Hosted Solutions Expands Application Hosting Business, Offering Robust SQL, Oracle,...

Hosted Solutions, the East Coast's
premier provider of IT infrastructure as a service (IaaS), announced today
that the company has significantly expanded its suite of application hosting
and management capabilities to include support for a full range of leading
business applications, including Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, WebSphere,
WebLogic and JBOSS.

This, when coupled with Hosted Solutions' industry-leading managed services
and web hosting capabilities, enables the company to provide a complete range
of IT services to its mid-tier and enterprise-level clients throughout the
United States, moving it away from the traditional, and increasingly outmoded,
pure "hosting-only" business model.

"As companies become more comfortable with the concept of hosted and managed
services, the old ways of doing things no longer suffice," said Christopher
"Kip" Turco, Hosted Solutions' Chief Operating Officer.  "By moving deeper
into the stack and providing a greater range of services, such as applications
hosting and support, we deliver greater value to our clients.  They, in turn,
are far more likely to regard us as their trusted partner, ready to help them
solve a full scale of business challenges."

"We've seen a significant level of interest in this offering from our
customers," Turco added.

As part of today's announcement, Hosted Solutions said it would provide its
customers with additional access to application environment planning,
administration, and monitoring services.  Through its "Hi-Touch" approach, a
team of seasoned application engineers will provide subject matter expertise
for end-to-end support of all aspects of customer application environments,
including architecture recommendations, incident triage, and in-depth
knowledge and troubleshooting on a wide range of J2EE technologies.

Hosted Solutions provides its full suite of application and network hosting
services to Motricity, a leading provider of data solutions and services to
the world's most successful mobile operators and content providers.  Those
services include functions in key areas needed to ensure consistent uptime,
featuring more than 100 terabytes (TB) of backup and storage, Oracle RAC
administration, dedicated account management and security to meet PCI
compliance standards.

"We found a solid partner in Hosted Solutions to assist us in our optimization
and platform consolidation efforts," said Chris Rivera, Vice President of
Managed Services/IT at Motricity.  "The Hosted Solutions professional services
team includes a well-seasoned group of Oracle DBAs, WebLogic and J2EE
application engineers, UNIX, Windows and Linux systems administrators and
network engineers.  They clearly have the technical expertise and impressive
uptime we require to manage a series of complex applications, ensuring that we
meet our customers' demands," Rivera said.

"There has been a notable trend in hosting providers looking up the stack and
trying to determine how to evolve their hosted solutions in concert with the
increasing demands of the new breed of SaaS and complex customers," said
Antonio Piraino, Research Director -Hosting & Cloud Computing, Tier1 Research.
 "Those service providers that are able to provide service levels around these
core applications are quickly gaining a greater level of trust by their
customers.  This represents a huge opportunity as the comfort level grows as
users understand the reliability and range of services that can be deployed
with greater speed, efficiency and at a lower price point than doing it
themselves; allowing these firms to devote more of their attention to their
core competencies."

Today's announcement reflects Hosted Solutions' evolution as one of the
nation's leading firms, focused on delivering a technology infrastructure that
enables uninterrupted access to enterprise-based mission-critical information.
 Hosted Solutions provides leading-edge managed services, covering key areas
such as information security, data protection, database administration and
more.  All of Hosted Solutions' services are augmented by the company's
experienced technical and engineering teams, available on a 24/7 incident
response basis.

Turco added that by working with acknowledged market leaders such as EMC, IBM,
VMware, Sun, Dell, RedHat, Cisco and more, Hosted Solutions has built a
well-earned reputation for reliability and professionalism.

Source

Managed hosting 'a key business continuity solution'

Companies that are planning to improve their disaster recovery plans could benefit from managed web hosting, according to a data services firm.

InTechnology has claimed in a blog article for ZDNet.co.uk that such hosting systems are "the ultimate business continuity solution", as they can protect a firm's entire communications infrastructure.

According to the firm, IT problems are one of the most common threats to firms, so all possible risks should be considered by business.

"Hosting your IT infrastructure in the cloud covers every aspect for business continuity as well as allowing you access to extra computing resources when you need them," the firm added.

"For a truly resilient business continuity solution that is flexible with your business needs, managed hosting is the answer."

Source

NEOSPIRE MANAGED HOSTING FEATURED AS CASE STUDY

Dell just released a comprehensive case study on managed hosting provider NeoSpire which focuses on how NeoSpire maintains growth in the wake of a tough economy.   The company’s growth was due in part to NeoSpire’s intense focus on the customer experience which mandated that NeoSpire standardize on a rock-solid server, storage and networking platform.   By choosing technology partners such as Dell and building custom solutions for every customer; NeoSpire is able to not only survive but actually thrive in today’s challenging economy.

