Oracle is going to buy Acme Packet, a Massachusetts networking gear player that sells secure IP video conferencing, data and voice calling to SPs and the enterprise.
Acme is a company, described as a “one of Boston’s recent success stories,” as well as a rival of Cisco and Juniper, more likely to be acquired by Cisco than Oracle, that Oracle is picking up for $2.1 billion in cash or $29.25 a share, a 22% premium over Acme’s Friday close.
Oracle will wind paying $1.7 billion, net of Acme’s roughly $363.4 million in the bank.
Acme reportedly has 1,900 service provider and enterprises customers worldwide including 89 of the world’s top 100 communications companies.

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Oracle is going to buy Acme Packet, a Massachusetts networking gear player that sells secure IP video conferencing, data and voice calling to SPs and the enterprise.
Acme is a company, described as a “one of Boston’s recent success stories,” as well as a rival of Cisco and Juniper, more likely to be acquired by Cisco than Oracle, that Oracle is picking up for $2.1 billion in cash or $29.25 a share, a 22% premium over Acme’s Friday close.
Oracle will wind paying $1.7 billion, net of Acme’s roughly $363.4 million in the bank.
Acme reportedly has 1,900 service provider and enterprises customers worldwide including 89 of the world’s top 100 communications companies.

read more

Remember when Twitter went out for 40 minutes last July? Twitter was so contrite that it posted the following statement:

“The cause of today’s outage came from within our data centres. What was noteworthy about today’s outage was the coincidental failure of two parallel systems at nearly the same time…We are investing aggressively in our systems to avoid this situation in the future.”

Glitches like this have consequences – many of which aren’t immediately obvious, and often aren’t public. Many are much more serious, because their business value is more intense for any one customer. I can think of four cautionary tales right off the bat.

1) Silent but deadly financial claw-backs

When one firm’s systems experienced serious performance degradation during the holiday season (at precisely the time when traffic was expected to peak), savvy customers took financial action behind closed doors.

“We did issue …

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.