But a big impediment in adopting cyber-infrastructure in most jurisdictions is the lack of financial incentives. The energy savings of cyber-infrastructure are usually earned by the facilities or estates department or rarely based on to researchers and educators. But initiatives like national Green Revolving Funds, funded by the national government such as the 10 million Salix pound program in the UK, and JISC/JANET programs to promote clouds, outsourcing and Green IT are starting to make a difference. More importantly universities such as Cambridge are developing programs to pass on energy savings to individual departments^†.

Another great example is the public-private partnership of London University and UNIT4 to offer shared outsourcing services to UK universities, as well as the recent JANET cloud brokering offering.

If these collocated facilities use green or renewable power, the carbon/energy savings for a university can be significantly greater than more traditional energy saving schemes such as changing light bulbs or adding insulation. Of course, advanced high speed R&E networks supporting Software Defined Networks and Hybrid optical backbones are critical for this vision.

Ultimately I think such initiatives can entirely underwrite the cost of such advanced networks by making Green Revolving Funds aware of the huge energy savings available by integrating advanced networks with clouds and outsourcing. Kudos to JISC/JANET for these forward thinking services.

^† Cambridge Shared Savings – A new case study from the JISC-funded RECSO Project, managed by Forum for the Future with inputs from SusteIT, describes the background, aims and working of the Electricity Incentive Scheme (EIS) that Cambridge University implemented in 2008/09 and has since developed. The Scheme encourages consumers of electricity across the University to maximise their energy efficiency through a system of financial incentives (both rewards and penalties) at a departmental level. It thus achieves the benefits of fully devolved energy budgets without the administrative and managerial implications that this could have involved. The Scheme saved an estimated £820,000 in energy costs in its first year. Although not targeted at ICT, it obviously provides general incentives to tackle its energy use — as evidenced by an Appendix which details how the scheme helped stimulate an innovative green data centre (PUE approaching 1.1) in the Department of Engineering (also featured in the presentations from our September 2011 workshop at Cambridge). (PDF)

Written by Bill St. Arnaud , Green IT Networking Consultant

Facebook Constructing New Data Center - Located 62 miles south of the Arctic Cicle, Lulea. Facility consists of three 300,000 square feet server buildings; scheduled for completion by 2014.

Photo above shows Facebook's first outside the U.S. data center currently being built on the edge of the Arctic Circle. The northern Swedish city of Lulea chosen for the data center is partly because of the cold climate — crucial for keeping the servers cool — and access to renewable energy from nearby hydropower facilities, according to the company.

Image below is a visualization of Facebook's social graph of 500 million back in 2010 created by intern Paul Butler.

Facebook 'Friendship Visualisation' shows pairs of friends between the world's cities based on company's 500 million user base in 2010. Facebook's current user base at the time of its SEC filing is reported to be over 800 million.(Click to Enlarge)

ACMA receives a major compliment

In 2004, when I first entered the anti-spam arena, this was a mantra that I had to hear very often: "Spam is international. We cannot do anything", spoken with a lot of emphasis and some despair. Unfortunately in 2012 this is still true for many countries. Not because of the fact that it is impossible to do something about spam, no, but due to a lack of initiatives. I think that a great compliment to Australia's ACMA (Australian Communications and Media Authority) was published on CircleID in a comment to an article about the impact of Canada's spam law on local businesses. Brett Watson, an Australian internet engineer, writes:

"However, my present (and general) lack of anything to complain about reflects well on the law and its enforcement… Perhaps what's most telling is that I have, for the first time, subscribed to some advertising newsletters in recent years. I don't feel the need to jealously protect my email address any more, or diligently use uniquely tagged addresses when handing them over. I trust ACMA to keep the companies in line, and the trust seems well placed so far."

This proves that fighting spam is effective and that the combination enforcement with filtering by ISPs keeps mailboxes clean. Spam hasn't gone away, but at national level companies are disciplined and mostly act within the law in the few countries with vigorous enforcement bodies.

Who enforces what?

Privacy and spam are closely related. Spam is seen as an invasion of privacy. But it goes way beyond mere privacy. Privacy sensitive data is often used, sold or worse stolen in order to approach people. Whether to sell a(n illegal) product, phish for more (bank)data or industrial espionage, a stolen e-mail address is often the basis of law violations. The patchwork of enforcement agencies, unclear enforcement powers, the lack of understanding of the issues at stake, of resources, training or powers, the unavailability of online reporting of spam or cyber crime, all make that enforcement is far from optimal in most countries.

