Monday 15 March 2010
NewServers,
NewServers, the only server cloud that delivers dedicated servers instead ofctoday announced that the newly launched Ranker.com data-sharing search and social media site has chosen NewServers to support its network of multiple high-capacity web, database, search and image servers.
Integrating Web 2.0 social capabilities with Web 3.0 data capabilities, the Ranker.com search engine leverages huge amounts of data and is required to scale quickly to accommodate a large and uncertain number of anticipated users since the site lends itself to discussion of topical, relevant news events.
“The main NewServers benefit is on-demand deployment of dedicated server hardware. We will not deploy excessive capacity to handle traffic spikes, we will handle them as they come with the on-demand deployment server architecture. We built prototypes on other server clouds and were unable to guarantee the quality of customer experience with virtual server clouds,” said Tchavdar Ivanov, CTO/VP of Engineering, Ranker.com.
Unique from other cloud providers, NewServers empowers Ranker.com with its own dedicated server hardware, dedicated VLAN, and the ability to customize the server specifications beyond the defaults. Most importantly, NewServers allows Ranker.com to scale horizontally - capacity overloads are accommodated in minutes through NewServers’ self-service model.
“With its vast amount of information and unpredictable network utilization, Ranker.com is an example of the growing number of next-generation destination sites that require reliable, high performance servers to support its user community,” said JP Gagne, CEO, NewServers.
About Ranker.com
Ranker.com is a social web application that leverages the social aspects of Web 2.0 with emerging Web 3.0 data capabilities. Ranker uses lists, and user rankings, as the backbone of a community enabled to socialize and exchange ideas by creating and sharing lists from precompiled data based on their own personal preferences. The Ranker application is fully distributable and other sites can embed lists made on Ranker with just one click.
About NewServers Inc.
NewServers operates a cloud of “Bare Metal” devices called cloud servers that uniquely feature dedicated, not shared, servers. The Hardware as a Service (HaaS) approach allows organizations to maintain scalable, affordable, secure data centers that are hosted at NewServers’ state of the art data center. More than 290 companies currently use NewServers for voice over IP communications, gaming, web applications, graphics rendering and high-performance computing deployments. Privately-held NewServers is based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and more information can be found online at www.newservers.com.
Contacts
Madison Alexander PR
Dan Chmielewski, 714.832.8716
dchm@madisonalexanderpr.com
Paula Brici, 949.677.6527
paula@madisonalexanderpr.com
There are several kinds of Cloud Computing service offerings. Here are the most common ones. Common Services. Some products offer Internet-based services—such as storage, middleware, collaboration, and database capabilities—directly to users.
SaaS. Software-as-a-service products provide a complete, turnkey application—including complex programs such as those for CRM or enterprise-resource management—via the Internet.
PaaS. Platform-as-a-service products offer a full or partial development environment that users can access and utilize online, even in collaboration with others.
IaaS. Infrastructure-as-a-service products deliver a full computer infrastructure via the Internet.
DaaS. Desktop-as-a-service which utilize virtualization of desktop systems serving thin clients.
Sybase’s mobile platform may provide a cloud-based lifeline for the likes of SAP, Microsoft, and Oracle, providing those legacy enterprise application vendors an entry into the mobile-computing world of the future. Sybase’s big play into cloud computing seems to be from the “client side” in the form of mobile access to applications in the cloud, not the data center side as some might expect. It may be that mobility-platform vendors are some of the biggest winners from the cloud-computing movement, as there is a lot of “work” to be done between the service and the device for most cloud applications. Yes, many cloud applications will be architected with mobility in mind (especially support for the Apple iPhone), and yes, Sybase seems to be targeting more ”traditional” Web and client-server applications, but in general, there is infrastructure that enables mobile phones to connect with cloud back-ends (e.g. 3G/4G, the Apple Store, etc.), and cloud computing could be a huge boon to mobile “glue” vendors that address the opportunity.
