Hosted Solutions, the East Coast’s premier provider of IT infrastructure as a service (IaaS), announced that they have entered into a partnership with the Cavaliers Operating Company, LLC., whereby the Cavaliers will use Hosted Solutions’ Stratus Trusted Cloud(TM) to power the team’s official arena website, theQarena.com.

Because the arena’s website is anticipated to draw much heavier web traffic this year, the Cavaliers selected Hosted Solutions in an effort to increase the availability and robustness of theQarena.com. Reasons for increased traffic include:

– The team and arena recently launched their own single-game primary and secondary market ticket sales service with Veritix – the industry’s most cutting edge digital ticketing, event marketing and relationship management platform. The public is directed to theQarena.com to purchase tickets to all Quicken Loans Arena events including the Cavaliers and AHL Lake Erie Monsters.

– The Cavaliers begin their 40th season with a powerful team of proven players and high expectations and projected record attendance (The Cavs set two franchise records during the 2008-09 season with an average attendance of 20,512 and the number of sellouts – 38 total.)

– The Q now heads into an entertainment season with a jam-packed schedule of special events expected to generate record website traffic levels.

Stratus Trusted Cloud provides the availability needed to handle spikes in traffic at any time. “The upcoming year is sized up to be ‘XL’ in every way, including our fans’ interest in tickets to see the Cavaliers, Lake Erie Monsters, concerts, special events, and family shows,” said Jeff Lillibridge, Web Services Director. “We feel the scalability and dependability of Hosted Solutions’ Stratus Trusted Cloud is a perfect match to support our needs, which in turn allows us to provide our fans the level of service they deserve.”

Introduced earlier this year, Stratus Trusted Cloud dramatically improves the efficiency and availability of IT resources and applications for small and mid-sized enterprises. Stratus offers a massively scalable, multi-tenant infrastructure that enables customers to access a secure, enterprise-class cloud environment with built-in high availability and automated resource balancing. As a result, businesses can move faster without compromising availability or security and significantly reduce both their capital and operating expenditures, whether Stratus is deployed on an enterprise, private or hybrid cloud basis. Moreover, Stratus is designed to provide an added level of assurance to companies that their data and entire infrastructure is being administered in a trusted manner, acting in accordance with a full range of governance, risk management and compliance (GRC) regulations.

“The demand for an ‘always on’ IT environment is not unique to the Cleveland Cavaliers,” said Rich Lee, Hosted Solutions’ founder and Chief Executive Officer. “Any company doing business online requires the highest degree of reliability; even a short amount of downtime in this competitive economy can hurt significantly. The Cavaliers’ decision to deploy the Stratus Trusted Cloud for their arena website confirms its value for firms seeking a reliable, consistent and secure approach to ensuring that their website is up and running when they, and their customers, need it most.”

Lee added that several other companies have chosen the Stratus Trusted Cloud in the last several months. He noted that 80 percent of Hosted Solutions’ clients run their production environments through his firm, a further testament to the superior level of performance delivered by the Hosted Solutions team.

Network Solutions® announced today that Kurt Gastrock has been named Senior Vice President. Kurt responsibilities will span three key areas: Product, Sales and Wholesale. Gastrock will be a catalyst for product innovation and customer growth. He is charged with extending the company’s suite of products and services through online and new sales channels and developing new private label offerings to a growing portfolio of partners.

“Kurt brings a wealth of experience in product development and channel strategy to the company,” said Tim Kelly, President of Network Solutions. “He is a great complement to the existing team members.”

Network Solutions is focused on providing businesses with quality products and services that make it easy for them to establish and grow their companies using the Internet. The product portfolio spans a wide range of services – from web hosting to online marketing services – that are supported with free, 24/7 customer service support, certified by JD Power & Associates year after year.

“I am happy to be part of the Network Solutions team,” said Kurt Gastrock. “The company continues to develop, refine and expand its product portfolio and open new sales channels to deliver products and services that deliver results small businesses expect.”

Prior to joining Network Solutions, Gastrock served as the Senior Vice President for Sales and Business Development at NextG Networks. His past experience includes leading the day-to-day operations of Convera Corporation where he was the Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer. Gastrock also spent a number of years at Sprint Nextel Corporation where he held senior level posts in their wireless site development, hosting, and E|Solutions business units.

Gastrock earned a Master of Business Administration from Georgetown University and a Bachelor of Science, Mechanical Engineering from Lehigh University.