Generic and non-server grade hardware inevitably fall short of customer expectations, so NeoSpire made a conscientious decision to focus on its strengths as a managed web hosting provider and standardize on Dell PowerEdge servers and Dell/EMC storage. NeoSpire chose Dell products because the company wanted a reliable server platform with robust management tools and needed a partner that could help it respond quickly to customer needs.

“Customers who demand a five-nines SLA ask us to design their solution in a fully redundant environment,” says Jason Burnett, Director of Network Services. “We couldn’t confidently do that with lesser equipment.”

For the past ten years, using hardware that has been universally tested and benchmarked prevented a myriad of hardware issues that plague cheaper commodity server, which is no small matter for NeoSpire clients who have mission critical web applications. A number of clients have switched to NeoSpire from other hosting providers that used self-built servers that caused outages and other performance issues.

“Our web presence is a vital communication tool between us and our customers and cannot go down,” explained Elena Ganczuk, Partner at Southwest Medical & Dental, Inc. “Understanding what hardware was going to be used to build our solution was one of the deciding factors in choosing NeoSpire as our managed hosting provider.”


Source

Internap Network Services Provides Managed Server Hosting Services for Mashery

Network Services Corp., a global provider of Internet business solutions, announced that it is providing managed server hosting services for Mashery, a cloud-based API (Application Programming Interface) infrastructure management company.
The companies noted that Mashery will use Internap's managed-server infrastructure as a backup solution for both standard and enterprise service customers.

"Despite, and perhaps driven by, a sluggish economy, Mashery has seen rapid growth. Best Buy, MTV, New York Times and Netflix are among a growing list of industry leaders relying on Mashery to manage their APIs," said Oren Michels, Mashery Co-founder and CEO. "We chose Internap after an extensive business and technical vetting process. We found the company had the most robust set of MSP services combined with outstanding SLAs - both of which were prerequisites for Mashery and our premium-service customers."

In 2008, Internap expanded its managed-server offering to a global footprint, which according to officials was a factor in the bid for the Mashery business.

Source

Hosting Firms Have New Answer to 'I Want My Own Server'

Virtualization is great and all, but sometimes a customer just wants their own server. For many companies, however, off-the-shelf servers are too big, too powerful and too hot-making the typical data-center fare too costly. t's a problem that faced Dell's in-house skunkworks, the Data Center Solutions (DCS) group, last year. Their solution? Build a compact server based on the Via Nano processor -- a low-power, low-cost chip found in increasingly popular netbooks, says Todd Brannon, market development manager for Dell's DCS. The mini-server, known as the XS11-VX8 or Fortuna, almost fits in a 3.5-inch floppy case and requires a fraction of the power of a typical enterprise server.
"The servers we typically build for our mainstream IT customers are too much for these applications," Brannon says. "What we are finding is that the hardware requirements are very different for these massive 'hyperscale' environments."
While Brannon is quick to stress that the server is a custom design only suited for a limited market, Dell is not alone in pursuing the low-power market.
In February, Microsoft showed off a data-center cabinet filled with netbook processors that could be run using a standard AC outlet. The company demonstrated the solution to hardware makers as a possible solution to cut back on energy consumption in data centers.
The problem for many companies is that server performance, and power consumption, has leaped ahead in the past five years, improving by a factor of 11, according to Dell's Brannon. For companies that make heavy use of virtualization, the gains mean more efficient computer resources. However, for customers who want to host a single application on a single server, today's run-of-the-mill servers are too high-powered.
"If you are a managed hosting company, the workloads on those servers have not gone up 11 times, so they have a problem that, if they buy an enterprise-class system, they are way over-provisioned," Brannon says.
Dell fit 12 Fortuna servers in a 2U rack, allowing for a higher density of servers per data-center cabinet, without appreciably increasing the power consumed.

Source

Organisations 'turning to outsourced managed hosting'

In times of economic uncertainty, managed hosting solutions become more popular among large organisations, it has been asserted.

According to IT industry analyst IDC, users' preference for predictable periodic expenses and potential cost savings from vendors' economics of scale in a downturn tends to drive take-up of outsourcing and managed services.

Adam Lee, IDC associate market analyst for the New Zealand IT services market, commented: "With some skin left in the game, vendors can better convince customers of their commitment towards fulfilling service level agreements. Outcome-based contracts and price-per-mainframe capacity are some of the examples."

The company went on to say increasing pressures on vendors to help their customers ride through the economic storm is leading to a preference for discrete outsourcing over enterprise-wide information system outsourcing.

Earlier this week, IDC stated the popularity of open-source managed hosting solutions is on the rise.

The group added that vendors of open source enterprise applications are attracting equity investments and experiencing growth rates are typically above 20 per cent each year. 


Source