Standardisation of spam and cyber crime law

Could a standardised law, with a standardised toolkit for enforcement agencies make a difference? Yes, I think that it would. For the public it would mean that there is the certainty that when the law is broken, it is clear who to report to and that it is likely that an investigation follows. That it makes a difference to complain. For senders it also sets clear boundaries. Their business continues, as is proven in e.g. The Netherlands, but in compliance with the law. Next to that it offers this clearness in 27 states.

As spam, e-fraud, phishing, cyber crime and worse are all so closely related and often involves several countries, it makes sense to be more directive from Brussels. At national level there are so many different laws, ministries and enforcement agencies involved, that coordination there is almost utopian. Next to the fact that success without industry participation is clearly unthinkable. Despite the fact that the Dutch National Cyber Security Centre is a promising initiative, it is obvious that for most countries this form of public-private cooperation is hard to attain.

A proposed course of action for the EU Cyber Security Centre

The discussion about the EU Cyber Security Centre is under way. Let me give a pointer on what the centre could do. To my mind it ought, also, to actively collect, analyse and share data with those involved: public and private entities, universities. This gives the centre coordinative powers in matters cross border and across different enforcement organisations as well. Two difficult hurdles taken… should this come to pass. The combination of the overview and oversight with the transparency caused by available, shared data makes all concerned answerable for their (lack of) actions to the centre and each other. I am also convinced that this model will lay the foundation for cooperation with whole new groups of Internet industry partners that are now harder to reach/convince.

Ambition at Commissioner level

If Commissioners Kroes, Malmström and Reding used their powers to harmonise the laws and enforcement in the way Ms. Reding proposes for privacy, i.e. the same law and enforcement tools, standardised enforcement agencies and a point of case handling, the fighting of privacy infringements, spam, malware and cyber crime may actually take a turn for the better. They are so intertwined that another approach is (well, should be) almost unthinkable.

The combination of a pro-active EU Cyber Security Centre with a layer of harmonisation where enforcement is concerned will prove to be a structural step forward from the present situation in many countries. Yes, this is ambitious, but it is clear that the present approach is not going to change much. Everything cyber is still a field day for criminals and a private company, Microsoft, so far is the most successful in fighting botnets. This ought to be different, shouldn't it?

Written by Wout de Natris, Consultant international cooperation cyber crime + trainer spam enforcement

What Happens in an Internet Minute
Source: Intel (Click to Enlarge)

Looking at the traffic data, Intel asks if there is sufficient attention being paid to investment in infrastructure.

Imagine the state of the network in three years, when the number of connected devices is projected to be double the world's population. Can our networks scale to handle predicted traffic and meet consumer expectations for immediate access from multiple devices?

What about security?

Among highlights from the infographic:

• Nearly 640 Terabytes of traffic are being transferred each minute by global IP networks;
• 6 million Facebook views; 2 million Google search queries;
• 30 hours of video are being uploaded to YouTube; and
• 1.3 million videos are being viewed.

The email I received put it this way:

Governments invest in infrastructure every day — roads, bridges and airports — but what about network infrastructure?

Hopefully, network operators will not follow the practice of governments in infrastructure investment. The state of our roads, bridges and airports seem to be case studies on why network investment is best handled by the private sector. My experience is that governments tend to use "just too late" provisioning.

Written by Mark Goldberg, Telecommunications Consultant

The DoE probably supports the largest concentration of HPC facilities in the world. I agree with the report that for traditional applications such as computational chemistry, astrophysics, etc. will still need large HPC facilities. But traditional computational intensive applications are becoming a niche market and increasingly many of these applications can now run on specialized commercial "HPC" clouds as for example Nimbix.

The biggest growth in demand for computing is not in computational intensive modeling but data intensive processing. New disciplines such as Astroinformatics, Matinformatics (real-time chemical analysis), Systems biology, Meta-genomics, Computational history, computational linguistics, etc. are the driving force for research computing. Most of these data intensive applications are loosely coupled and are ideally suited for using clouds.

