Archive for July, 2010

Rebel Networks Launches Hosted Exchange and Blackberry Enterprise Service

July 31st, 2010 admin

Leveraging its relationship with Microsoft (www.microsoft.com) and BlackBerry developer Research in Motion (www.rim.com), Web host Rebel Networks (www.rebelnetworks.com) has built and setup a Hosted Exchange and Blackberry Enterprise service infrastructure in its data center in Toronto, Canada. According to Rebel Networks’ Friday announcement, the “Oh WOW Amazing” Cloud provides email and storage solutions to customers worldwide from a secure Canadian environment.“Our primary goal is to help small and medium business customers set up collaboration, email, and realated services, without the need to manage mail servers, licensing, security, and other IT facets,” Rebel Networks president and chief executive officer Domenic Macchione said in a statement.

Rebel Networks provides scalable, secure and full-featured Hosted Exchange solutions that give users the ability to easily collaborate without them having to invest in mail servers, software licenses, security, or be involved with ongoing system administration. Users can have options to have active Sync enabled for their iPhones, as well as have full Blackberry Enterprise Hosting for their Blackberry Devices. Sharepoint, and Communications server will be added within 60 days.

Rebel Networks also plans to offer a wholesale version of OWAcloud to their resellers and other smaller hosting companies later this month.

The OWAcloud, according to Rebel Networks, will offer more than just email and blackberry colaboration. The plan for OWAcloud is to have small Business customers pay small monthly fee’s for services required such as telephony and voicemail integration, CRM solutions, email, mobility devices, but also wiki portals, tools, and access to legal documents, HR documents, best practices, and online accounting.

“The Idea is simple, a small business today needs to deal with many facets of IT, Telephony, Mobility, and outside consultants to help them manage all of these components and integrate it with HR, Legal, office administration,” Macchione said. “This cloud will make it much easier for small business to manage all aspects of IT, without spending CAPEX, or extra in IT.”

Rebel Networks services include the provision of managed dedicated servers, unmanaged collocation services, domain names services, reseller hosting, and shared Web hosting solutions with 100-percent server uptime.

As part of its cloud computing strategy, Rebel Networks added a new data center last month in Dallas, providing a range of services, including shared hosting, semi and fully-managed dedicated hosting, colocation and virtual servers. Rebel Networks said it would be adding US based Microsoft Exchange, Blackberry and other SaaS services with the launch of this data center, complimenting the SaaS services out of Toronto.

Source : web-hosting-news.org

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The Importance of Being Connected

July 30th, 2010 admin

For quite some time, we’ve been listening to the debate about network neutrality and whether the internet will cope with all of the extra traffic on it. According to a study some years ago by Cisco, traffic running across the network will surpass a zettabyte by 2010 (http://bit.ly/zrS0u) and many organisations are clearly worried by this. Whilst the fixed network technology has been steadily upgraded over the decades, mobile networks are still in their infancy. Indeed, Ofcom recently asked for comments on how to deal with rising mobile traffic. (http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2010/06/24/241726/Net-neutrality-Ofcom-asks-for-comment-on-traffic-blocking-and.htm)

Here at Rackspace, we do know that however you access it, the web is an increasingly large part of our lives, which is why we offer zero downtime guarantees on our hosting plans. We’re keenly looking at how the future is changing and how we may have the power to shape the future of it, most notably via our involvement with cloud computing and the OpenStack initiative which we launched last week. Through this initiative, we’re working for good to unify open source cloud standards in much the same way as Linux did for Unix.

However, there’s one thing which isn’t in any doubt – the internet will continue to become inextricably intertwined with our lives, and we’ll be keeping an eagle eye on developments.

Source : web-hosting-news.org

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IBM to Respond to Texas’ Data Center Deal Warning

July 29th, 2010 admin

IBM has just over two weeks left to respond to a “notice to cure” issued by the Texas IT department in regards to alleged problems involving the state’s $863 million data center outsourcing deal, according to a report by Government Technology.

Texan officials sent the notice to IBM on July 16  stating that the company had not followed through on its obligations of a massive seven-year data center consolidation and privatization deal signed back in 2006.

The deal aimed to consolidate 27 Texas state agencies’ IT operations into two new IBM-operated facilities, with the migration of the agencies’ servers to IBM to be completed by December 2009.

However, the DIR says that IBM has completed less than 12 percent of this task, with only five agencies being completely consolidated and an additional five undergoing consolidation, so far.

The government threatened it would potentially terminate the deal if IBM did not resolve these alleged shortcomings within 30 days.

Texas CIO Karen Robinson and a government deputy told Government Technology last week that they are hopeful that the state and IBM will be able to arrive at a resolution.

In the event that IBM does not make good with its agreement terms, the Texas Department of Information Resources will potentially disassemble parts of the services that are being offered and market them through different vendors.

Although, the department is quick to state that it has not yet made a final decision on this and will give IBM a full chance to fulfill its terms of the deal.

IBM spokesman Jeff Tieszen said on Tuesday that the company would respond to the notice “in an appropriate and timely manner.”

He emphasized that IBM has met all of the contract’s obligations and believes the allegations to be “unfounded accusations of material contract breaches” that fail to provide just cause for terminating the contract.

The DIR alleges that IBM has failed to make key deadlines due to poor performance and underinvestment in the project, as well as removing some of its staff from the project and withdrawing consolidation duties all together since last fall.

IBM says that the consolidation project has been slowed down by the state’s poor management by the state, alleging that the DIR lacks the authority to centrally manage the plan.

The company says these issues have hindered server modernization and consolidation while significantly increasing IBM’s costs.

Source : hosting-news.org

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Arsys Reduces Data Center Energy Consumption

July 28th, 2010 admin

The leading Internet presence, managed hosting and cloud computing service company Arsys has reduced its energy consumption by 20% in the past year, since its new Data Center came online in July 2009. This has resulted in a reduction in electricity consumption of approximately 300,000 kWh per month, including both the electricity consumed by servers and that required to cool them.  That amount of production by power utilities would have resulted in the emission of several tonnes of CO2 per month.

In recent months, Arsys has undertaken various energy efficiency projects at the new Data Center to consolidate its technology platforms through virtualised environments and the cloud hosting platform.  The number of servers required, and therefore the energy consumed, is thus reduced without affecting the technology services marketed by the company.

In the words of Olof Sandstrom, General Manager for Operations of the company, “this Data Center has enabled us to undertake intensive server virtualisation projects and reduce the total number of actual, physical production servers by around 800, while increasing our levels of service and the reliability of our platforms.  We intend to continue working on these lines to cut the number of actual servers by a further 400”.

The Arsys Data Center incorporates advanced technology that reduces the electricity consumption of servers.  “By combining latest generation UPSs, chillers, climate control units with automatic cold regulation and ventilation, open towers and sealed off, chilled aisles in the technical room, we have set up a system with enormous potential for configuration and adjustment which can reach an annual average PUE of less than 1.6, even though it is not yet performing at full capacity”, explained Sandstrom.

Arsys is optimising all its technological and industrial resources to reduce the environmental impact of hosting and maximise reliability and energy efficiency in the services that it has launched onto the market and in the customised ICT architecture solutions that it develops from medium and large sized corporations.

Arsys is already planning to expand its modular Data Center in response to increasing demands for its services.

About Arsys
Arsys is a leader in technology and innovation which provides Internet presence services, managed hosting, cloud computing and advanced solutions for corporate customers and individuals. Arsys has over 250,000 customers and manages over 680,000 domains. The company is at the top of the ranking in its sector in Europe and is pioneering the development of Spain’s first commercial cloud hosting platform.

Source : web-hosting-news.org

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