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(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Developers have had to keep up with many new technologies and developments as cloud computing and a Software-as-a-Service delivery model has taken off over the past few years. To make their job easier, cloud-based virtual lab Skytap (www.skytap.com) provides an entirely self-service provisioning of complex IT environments without any architectural changes -- and it now features collaboration capabilities that let individuals from around the world work more closely on projects.
Dynamic environments cost application development, IT ops testing, virtual training and software demo labs greatly. As well, they are typically underused and difficult for IT operations to maintain. Skytap provides a hosted alternative.
"We specialize in very dynamic IT workloads... and then also application testing which are things like SAP migrations or if you're doing a SharePoint migration -- so anything where basically a team is working on a development project, weather it's a web site, an application, a web service, or whatever, and delivering that," says Skytap product management senior director Ian Knox.
One of the advantages of Skytap that sets it apart from other testing clouds it is one of only a handful of clouds of its kind based on VMware, giving clients massive flexibility in terms of the environments they can run. "[W]e can run any IT environment completely unchanged, and that's very different from anyone else," says Knox. "A lot of the other folks are based on Xen and they run a very limited set of operating systems. With us, you can take anything you've been running and run it on Skytap and test it on Skytap, and then move it backwards and forwards."
Skytap's interoperability becomes very apparent when compared to other clouds such as Amazon's EC2, which runs on a highly customized version of the Xen hyper-visor and does not offer native VMware image support.
While the WHIR and other publications, as well as experts across the industry, have been urging organizations to use cloud-based solutions for dynamic IT workloads, it is not always clear to businesses exactly how much simpler, cheaper, and more effective it is. Skytap's sandbox environments let systems engineers and consulting organizations use Skytap Virtual Lab to quickly demonstrate value to customers before exporting virtual machines to the customer’s on-site environment
And Skybox's new collaboration features not only let SEs and consultants show clients their solutions, but they also let colleages share workspaces. Just as SharePoint and WebEx let workplaces collaborate on documents, Skytap's latest release lets IT teams collaborate within complex IT environments in the cloud. For instance, Skytap lets users quickly and securely share virtual data centers and machines from any location using resource links.
With the rise in globalization, IT teams from across the world, comprised of both corporate employees and contractors, can work together using shared resources, while also maintaining different access rights to the enterprise IT environments so that companies can retain control over their intellectual property and make sure no wrong doing is done using their systems. In addition to Skytap's existing security capabilities, including encrypted traffic and secure network virtualization technology, Skytap's new release includes new features for policy management and role-based security.
"A very good example is when a developer wants to share an environment with someone, they can very easily do that by publishing that," Knox said. "We've also enabled security policies, so this is especially important when you're working with a client or an enterprise that there are some folks who require more access than others." For instance, a developer in India could get just enough information to finish a part of a project and collaborate with developers, but not have access to the full data center environment."
According to Skytap, organizations choosing to use Skytap as part of their IT strategy typically see immediate cost savings, increased productivity and improved responsiveness to the business by incorporating. After spending five months trying to customize another cloud provider to work its specific application, says Frank Martin, technical product manager for virtualization at Oracle. "Once we switched to Skytap, we were up and running in less than two hours," he says. "They are a terrific cloud based lab for development and test."
As cloud-based IT solutions become a realistic option for many enterprises, Skytap would be a good starting point for developers of a variety of applications. Because it's perhaps more important than ever to get solutions to market, a collaborative environment like the one from Skytap could revolutionize workflow, and shave precious days and weeks off projects, which could mean thousands of dollars in savings -- or even a company's success.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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