While the growth of data intensive science and use of clouds is well recognized, it is still ongoing debate whether researchers should use in-house clouds or commercial facilities. The DoE report did an extensive analysis on the cost of commercial clouds versus in-house facilities. They compared the cost per compute core of an in-house facility versus that of a commercial provider. While I may argue with some of the assumptions in their analysis: for example they did not include cost of money or real estate in their analysis, nor did they use much lower spot market for commercial cloud pricing, I still agree that, in the near term, commercial clouds will be marginally more expensive than in-house facilities.

From a funding agency perspective, however, there is huge advantage of promoting commercial clouds over an in-house facility. Despite the higher per core costs, the elimination of up-front capital costs of using a commercial cloud is incredibly significant, especially in this time period of fiscal constraint. Any capital expenses that can be delayed or eliminated, and yet not impact the quality of the research, has a huge cost benefit to funding agencies. This is also advantageous to the researcher as well. Usually it takes several years to make a proposal, get approval, acquire and install a large HPC facility. With commercial clouds a researcher can start immediately to undertake their computational research. The upfront cost is very small and their time to market (i.e. publishing the results) can be much faster with a commercial facility. In fact some commercial clouds like Amazon and Azure offer a free pilot service to allow researchers and businesses to migrate their software to the cloud and shake out any possible kinks in their software.

With a commercial facility researchers can scale their application as warranted without incurring any additional capital costs. There is no need for peer review to determine the resources that may be made available to the researcher. More importantly, because the incremental per core costs are very small, many other venues for funding for the computation facility are available, as opposed to the limited funding channels available for the purchase of an in-house facility. For example, some commercial organizations will broker their cloud infrastructure for little or no cost to university researchers, as opposed to commercial users. Many R&E networks are also negotiating significant bulk discounts for commercial cloud services on behalf of the R&E community.

Written by Bill St. Arnaud , Green IT Networking Consultant

"FedRAMP is a government-wide effort, and represents the efforts of the Department of Defense (DoD), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the General Services Administration (GSA), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), amongst many others."

Some key FedRAMP benefits include:

• Saves significant cost, time and resources — do once, use many times
• Improves real-time security visibility
• Supports risk-based security management
• Provides transparency between government and cloud service providers (CSPs)
• Improves trustworthiness, reliability, consistency, and quality of the federal security authorization process

The full policy meme is located here on CIO.gov website.

The same crisis in data volumes is also occurring in the climate modelling and other fields as well.

Research and Education (R&E) networks for many years have been warning about this coming data tsunami. For the most part they have the capacity and the tools to easily enable the transfer of these large data volumes. No commercial networks have this capability at this time. But the biggest problem is a lot of this data is not being generated by universities or R&E organizations but commercial facilities closely aligned with the R&E community. Numerous bioinformatics companies, like SoftGenetics, DNAStar, DNAnexus and NextBio, have sprung up to as they have found life sciences a fertile market for products that handle large amounts of information.

This poses a real dilemma for many R&E networks, especially those who receive public funding. They cannot be seen to be competing with the private sector (even though commercial networks do not yet have the capability or technology to deliver such data volumes), and in many cases their stated public policies do not allow them to connect commercial facilities. Compounding this problem is that most of the modern computational tools needed to analyse this data are only available on commercial clouds. Academic HPC facilities and university based cloud solutions generally cannot scale as quickly as commercial cloud providers in providing as many cores as required on demand to analyse this data. As well many grad students and many small innovative businesses are developing the necessary analysis tools to work only on the commercial clouds, as they are driven by the revenue opportunity of "click compute" models offered by many commercial cloud providers.

R&E networks are thus conflicted. Academic institutions and commercial organizations need access to commercial clouds to analyse this torrent of data — yet their acceptable use policy may prohibit the interconnection to commercial facilities, especially if the other end of the connection is also a commercial organization. This is where Open Lightpath Exchanges can play a critical role, much like the earlier NAPs played in the early day of the commercialization of the Internet.

Open LightPath Exchanges, by their very definition are policy free. That means anyone can cross connect to anyone else regardless of whether they are commercial organizations or academic institutions. Open LightPath Exchanges are being established all around the world and many more are expected to be deployed in the coming year. A good background paper on Open LightPath Exchanges "Open Exchanges for Open Science" can be downloaded here [PDF].

Written by Bill St. Arnaud , Green IT Networking Consultant

From the report: "The vast majority of the data center traffic is not caused by end users but by the data centers and clouds themselves undertaking activities that are largely non-transparent to end users — like backup and replication. By 2015, 76 percent of data center traffic will remain within the data center itself as workloads migrate between various virtual machines and background tasks take place, 17 percent of the total traffic leaves the data center to be delivered to the end user, while an additional 7 percent of total traffic is generated between data centers through activities such as cloud-bursting, data replication and updates."

