News: Web Host ViaWest Names VP and GM of Sales for Utah
News: BlueLock Introduces New Suite of Cloud Computing Services
News: ShareFile Opens its First EU Data Center in Ireland
News: AtlantaNAP Completes SAS 70 Type II Audit
News: Answers.com Signs Colo Deal with C7 Data Centers
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- With actual cloud computing implementations having now become at least somewhat commonplace, the emerging trend appears to be that the newest cloud hosting offerings bear some mark that distinguishes them within the cloud space.
We saw it last week with the launch of Carpathia Hosting’s “hybrid” cloud offering. And it appears to be the case again this week, as east coast data center operator Hosted Solutions (www.hostedsolutions.com) introduces its Stratus “Trusted” Cloud.
“Trusted,” in this case, is an effort to distinguish the company’s cloud as especially fit for production environments, says Hosted Solutions’ chief operating officer Kip Turco, rather than the development or testing implementations that made up a significant portion of the cloud computing early adoption.
The Stratus product was not a rushed reaction to the cloud computing trend, says Turco. Hosted Solutions started developing a cloud product 11 months ago. The process involved talking to customers and analysts, and examining the company’s strengths, to identify how it could best employ cloud technology.
“Most of the clouds out there are what I would term developer level clouds,” he says. “Some of the characteristics of that would be that some; not all; are built on legacy infrastructure and software – stuff that companies wanted to re-purpose or re-utilize. They’re highly elastic; you can go up and down very quick. Some of them have customization around the app, or writing to APIs. And most of them have fairly limited SLAs.”
Most of them are good environments, he says, and very useful for test development and quality assurance, but they might not fit for companies considering moving mission critical applications to the cloud.
Hosted Solutions set out to distinguish its product by designing it to meet the enterprise grade standards demanded by most of its customers, according to Turco, a void the company identified in the current cloud computing landscape.
The Stratus Trusted Cloud includes a service level agreement guaranteeing 99.99 percent uptime, a consequence, says Turco, of being built with “best of breed” technology from partners such as VMware, F5, Juniper, Sun Microsystems and EMC.
The solution also is representative of the managed services approach the company takes to its more traditional hosting products – a consultative, hands-on approach Hosted Solutions describes as “high touch.” The Stratus Trusted Cloud includes management of storage, backups, load balancing and firewall.
According to Turco, the company’s cloud is offered in a starting resource package described as a “pod,” which combines storage, processing, RAM, access and firewall for about $2,500 per month. Each implementation is burstable, and can be scaled up in increments of processing power and bandwidth.
A more exhaustive, detailed description of the product and its features is available for download in a devoted section of the company’s website.
The early impact of the new product, says Turco, has been to attract a new audience of customers to the company’s services – outside the geographic constraints sometimes associated with colocation or managed hosting services.
While roughly 90 percent of the company’s existing customers come from within about 100 miles of one of its data centers (located in Boston, as well as Charlotte, Raleigh and Carey, North Carolina), Turco says more than 50 percent of the inquiries about the cloud service are from farther – customers looking into cloud computing solutions tending to consider geography less relevant.
Ultimately, what most distinctly characterizes the Stratus Trusted Cloud is the very same thing that distinguishes its other services – the company’s specific expertise and “high touch” style of complex management is carried over to the new product.
“When you’re coming to a company like hosted solutions, and getting on our cloud, you’re working with a company that has a proven track record of dealing with complex technology issues. Secondary to that, we’re used to dealing with production-level systems,” says Turco.
“We’re not a provider that’s typically in telecommunications, or some other industry, offering a cloud that is somewhat compatible with what they do. This is core to our business. This is what we do, and we’ve done a good job and have a great track record doing so.”
Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
Comment anonymously or log into your WHIR account
Logging in allows enhanced commenting features (such as external linking) in news, features, blogs and more.