for its superior technology,” added NEA partner Rohini Chakravarthy. “We see network capacity build-up expected to support 15 billion connected devices by 2015. This represents a tremendous opportunity for Aquantia.”
“This past year has been tremendously gratifying, as it has been the culmination of hard work, innovation and powerful partnering in the 10GE and LOM space,” explained Aquantia’s president and CEO Faraj Aalaei. “We are truly ecstatic about the takeoff of Intel’s Romley platform and what it means as a watershed event for the near-term ubiquity of 10GBASE-T in the data center as well as future opportunity across the Enterprise space. This is what we have been working toward, and our funding partners in this and all previous rounds have positioned us for tremendous delivery success.”
Go to http://www.aquantia.com/news-and-media/ for footage of recent discussions on 10GBASE-T, and follow Aquantia on Twitter for ongoing updates on 10Gigabit Ethernet connectivity in the data center and cloud computing environments.
About Aquantia
Aquantia’s 10Gigabit Ethernet ICs are at the heart of cloud computing and large-scale data center deployments taking place today. This market segment is going through a very fast transition, with astounding growth in the total amount of compute power and the move to faster connectivity. This has in turn led to a new paradigm for 10Gigabit Ethernet all across the ecosystem. With its 10GBASE-T silicon products, Aquantia delivers to its OEM customers the most versatile and highest performance 10Gigabit Ethernet connectivity solution while providing lowest Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Located in Silicon Valley, Aquantia is a venture-backed company, with strong tier-1 VCs and strategic investor support. For more information, visit www.aquantia.com.
About RUSNANO
RUSNANO was founded in March 2011 as an open joint stock company through reorganization of state corporation Russian Corporation of Nanotechnologies. RUSNANO’s mission is to develop the Russian nanotechnology industry through co-investment in nanotechnology projects with substantial economic potential or social benefit. The Government of the Russian Federation owns 100 percent of the shares in RUSNANO. Anatoly Chubais is CEO and chairman of the Executive Board of RUSNANO.
Work to establish nanotechnology infrastructure and training for nanotechnology specialists, formerly conducted by the Russian Corporation of Nanotechnologies, has been entrusted to the Fund for Infrastructure and Educational Programs, a non-commercial fund also established through reorganization of the Russian Corporation of Nanotechnologies.
Parallels recently published a case study looking at how leading Australian web hosting provider, Net Logistics, was able to create new revenue opportunities through Virtual Private Servers (VPS) offerings. In the case study, Net Logistics Business Development Manager, Joseph Salim, described how it took just three years to go from no VPS offerings to VPS accounting for 40% of their customer base. Today, 60% of all new customers buy VPS from Net Logistics.
The demand for Virtual Private Servers continues to explode, and can include everything from a single VPS to elastic, hourly-billed cloud infrastructure. Deploying cost effective VPS and cloud server solutions is the key to accelerating revenue and realizing profit. In our upcoming webinar on May 9, the focus is on growing your VPS and cloud server business. Lowell Anderson, Parallels Director of IaaS Product Marketing, will share the results of our latest market research and the best practices to optimize your cost structure and drive profits from your VPS solutions. Liam Eagle, Editor in Chief of Web Host Industry Review (The WHIR), , will moderate the discussion through a range of topics including market survey results describing VPS revenue opportunities, buyer preferences and what drives purchasing for VPS services, best practices for profiting from VPS services and how to plan for the future.
Would you like to find out how your business can capitalize on this market opportunity by offering VPS to your customers? Please join us May 9, 2012 at 11am-12pm Pacific, 2pm-3pm Eastern for our Best Practices for Growing your VPS and Cloud Server Business webinar.
To register or invite customers to attend, click here.
ServInt, a provider of managed cloud hosting for enterprises worldwide, today announced the commercial availability of Jelastic, the world’s first software stack-agnostic, platform-as-a-service cloud hosting offering for Java applications. ServInt is the exclusive provider of Jelastic cloud hosting services in the United States, and the first service provider to offer Jelastic commercially.
ServInt’s Jelastic release follows the introduction last month of the ServInt Flex line of “dedicated cloud” servers, which combine the scalability advantages of cloud hosting with the sole-owner benefits of dedicated servers. ServInt now offers hosting products in both the IaaS and PaaS categories, with more cloud offerings and enhancements scheduled for release soon.
“This isn’t the first PaaS solution on the market – even for Java – but it’s the first one that leverages best-of-breed systems from both the hosting and the PaaS software industries,” said ServInt CEO Reed Caldwell. “The folks at Jelastic are amazing software developers. We are a world-class hosting provider. Too many PaaS providers try to be too many things to too many people, and that lack of focus makes them ineffective. We have collaborated directly with Jelastic every step of the way to ensure that Jelastic is the best designed, most reliable and best supported PaaS on the market.”