Cisco Global Cloud Index (2010 - 2015) Infographic

Cisco YouTube Animation: How Big Will Cloud Computing be in 2015?

More on Cisco's Cloud Index can be found here.

The story continues: "The employees' quick thinking is being credited with saving the state's largest agency from disaster. AHS oversees not only the Department of Corrections but runs programs that serve thousands of Vermont children, families, senior citizens and individuals with disabilities. Within days, AHS was up and running again — its servers installed at an alternate site."

State servers and the data on them don't belong in state. The more critical the application, the more important that it be running in a cloud with several replications and that it NOT be vulnerable to any catastrophe that might hit the state. The Internet makes the actual physical location of servers irrelevant to users. It's more important that they be well-connected in cyberspace than they be located physically close to their users.

In the State Emergency Operations Center, which also had to evacuate the Waterbury complex, their computer systems became unavailable just when they needed them most. Sure, you can argue that all of the servers should've been on higher ground; but you never really know what kind of catastrophe is going to strike. In an emergency communication and power outages may be widespread as well as physical damage to buildings almost anywhere. When a disaster strikes, you want your critical data and servers (as well as your less critical ones) to be as far from the impacted area as possible; that means out-of-state. It is routine in cloud computing for Amazon or Microsoft or Google or whoever hosts the cloud applications to replicate them in several different locations so you don't have to worry about out-of-state catastrophes either.

Another reason for outsourcing state computing to the cloud is to make it possible to handle spikes in demand without having to have huge amounts of expensive standby capacity during normal times. When the recession first hit and unemployment claims skyrocketed, the newly unemployed had to endure the extra pain of unresponsive or unavailable servers because of the sudden surge in claims. What is an unmanageable surge of volume to Vermont or even California is a blip that a hosting service like Amazon won't notice. They won't run out of server capacity; they won't run out of Internet access capacity; and they won't be affected by instate earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, or floods just when you need them most.

Some people argue that critical state data — welfare records, for example — are only safe if hosted in state. That sounds right but it's wrong. The greatest threat to data is disgruntled or crooked employees. State employees know where the state's critical data is and may have a particular grudge against an individual or a department. Google employees are much less likely to have a grudge against anyone in Vermont or know anything about the specific nature of the data hosted on their servers. Moreover, the big hosting companies spend a fortune on both physical security and hacker-proofing. No state is going to be able to match that. Of course web-accessible applications need to be developed to be hacker-resistant; but that's true whether the hosting is in or out of state.

Employees of a cloud service are unlikely to go to the extremes our state employees did to save us from data disaster. But, since resources in a cloud can be replicated in several locations at little cost to the customer, such heroics won't be needed.

A final reason for moving state computing into an out-of-state cloud is cost. The big hosting companies have huge economies of scale which they share with their customers. Forward-looking companies have moved to cloud computing so that they can focus on what's best for their customers and products and leave the physical care and feeding of servers to those who do nothing else. Many investors I know won't look at a new company which plans to spend scarce capital on servers; inhouse servers are usually a waste of capital, an unnecessary risk, and too inflexible in dealing with unpredictable demand.

BTW, what goes for the state goes double for its towns. We don't know yet how many town records — computerized or otherwise — we're lost in Irene. A town size disaster is much more likely than a statewide one. And towns have even less resources to devote to servers and their proper backup and possible disaster recovery.

I understand that Vermont had to get up and running quickly and probably had to buy some new computers to do so. Nevertheless, one of the ways that we can learn from Irene and be stronger than we were before is to get our servers into the cloud and out of harm's way.

Written by Tom Evslin

Encouraging the development of Internet-based services and accelerating the development of local content are often touted as noble objectives. It is also widely acknowledged that reaping the benefits of technology is dependent on reducing Internet connectivity and bandwidth costs, improving infrastructure, and improving quality of service to all Internet users.

Yet in a region with over 20 million potential Internet users and great ambitions to create a "knowledge-based society" and develop "technology-driven economies", the cost of access remains prohibitively high and there is a glaring absence of critical Internet infrastructure.