PEER 1 Network Enterprises, Inc today announced a collaboration with InMon to provide precise bandwidth measurement and analysis capability.

PEER 1 will deploy the industry standard sFlow® network monitoring technology and InMon’s Traffic Sentinel, in all of its data centers to provide an industry leading bandwidth billing solution for its Managed Hosting customers.

Bandwidth usage is measured on a per-IP address basis, so PEER 1 is able to ignore traffic occurring inside the data center, and provide precise traffic charges to its customers in a way that is not possible through per-port or physical-layer network traffic monitoring.

For PEER 1 customers, the InMon-powered network traffic monitoring and analysis is accessible in real time through the online customer portal with customizable graphs and downloadable data.

Ted Smith, SVP of Operations at PEER 1 said: “We believe our customers should only pay for the services they use and our collaboration with InMon maximizes our network analysis and measurement capability allowing us to accurately pass on lowest cost bandwidth charges to customers. Our IP-based or layer three approach not only increases transparency and billing accuracy, it also enables our customers to accurately re-charge bandwidth usage to their own customers.”

”The unique scalability of InMon’s sFlow solution makes it the ideal choice for monitoring the fastest of data center networks,” said Peter Phaal, president of InMon Corp. “In the expert hands of the PEER 1 engineers, the detailed traffic database in the Sentinel product can be applied to a wide range of applications, from accounting and capacity planning to troubleshooting and security.”

PEER 1 Network Enterprises, Inc today announced a collaboration with InMon to provide precise bandwidth measurement and analysis capability.

PEER 1 will deploy the industry standard sFlow® network monitoring technology and InMon’s Traffic Sentinel, in all of its data centers to provide an industry leading bandwidth billing solution for its Managed Hosting customers.

Bandwidth usage is measured on a per-IP address basis, so PEER 1 is able to ignore traffic occurring inside the data center, and provide precise traffic charges to its customers in a way that is not possible through per-port or physical-layer network traffic monitoring.

For PEER 1 customers, the InMon-powered network traffic monitoring and analysis is accessible in real time through the online customer portal with customizable graphs and downloadable data.

Ted Smith, SVP of Operations at PEER 1 said: “We believe our customers should only pay for the services they use and our collaboration with InMon maximizes our network analysis and measurement capability allowing us to accurately pass on lowest cost bandwidth charges to customers. Our IP-based or layer three approach not only increases transparency and billing accuracy, it also enables our customers to accurately re-charge bandwidth usage to their own customers.”

”The unique scalability of InMon’s sFlow solution makes it the ideal choice for monitoring the fastest of data center networks,” said Peter Phaal, president of InMon Corp. “In the expert hands of the PEER 1 engineers, the detailed traffic database in the Sentinel product can be applied to a wide range of applications, from accounting and capacity planning to troubleshooting and security.”

Codero unveils new server networks improving security, performance, backup and ongoing management for any dedicated hosting scenario. Custom network configurations offer complete redundancy and control for high-volume email, websites, databases, application hosting and more. Three custom network configurations are designed to support complex business applications requiring multiple servers. Load-Balanced is fully redundant maintaining network traffic on high-capacity mail and web servers. High Availability is designed for marketing campaigns, high-traffic stores and data-demanding applications. The Cluster network configuration supports social media hosting, large databases and mission-critical infrastructure with optimum privacy.

“These custom configurations are perfect for the medium-to-large enterprise,” says Taylor Giddens, Director, Dedicated Services for Codero. “Whether to secure core data, handle spikes in traffic or support thousands of users at once, each server network delivers a flexible solution with an emphasis on uptime.”

Codero’s network configurations feature high-quality components including dedicated load balancing, Cisco firewall, EVault managed backup, 100MB switch, Gigabit Private VLAN and database (dynamic, replication or cluster). All server setups are available as Linux or Windows and may be further customized to meet any business need.

The Planet, the global leader in IT hosting, today expanded its portfolio of products and services with the addition of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2.  Windows Server 2008 R2 helps organizations reduce operating costs, and increase efficiencies.  The new operating system is available to all dedicated hosting customers across the company’s eight SAS 70 Type II-audited data centers.

