By Sharon Florentine

Sharon Florentine is a freelance writer who covers everything from data center technology to holistic veterinary care and occasionally blogs for Rackspace Hosting.

Welcome to Generation Now. Today’s users want information in an instant. Make them wait more than a second or two for your webpage to load and they’ll surf over to the first competitor who feeds their demand for instant gratification.

Using a Content Delivery Network or Content Distribution Network (CDN) to quickly load static elements of your site to hasten access can deliver quicker gratification for customers. And stickier eyeballs — and greater profits — for you.

Basically, a CDN is a number of highly optimised web servers located around the globe, explains Joost de Valk in an article posted to Yoast.com. Though de Valk’s article deals specifically with using a CDN to speed performance of WordPress sites, a CDN is beneficial …

Elastichosts, a British Amazon wannabe, is setting up in Silicon Valley to be
near potential cloud customers like start-ups and other small to mid-sized
concerns.

It’s already got a data center in Los Angeles. The new San Jose site will give
it redundancy.

It’s also opening new data centers in Hong Kong, Sydney and Amsterdam,
expanding out of London, Toronto and San Antonio, Texas.

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Elastichosts, a British Amazon wannabe, is setting up in Silicon Valley to be
near potential cloud customers like start-ups and other small to mid-sized
concerns.

It’s already got a data center in Los Angeles. The new San Jose site will give
it redundancy.

It’s also opening new data centers in Hong Kong, Sydney and Amsterdam,
expanding out of London, Toronto and San Antonio, Texas.

read more

Piston Cloud Computing, the OpenStack disciple, has gotten an $8 million B round to accelerate OpenStack adoption from Cisco, Data Collective, Divergent Ventures, Hummer Winblad, Swisscom Ventures and True Ventures.
The money will be used for product development.
Cisco, Data Collective and Swisscom Ventures are new investors.
Piston got a $4.5 million A round in July of 2011 and launched the first commercial OpenStack distribution for building, scaling and managing a private Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud on bare-metal, converged commodity hardware.
The widgetry also integrates with the open source Cloud Foundry Platform-as-a-Service.

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As an Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider, Bluelock sees a lot of migration of applications. Migration is occurring from physical servers to cloud, from private cloud to public cloud and back to private cloud from public cloud.
Migration can be tricky and a poor migration strategy can be responsible for costly time delays, data loss and other roadblocks on your way to successfully modernizing your infrastructure.
While each scenario is different, I’d like to identify three key best practices that will help your team create a solid, successful plan for migrating your application.
Even before you begin to move your application, there’s a lot of best practice that goes into choosing which application to migrate to the cloud. Regardless of whether you are migrating that app to a public cloud or a private cloud, you should assess the app for data gravity and connectivity of the application.

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by Ted Hu, Director of Technical Product Marketing, Parallels

Founded on Parallels Panel 11 technology, the industry’s premier multi-server hosting solution, Parallels Plesk Automation 11.1, continues to get even better. Earlier this week, Microupdate #5 (MU#5) released with more than 10 software fixes, making Parallels Plesk 11.1 more stable than ever, while also delivering additional key features that boost the day-to-day productivity of shared hosters operating Parallels Plesk Automation. One of these key features is the ability to move subscriptions between nodes. Useful for when shared hosters want to transfer web hosting from one node to another, this is relevant in two main operational scenarios:  

• ·         The first is when there are a lot of domains on the node which often then perform very slowly due to excess workloads that result.
• ·         Another is when shared hosters want to repair and upgrade server hardware without any downtime. For example, this feature helps shared hosters avoid downtime by enabling easy moving of hosting to another service node allowing for the upgrade of the original hardware server.  

It is now possible to move such services and subscriptions

• ·         from an Apache node to an Apache node;
• ·         from a MySQL node to a MySQL node;
• ·         from an Apache + MySQL node to an Apache + MySQL node;
• ·         from an Apache + MySQL node to a node running Apache + a node running MySQL;
• ·         from an Apache node and a MySQL node to a single node running Apache + MySQL.