Countries in the region are, of necessity, accelerating investment in Internet-based applications and services. But the opportunities opened by these investments also increase exposure to the threats of the digital world in countries that do not always have adequate resources, capacity, or legislative frameworks to protect themselves. Computer network attacks, identity theft, malicious software, and online fraud can extract a heavy toll on users and on the economy.

An Internet Exchange Point (IXP) is an internationally recognized mechanism for achieving cost and service gains and expanding the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector. IXPs allow for the free exchange, or peering, of domestic Internet traffic between Internet service Providers (ISPs). ISPs that take advantage of interconnection to deliver local traffic can reduce the portion of their Internet traffic that must be delivered via their out-of-country transit providers. Within the Internet community, IXPs are considered to be essential to facilitating Internet-based economic growth.

Building an IXP is a trivial exercise technically; however, building the level of trust and collaboration between the stakeholders requires new levels of cooperation and trust.

In the English-speaking Caribbean, true competition in the telecommunications markets is still very much a work in progress. Furthermore, regional service providers do not have a strong history of collaborating for mutual benefit.

The launch of Grenada Internet Exchange Point, GREX, on 17 May 2011, was therefore received as a major achievement for the region. Two of the region's largest ISPs — LIME (formally known as Cable and Wireless) and FLOW (a subsidiary of Columbus Communications) — are now exchanging traffic and, perhaps more significantly, have established a precedent that can be replicated throughout the Caribbean.

Plans are afoot to take advantage of the new IXP with local video and audio streaming, VoIP, domestic data backup, new e-government services, distance learning, e-health, and other high-bandwidth, low-latency applications that depend on local traffic exchange.

The GREX milestone was achieved as a direct result of the joint promotion and support for domestic peering in the Caribbean by the Caribbean Telecommunication Union (CTU), a regional ICT policy development agency, and Packet Clearing House (PCH), a U.S.-based research nonprofit. Through a regional outreach initiative, branded the Caribbean ICT Roadshow, the CTU and PCH are raising awareness of the purpose of IXPs and their benefits to development in the region.

The notion of Caribbean IXP proliferation has found ready support from regional governments and ISPs, which are recognizing that exchange points must be deployed across the region. They now appreciate that this is critical for developing the kind of domestic Internet economy necessary to spark new levels of indigenous innovation, local content creation, and industry growth.

The government of Grenada and the Grenada National Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (NTRC) both played central roles in guiding the GREX implementation, from conceptualization to launch. The CTU and PCH aided the process with technical and policy recommendations and interventions to bring Grenadian service providers into agreement.

This collaborative approach represents a model other Caribbean countries are already seeking to adopt. PCH is working to strengthen existing peering facilities with the Caribbean Network Operators Group (CaribNOG), a loose nonprofit association of network engineers and technical specialists. PCH has already provided hardware and technical training. CaribNOG has declared its intention to work with regional ISPs and governments to place hardware and software services such as time servers, looking glass services, and file servers with open source, cultural, and educational content at regional IXPs. The CTU, under the umbrella of the Caribbean ICT Roadshow, plans to continue working with regulators in the region to ensure that the regulatory environment evolves to support the emerging Internet economy.

The vision of being able to deploy local Internet-based applications and services properly is now a reality for Grenada. It is now also within closer reach for other Caribbean territories. Already IXPs have provided tangible benefits in Haiti, St. Maarten, and Curaçao. Within the next few weeks, the British Virgin Islands is also expected to launch its own exchange. St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, and Dominica have also taken active steps toward establishing exchanges. It remains to be seen whether the stakeholders in the larger, more complex and fiercely competitive markets of Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago and can overcome issues that have thus far impeded collaboration for mutual benefit.

It's not that far-fetched. With LIME and FLOW having already established their willingness and capacity to participate in exchanges in the Caribbean, the onus is now on ISPs, governments, businesses, and consumers to continue pressing to transform the region. In this regard, we can look at the GREX launch as one small step for Grenada, one giant leap for Caribbean Internet infrastructure development.

Written by Bevil Wooding, Internet Strategist, Packet Clearing House

Hostway's FlexCloud™ Servers were designed to be one of the most flexible, reliable and easy-to-use cloud hosting solutions on the market and are based on Microsoft's Hyper-V and System Center, supporting both Windows and Linux virtual machines. An intuitive Web-based management console enables users to create and self-manage multiple clouds, automating the administration of resources including server instances, CPU/RAM/Disk, IP addresses, security, load balancing and more. Public and private image libraries facilitate saving and cloning of images, user-initiated snapshots save multiple states and backups are automatically scheduled and performed. With FlexCloud, provisioning takes minutes, enabling near real-time availability of resources to meet growth and variability requirements.