Microsoft’s cloud computing platform was initially released last fall and offers an operating system and developer services that can be used individually or together. The whole shebang will hit the virtual shelves at the Professional Developer Conference in November of this year. Once available, Azure will be offered through a consumption-based pricing model. This method will allow partners and customers to pay for the services that they consume, and nothing more. Exact pricing for Azure’s OS will reportedly be US$ 0.12 per hour for computing, and US$ 0.15 per Gigabyte per month for storage. Plans include a basic US$ 9.99 per month basic edition and a US$ 99.99 per month business edition which comes with a 10 Gig database.
Cloud Computing is kind of a huge thing right now so naturally, at the initial release of Microsoft’s platform, we considered the possibility that the company was “betting the farm on Azure.” Do we still think that’s the case? Perhaps. Earlier this year we saw upgrades aimed to woo developers and the pending commercial availability certainly speaks to the needed openness.
Salesforce.com CRM, the enterprise cloud computing company, today announced Force.com Free Edition, a new offering that provides everything companies need to build and run their first cloud computing app - for free. Force.com is salesforce.com’s enterprise cloud computing platform. It provides everything companies need to quickly build and deliver business applications in the cloud, including the database, unlimited real-time customization, powerful analytics, real-time workflow and approvals, programmable cloud logic, integration, real-time mobile deployment, programmable user interface and Web site capabilities.
Force.com provides companies the fastest way to build and run applications and Web sites in real time without requiring any software or hardware infrastructure. Already, customers and partners have built more than 110,000 business applications on Force.com, from manufacturing, finance, and supply chain management to brand management, claims processing and order management, and much more. Industry research has shown that building apps in the cloud on Force.com is 5 times faster and less costly than on-premise alternatives.(1) Force.com Free Edition will allow companies to further extend their success with salesforce.com by enabling them to build and run their first app or Web site in the cloud for free, for up to 100 users.
The emergence of cloud computing raises a host of questions about the best database technology to use with this new model for on-demand computing. The database manager you choose should be a function of the mission and the applications it supports, and not based on budgets and whether it will run in the enterprise as a private cloud or as a public cloud from a service provider. For instance, some companies turn to a cloud provider to back up mission-critical databases or as a disaster recovery option. Database-intensive apps such as business intelligence can be deployed in the cloud by having a SaaS provider host the data and the app, an infrastructure provider host a cloud-based app, or a combination of these approaches. And popular solutions for processing very large data sets, such as Hadoop MapReduce, can run in both the private and public cloud.
Security in cloud environments varies based on whether you use SaaS, a platform provider, or an infrastructure provider. SaaS providers bundle tools, APIs, and services, so you don’t have to worry about choosing the optimal data store and security model. Your database decision also will hinge on whether the environment supports a multitenant or multi-instance model. Salesforce .com hosts apps on Oracle databases using multitenancy. Amazon EC2 supports multi-instance security. If you fire up an Amazon Machine Image running Oracle, DB2, or Microsoft SQL Server, you have a unique instance that doesn’t serve other tenants. You have to authorize database users, define roles, and grant user privileges when using the infrastructure-as-a-service model. Consider the class of applications that will be served: data asset protection, business intelligence, e-commerce. Determine the suitability of these apps for public or private clouds and Factor in ease of development.
There is a lot of magic that is happening out of sight that you have no control over. If you then have to scale your application it is often the relational database that these technologies require that becomes the performance and scaling bottleneck. Often requiring complex custom implementations of partitioning and sharding to make it work. The AWS services Amazon S3 and Amazon SimpleDB were designed to handle the dominant storage usage patterns within Amazon and they greatly reduced our need to rely on relational storage for scaling our systems.