Another feature in MU#5 is the ability to define and customize a host’s DNS template structure. Hosters may now override a predefined DNS template encapsulating a set of DNS records which will get applied for each domain. And last but certainly not least, new service node roles are supported: Apache web server + Postfix mail server + MySQL database server; Apache web server + Postfix mail server + MySQL database server + PostgreSQL database server; IIS web server + MS SQL Server 2008 database server. For more details, view the Release Notes.

Couple this with the release of Microupdate #4 last week that enables support for the popular SmarterMail Exchange-level server software solution and provides for the automation, in addition to registration, of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 installations, clearly Parallels is making significant ongoing investments. These investments have grown from the momentous Parallels Plesk Panel 11 launch that continues to be energized by the feedback we are receiving from our enthusiastic customers and partners. This feedback drives our engineering path forward.

Because of these reasons and more, I welcome the enthusiasm Parallels Plesk Automation has received from our community of shared hosters and the genuine excitement our customers have about the new growth opportunities Parallels Plesk Automation affords their businesses. I am confident these ongoing investments in new features and platform enhancements and the upcoming waves of powerful multi-server hosting innovations to come will yield powerful capabilities which will enable Parallels customers to profit from the cloud like never before.

by Brian Spector, CEO, CertiVox

Time was when SSO simply meant being able to automatically pass login credentials from one application to another, so that a user could work across several applications at once, without having to sign into each of them separately. Remember that?

But a sea-change is taking place within SSO. The notion of logging in once in order to use many different applications is still at its core, but the nature of that login is changing radically. It is no longer sufficient to have the right login credentials. Instead, you have to be identified as the individual to whom those correct login credentials rightfully belong.

As we put it in our paper The Death of Username and Password, “On the internet, nobody cares if you’re a dog – but they do need to know which dog you are!”

Multi-factor magic

SSO’s new-found robustness lies in multi-factor authentication – defined as something you have, plus something you know, plus an additional identifying factor. Think of an ATM – it authenticates you on the basis of something you have (your bank card), something you know (your PIN), and, additionally, the information contained on the card’s magnetic strip. One is useless without the others.

The challenge has always been in translating this into a software-based approach, enabling an online user to authenticate simply by using their computer. But this capability now exists. With nothing more complex than a browser, a PIN (entered using an on-screen pinpad) and an automatically generated cryptographic key, users can authenticate online more securely than when they use their ATM!

The scalability potential here would previously have been unimaginable. Usernames and passwords, with their fixed 1-to-1 relationships, stored in a file, are intrinsically too risky to scale (as LinkedIn’s loss of over 6,000,000 logins to a hacker showed!)

Multi-factor authentication, on the other hand, provided it is built on something called “elliptic curve cryptography-based authenticated key agreement protocols” – phew! –  can be robust enough to scale to many millions of users. This is because it simultaneously authenticates personal identity, the identity of the browser and the identity of the devices being used, without recourse to a fixed 1-to-1 relationship. If one of these factors is incorrect or missing, authentication can’t happen.

Scalable  = saleable!

For this self-same reason – scalability – service providers and their partners are suddenly into a whole new ball game here. If scale is no barrier to use, then it’s also no barrier to sale. So, excitingly, service providers and their partners now have the option of reselling the very same authentication services that they themselves use, so that their customers, in turn, can use them to secure their own end-users.

This is one snowball effect that should leave all of us feeling warm inside! If you want to learn more, we’re on Booth 704, or you can come to one of the technical or business sessions listed below:

• ·         Technical Track – 4^th Feb  between 08:15-17:00 –
• ·         Partner Theatre –  5^th Feb  at 12:45 – Growing Your Revenues with Single Sign-On, Multi-Factor Authentication for the Cloud and Mobile  – Frank Boening (CertiVox)
• ·         Developer Track – 6^th Feb at 10:30 – Extending APS packages with Single Sign-On – Brian Spector and Gene Myers (CertiVox)

VMware is without a doubt a major platform for private as well as public cloud deployments. But as in any other cloud-based system, data security, and more specifically cloud encryption and key management are fundamental building blocks.
We have found that external users have many of the same security requirements, whether the cloud is public or private: from an external user’s point of view, the differences between public and private clouds are technical details, and the user requires the same guarantees from the provider.

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