Jelastic COO Dmitry Sotnikov added, “Since we launched our public beta in October of last year, we have been growing at a rapid pace. Demand hasn’t slowed and the question of commercial availability has become even more frequent. Today, through our U.S. partner ServInt, Jelastic is now commercially available. This is a major step toward making our vision of a truly global, no lock-in, standards-based Java PaaS a reality.”
Unlike other Java PaaS and IaaS options on the market, Jelastic does not require customers to code to any specific API. Jelastic dynamically and instantaneously allocates resources for hosted applications, scaling servers up and down to make sure hosted apps have the resources they need, when they need them.
ServInt’s Jelastic customers are charged only for the actual RAM and CPU resources they consume, rather than for any predefined hosting service package or server they might otherwise purchase. This means hosting costs automatically go down when applications are off or not being used.
Jelastic measures resources being consumed in “cloudlets”, with one cloudlet equal to 128 MB of RAM and 200MHz of CPU processing power. Pricing is set at $0.02 per cloudlet/hour and there is no practical limit on the number of cloudlets that can be deployed. Jelastic does not require any application code changes. This means developers can simply upload their Java package or specify connection to their SVN or GIT code repository, and have their application running in the cloud in a few minutes – with no lock-in whatsoever.
Jelastic is fully compatible with all major Java software stacks, including Tomcat, GlassFish, Jetty and JBoss application servers – as well as with SQL (MariaDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB, CouchDB) databases.
There was a plethora of great content at Summit 2012 this year, and it was impossible to attend it all. Fortunately, we have all of our talks on YouTube! For this series of posts, we have consolidated the talks by tracks at Parallels Summit.
Chart Your Future: Parallels Roadmap – Find out where Parallels innovation is headed for 2012 and beyond.
Parallels Panel Roadmap
Craig Bartholomew, VP, Hosting Control Panels and Shared Hosting, Parallels
Be the first to know what we have planned for the next generation of Parallels Plesk Panel to help your hosting business save money on server costs, reduce labor cost, increase efficiency and sell more servers.
You can download a PDF copy of this presentation here.
Accelerating mobile adoption: Convincing small businesses they need more than a Facebook page
Roy Joseph, President, UNITY Mobile
This session will address the growing need and challenges for SMBs to have an internet presence beyond the browser. This includes a presence on Facebook as well as the ability to deliver a good customer experience across mobile devices. Come find out how SMBs can easily add these capabilities, and how service providers can profit and differentiate offering these services and solutions.
You can download a PDF copy of this presentation here.
The evolution of IT hosting services: What’s next?
Lance Crosby, CEO, SoftLayer Technologies
Understanding how cloud, dedicated and managed web hosting services will evolve and change is crucial to staying competitive. As one of the world’s largest privately owned hosting companies, SoftLayer will speak to industry leading trends which highlight the need for businesses of all sizes to adopt solutions that offer control, security, scalability, and ease-of-management. The presentation will also discuss how SoftLayer is working with Parallels to deliver the next generation of IaaS solutions.
You can download a PDF copy of this presentation here.
Differentiate and grow your hosting business with Parallels Business Automation Standard
Alex Goncharov, Sr. Director, PBAS Product Marketing, Parallels
Join a PBAS expert for insider tips on how to accelerate your business. Alex will also provide a view into how we’ll be enhancing the capabilities of PBAS in the coming years.
You can download a PDF copy of this presentation here.
Opportunities with Google Apps
Jeff Ragusa, SMB Channel Programs Lead, Google
In this session you will learn how to extend your portfolio with Google Apps – Google’s business suite of messaging and productivity applications. Bring these powerful web applications to your clients allowing them to work efficiently from anywhere on any device. By leveraging Google’s channel program you can deepen and strengthen your customer relationships and grow your cloud services practice without disrupting your existing business.
You can download a PDF copy of this presentation here.
Compliance: Understanding the legal and regulatory issues
Christian Dawson, COO, ServInt
David Snead, Attorney at Law
Compliance is becoming an even more important issue because governments are increasing the level of regulation related to intellectual property protection, privacy and protecting children. You need to understand the regulatory framework in order to build a secure cloud. This session will present the existing framework of security laws plus pending and anticipated legislation. Attendees will be given a framework to analyze their current compliance with these laws, and insights into whether certain important proposed legislative initiatives are likely to be adopted and what it will mean if they are.
You can download a PDF copy of this presentation here.