Windows Server 2008 R2 enables dynamic provisioning and management of virtual workloads with the much-anticipated update to Microsoft’s Hyper-V™. With its Live Migration-enabling technology, moves between physical hosts now happen in milliseconds. As the first Windows Server operating system with a true 64-bit architecture, R2 also offers powerful hardware and scaling features.
“Our customers around the world are always looking for ways to do more with less, and Windows Server 2008 R2 is optimized to meet those demands,” said Todd Mitchell, general manager for dedicated hosting and global services at The Planet. “As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, we stay in lockstep with new technologies from Microsoft to give our customers more ways to reduce operating costs and increase efficiencies.”

About Windows Server 2008 R2
The latest operating system from Microsoft includes a number of updates that enhance server performance and management control:

• Powerful hardware and scaling features; R2 is the first Windows Server operating system to move solely to a 64-bit architecture, and CPU-specific enhancements enable customers to run up to 256 logical processors.
• Updated Hyper-V augments virtual workload management; Hyper-V enables Live Migration, a new feature for R2 that moves virtual machines in a matter of milliseconds.
• Ubiquitous remote access; DirectAccess allows remote users to seamlessly access corporate resources without a VPN connection or client software.
• Strongest Windows application platform to date; R2 includes the new Internet Information Services 7 (IIS 7.0), which helps applications run faster while using fewer system resources.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Hosting is now available from IT Solutions Now. This hosted service offers organizations fully integrated customer relationship management software that creates and maintains a clear view of customers from first contact through post-sales.

“Now clients can easily track all of the stages of planning and executing marketing campaigns, including planning, tactics and follow-up,” says Billy Forte, CEO of IT Solutions Now, a leading Microsoft Exchange Hosting organization. “Most importantly, managers can manage leads better to convert them into sales.”

CRM hosting enables clients to assign, schedule and track marketing campaign activities, as well as easily measure campaign performance, creating a more efficient way to market both new and existing products and services. CRM 4.0 hosting is integrated with Microsoft Exchange and Outlook, allowing a minimal learning curve and quick return on investment.

CRM 4. 0 hosting offers many benefits to organizations and businesses. With a hosted service, organizations can customize a CRM solution to the needs of each customer, and can integrate sales marketing and service processes, creating a professional image to present to clients. An organization can used CRM 4.0 hosting to automate task planning, cost tracking and many other tasks involved in complex marketing campaigns, saving staff time and reducing room for error. A hosted service also allows for quicker follow-up on leads and makes it easier to connect with prospects and customers.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Hosting users can also track responses to mailings and e-mail marketing to stay in constant contact. The service also features full synchronicity with Outlook e-mail, tasks, contacts and calendars, and makes it easy to export data into Excel for fast analysis and reporting.

Overall, CRM 4.0 hosting leads to increased brand awareness, more efficient lead generation and better management of existing customer data to grow market share.

Rochen announced that today it has signed an agreement with Ksplice, a start-up that provides a new technology called Uptrack for keeping operating systems up-to-date without needing to reboot.

The use of the new Uptrack technology removes the need to deploy kernel updates manually as well as the need to reboot servers to initialize an update, meaning updates are deployed faster and without downtime. Now, when kernel updates are distributed by an operating system vendor, the wait time for them to be deployed is almost eliminated.

“Deploying Kpslice’s Uptrack technology across all of our servers will allow Linux Kernel security updates to be rolled out faster to our customers than ever before, without any downtime or disruption in service due to reboots,” says Chris Adams, CEO, Rochen Ltd.

The technology will be used across all of Rochen’s servers, including shared and reseller, as well as Managed Virtual Servers, Rochen’s proactively managed VPS service. There will be no additional charge for Rochen customers.

“Now that Rochen’s servers are protected with Ksplice Uptrack, their customers can get the critical security benefits of the latest OS updates without the disruption of rebooting. Hosting companies that aren’t constantly innovating like Rochen simply can’t serve their customers as well,” says Waseem Daher, COO, Ksplice Inc.

This is especially beneficial for customers looking to host Joomla powered websites. Rochen is the official web hosting provider for the Joomla open source content management system. Rochen also announced today that they will be one of the lead sponsors of Joomla’s Developer Conference on December 5th and 6th 2009 in New York City.

Rochen announced that today it has signed an agreement with Ksplice, a start-up that provides a new technology called Uptrack for keeping operating systems up-to-date without needing to reboot.