But it is almost never the case that a single storage technique is used in applications and services that need to operate at enterprise scale. For example it is a common pattern that objects stored in S3 using a primary key, have a collection of secondary keys (e.g. metadata) stored in SimpleDB. SimpleDB provides very fast indexing for querying of the metadata that will return primary keys of objects located in S3. At SXSW Interactive there was a great panel/presentation by Mike Subelsky, co-founder of AWS customer OtherInbox , about their experiences with scaling Ruby-on-Rails applications in the Cloud. They demonstrated that with Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 Ruby/Rails scales just fine. The room was packed and there was some great Q&A.
During the Q&A presentation co-founder and CEO of OtherInbox Joshua Baer gave some great insight in the changing role of relational databases and some really good advice about how they were able to keep their database simple and fast. After the session I asked Joshua to explain it once more for the readers of this weblog.
While there is still time to talk about the benefits the company will be able to reap from cloud computing, Yashraj Vakil, its chief operating officer, said that he was thinking on the lines of cost efficiency in terms of load-shedding and maintenance while taking the decision. We have been on the Cloud since we started operating in December 2008. The technology is good for a new launch, and we are happy with its ‘pay as you wish’ subscription. We can focus on our core, which is managing traffic and learning where people are coming from.
Dream11.com, however, is taking a reverse pattern. Where established players who have a huge legacy are migrating on to virtualization and cloud computing technologies, Vakil, in an interaction with CXOtoday, said, “I am trying to gauge the market. We want to have a server farm of our own. But that is a distant dream as of now. Let me first make my millions. So who hosts the company s website and servers? “GoGrid is our service provider. We have registered 1 million uniques and 5 million page views in the two months that we have gone live.
So is it all smooth sailing on the clouds? No, said Anil Singh, general manager IT at Dream11. And why did Dream11 chose GoGrid a relatively unheard-of company? Said Singh, “Among the top five or top ten, they offer the cloud only on an open source platform. Our IT architecture is on proprietary system.” Vakil said that all employees at Dream11 use the .Net platform since it is easy to use. “But we are wondering whether to move to open source, or use dual processes. That will depend on the legacy. For now the space is open, and we want to grow in the market.
New cloud service allows wineCellar 2.0 users to sync wines entries and then access the information via a desktop web application or a mobile Internet site that is iPhone compatible. Up to 500 Wines can be synchronized in the cloud at any given time and the first year of the service is free to licensed users, with additional years of service costing $15 per year.
The software is a wine database program that stores and retrieves information for over 2000 bottles of wine, allowing wine aficionados and collectors a way to track the wines they have as well as bottles they may want to buy. The database stores photos of wine labels, expiration dates and the location of each bottle. It can help research new wines via the Internet and can generate buy lists.
The new HP ProLiant SL server line, the latest addition to the HP ExSO portfolio for scale-out computing, comprises an open 2U chassis, which holds fans and power supplies, and task-specific server nodes that slip into the hardware’s rail-and-tray design. The ProLiant SL chassis fits into any standard rack from HP or third parties. Next is the SL160z, which is designed for large memory-cache apps. The server has 18 dual in-line memory module slots and up to two PCI slots. Finally, the SL170z is built for large storage applications such as Web search and database apps. The server has up to six large form-factor Serial ATA or serial-attached SCSI hard drives. HP is initially making three server nodes available. The first is the ProLiant SL2×170z, which fits two servers in a 1U tray. The servers are designed to support highly dense applications found in high-performance computing and Web front-end environments.
The new systems are scheduled to be available in July. Pricing will vary according to configuration and order volume. HP also offers management software and services as options for the ProLiant SL product line. HP, Intel, and Yahoo last year launched the Open Cirrus cloud computing test bed with a goal of promoting collaboration among businesses, government agencies, and colleges and universities. More than 50 research projects are plugged into Open Cirrus. Cloud computing is a type of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Companies operating such environments include Google, Amazon, and Salesforce.com. Small and midmarket companies are particularly interested in running applications on vendors’ cloud computing environments in order to avoid building large IT infrastructures.