The use of the new Uptrack technology removes the need to deploy kernel updates manually as well as the need to reboot servers to initialize an update, meaning updates are deployed faster and without downtime. Now, when kernel updates are distributed by an operating system vendor, the wait time for them to be deployed is almost eliminated.

“Deploying Kpslice’s Uptrack technology across all of our servers will allow Linux Kernel security updates to be rolled out faster to our customers than ever before, without any downtime or disruption in service due to reboots,” says Chris Adams, CEO, Rochen Ltd.

The technology will be used across all of Rochen’s servers, including shared and reseller, as well as Managed Virtual Servers, Rochen’s proactively managed VPS service. There will be no additional charge for Rochen customers.

“Now that Rochen’s servers are protected with Ksplice Uptrack, their customers can get the critical security benefits of the latest OS updates without the disruption of rebooting. Hosting companies that aren’t constantly innovating like Rochen simply can’t serve their customers as well,” says Waseem Daher, COO, Ksplice Inc.

This is especially beneficial for customers looking to host Joomla powered websites. Rochen is the official web hosting provider for the Joomla open source content management system. Rochen also announced today that they will be one of the lead sponsors of Joomla’s Developer Conference on December 5th and 6th 2009 in New York City.

UnitedLayer, LLC, a privately held company Managed Colocation Services firm, named No. 25 on S.F. Business Times’ 100 Fastest Growing Private Company List.

Today, UnitedLayer has 30 employees and 175 customers. The company is headquartered at 200 Paul Ave. in San Francisco, where it has over 32,000 square feet of Class A conditioned data center space and it runs a second 5,000-square-foot data center in Los Angeles, as well as Internet exchanges in Palo Alto, San Jose, Los Angeles and Ashburn in Virginia. The San Francisco based company offers managed data center solutions that allow customers to locate their IT equipment in one place where they can connect to numerous telecommunications providers and it offers dedicated and managed servers and very high speed Internet Connectivity.  

The San Francisco Business Times partners with PricewaterhouseCoopers to conduct the research and produce the Top 100 and Top 50 Fastest-Growing Private Companies Lists. All companies had to have been headquartered in the Bay Area, privately held between 2006 and 2008, and must have had revenues of more than $200,000 in fiscal year 2006. Fast 100 and Fast 50 Companies were ranked on percentage of revenue growth from 2006 to 2008.
 
“We are thrilled and honored to be part of the fastest growing private companies in the Bay Area and would like to thank all of our customers” said Arman Khalili, founder and CEO, UnitedLayer. The founder states with a smile, “I am lucky to have hired coworkers who are smarter than I am.” It is apparent that Mr. Khalili is proud of his staff; however he goes on to state that, “While, the UnitedLayer team is crucial to the momentum of our business, our customers come first. End of story.”
 
This year’s recognition follows the 2008 Top 100 list where UnitedLayer was named 82nd fastest growing Bay Area Company. “At UnitedLayer, we attribute our growth to our most important assets namely our clients and our co-workers” said Albert Ahdoot, Director of Business Development and Marketing. Mr. Ahdoot further acknowledges that “UnitedLayer’s success can be traced from the result of Class A services, coupled with its superior 24/7 customer support.”

UnitedLayer, LLC, a privately held company Managed Colocation Services firm, named No. 25 on S.F. Business Times’ 100 Fastest Growing Private Company List.

Today, UnitedLayer has 30 employees and 175 customers. The company is headquartered at 200 Paul Ave. in San Francisco, where it has over 32,000 square feet of Class A conditioned data center space and it runs a second 5,000-square-foot data center in Los Angeles, as well as Internet exchanges in Palo Alto, San Jose, Los Angeles and Ashburn in Virginia. The San Francisco based company offers managed data center solutions that allow customers to locate their IT equipment in one place where they can connect to numerous telecommunications providers and it offers dedicated and managed servers and very high speed Internet Connectivity.  

The San Francisco Business Times partners with PricewaterhouseCoopers to conduct the research and produce the Top 100 and Top 50 Fastest-Growing Private Companies Lists. All companies had to have been headquartered in the Bay Area, privately held between 2006 and 2008, and must have had revenues of more than $200,000 in fiscal year 2006. Fast 100 and Fast 50 Companies were ranked on percentage of revenue growth from 2006 to 2008.
 
“We are thrilled and honored to be part of the fastest growing private companies in the Bay Area and would like to thank all of our customers” said Arman Khalili, founder and CEO, UnitedLayer. The founder states with a smile, “I am lucky to have hired coworkers who are smarter than I am.” It is apparent that Mr. Khalili is proud of his staff; however he goes on to state that, “While, the UnitedLayer team is crucial to the momentum of our business, our customers come first. End of story.”
 
This year’s recognition follows the 2008 Top 100 list where UnitedLayer was named 82nd fastest growing Bay Area Company. “At UnitedLayer, we attribute our growth to our most important assets namely our clients and our co-workers” said Albert Ahdoot, Director of Business Development and Marketing. Mr. Ahdoot further acknowledges that “UnitedLayer’s success can be traced from the result of Class A services, coupled with its superior 24/7 customer support.”

Zmanda Cloud Backup (ZCB) now supports Windows 7 data and system state backups; users can migrate data from XP and Vista to Windows 7 using ZCB.

Zmanda™, today announced support for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 with its Zmanda Cloud Backup (ZCB) product. Users can backup file servers, SQL servers, Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, Oracle and MySQL based on Windows Server 2008 R2 to off-site cloud storage. Support is available immediately.

ZCB is a simple GUI-based backup solution that allows Windows users to easily automate their backup and recovery process. This robust and simple-to-use solution provides ongoing protection against disaster, user error and theft. Once ZCB is installed and the backup process is set using its simple scheduler, ZCB automatically backs up files, applications, databases, and networked devices to a storage cloud. The management console allows system administrators to schedule the extraction of backup data from live applications and the upload of backup archives to the storage cloud as independently scheduled operations, reducing the burden of backup operations on production applications and WAN bandwidth. ZCB can also be used to protect either physical or virtual machines.

ZCB uses open format (ZIP64) for storing backup archives. The ZIP64 format enables users to migrate from previous Windows versions to Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 using ZCB. Data from a Windows XP based laptop or desktop can be migrated to a Windows 7 based system without needing an external hard disk or a USB flash drive.

“Today’s Windows 7 and Windows 2008 Server R2 releases by Microsoft represent major upgrades for IT managers,” said Chander Kant, chief executive officer, Zmanda. “ZCB eases this migration by enabling these two platforms to quickly and easily backup to storage clouds.”

The price for ZCB 2.0 consists of a flexible pay-as-you-go cost of $0.20/GB/month ($0.25/GB/month for EU) for data transfer and storage on the cloud, with an additional monthly charge of $4.95 per account for the protection of an unlimited number of Windows desktops and servers. This low subscription based pricing makes ZCB ideal for one-time data migration projects. ZCB is immediately available for purchase and download from http://www.zmanda.com/cloud-backup.html

Nimsoft, the first provider of Unified Monitoring™ solutions, today announced that Web hosting provider 1&1 Internet has selected the Nimsoft Monitoring Solution (NMS) to monitor its entire server infrastructure.

With about EUR 1.2 billion in revenues, 8 million customers, and 10 million domains being managed, 1&1 is the largest Web hosting provider in the world. In order to deliver its portfolio of shared and dedicated hosting, ISP, and new cloud computing services, 1&1 needs to manage a vast infrastructure that includes more than 65,000 servers.

The IT staff at 1&1 realised it needed to replace the existing open source monitoring solution in order to most effectively optimise the performance and reliability of its servers. After evaluating solutions from IBM, Hyperic and Nimsoft, the staff found that only NMS offered the combination of scalability, ease of deployment, and security they required.

“In the end, we found that Nimsoft was the only solution that met our requirements for scalability, ease, and off-the-shelf capabilities, while at the same time delivering the flexibility we’d need to adapt to our evolving requirements,” said Henning Kettler, CTO 1&1. “As a result, we’re able to deploy quickly and get immediate benefits and have confidence that the solution will deliver value in the long term.”

Its distributed architecture and security model makes NMS an ideal solution for large and geographically diverse businesses such as 1&1. The solution’s secure model for gathering and distributing monitoring data helps 1&1 optimise the security of its infrastructure while offering the scalability required to effectively aggregate the massive amounts of monitoring data being generated by the company’s server infrastructure.

“1&1’s selection of Nimsoft is a tremendous testament to the scalability of our solution,” said Gary Read, Nimsoft president and CEO. “With NMS, 1&1 gains the ability to efficiently monitor its vast infrastructure, and so reduce administrative time and expense, while at the same time boosting the availability and performance of its services.”