Hostway is the first cloud hosting provider in the industry to offer Automatic Price Protection, a revolutionary billing model that was commended for the value it affords customers. Automatic Price Protection guarantees the lowest price by automatically billing for services at whichever model costs less: hourly billing based on usage or a fixed monthly rate, providing a predictable cap to help control costs.

The Hyper-V Cloud Provider of the Year award was presented by Austen Mulinder, CVP, CS, corporate vice president of the Communications Sector at Microsoft during the opening keynote of the 2011 Microsoft Hosting Summit in Bellevue, Wash.

With more than 75 Microsoft Hyper-V Cloud Service providers offering their own unique services, Hostway's vice president of Enterprise Hosting Todd Benjamin says the Hyper-V Provider of the Year honor from Microsoft is strong validation of Hostway's superior, cost-effective offering.

"We've received numerous accolades and best-in-class rankings from a wide range of industry analysts and publications, but we are especially thrilled to be recognized by Microsoft for our innovation in technology and customer focus," Benjamin said. "We look forward to the opportunity to continue evolving our services in concert with Microsoft to meet our clients' every-changing needs."

For more information about Hostway FlexCloud as well as other managed hosting, ecommerce and network/infrastructure services, visit www.hostway.com.

For 2011, tempering is expected but still robust growth in sales, and the biggest opportunities for vendors is in helping companies grow their data centre infrastructure sustainably, such as through the use of products that dramatically increase price-to-performance or improve management in highly virtualized environments.

Data centre network equipment market highlights

• In 2010, the worldwide data centre network equipment market, data centre Ethernet switches, application delivery controllers (ADCs), WAN optimization appliances — jumped more than 50% over 2009, to almost $8 billion
• Data centre switches, by far the largest segment, are transitioning from general-purpose to purpose-built equipment, as evidenced by a near-doubling in purpose-built equipment revenue quarter-over-quarter
• Cisco leads the data centre Ethernet switching market by far, with over 80% market share
• ADC market leader F5 maintains its strong #1 position, although revenue share declined as rival Cisco turned the corner
• The WAN optimization market is a 3-horse race between Blue Coat, Cisco, and Riverbed

Enterprise data center survey highlights

• North American enterprises plan to increase their data center infrastructure spending by an average of 25% in 2011
• Cloud technologies will play a major role in this expansion, and are among the top 3 expected data centre changes
• Interest in 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GE) equals or exceeds interest in 40GE, despite the lack of available products
• Fibre Channel is the most used SAN technology, but respondents show strong interest in next generation FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) to streamline their data centre networks

Written by Paul Budde, Managing Director of Paul Budde Communication

Hosted Exchange 2010 offers several new capabilities for business users. Enhanced self-service capabilities help users perform and learn common tasks, reducing the need for help desk contact. Distribution lists and employee calendars can now be more easily shared with recipients outside of the company. Employees no longer need to worry about storing many messages or sending multimedia files as Hostway offers 25GB in free storage.

Offered with no long term contract, Hostway's hosted Exchange 2010 delivers the security features, reliability, and built-in protection business users requires, with premium mailbox security managed by Google's Postini, a leading email and web security service.

"Our offering of Microsoft Exchange 2010 is further testament to our commitment to providing the latest and best hosted applications," said Andrew Kemp, vice president of product management for Hostway. "As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner we are very proud to introduce yet another Microsoft application. Exchange 2010 provides customers with an affordable tool to access mission critical data from any Internet connection or on their mobile device. It also affords a layer of security for user's desktop and mobile environments, and features the ability to remotely wipe stored data from a lost mobile device."

Hostway also offers a hybrid option that allows companies to save costs with Exchange by customizing the exact number of Exchange accounts and SiteMail POP email accounts that are needed. Staying connected to messages is enabled through an ActiveSync feature that enables free real-time synching with hundreds of mobile devices. Users can furthermore customize their email by adding images to automated signatures and disclaimers, and by pulling Active Directory information messages.

Pricing for Microsoft Exchange 2010 begins as low as $7.50 per mailbox. All new customers can take advantage of a 30-day free trial of Exchange 2010 during the initial launch. For more information on Microsoft Exchange 2010, visit http://www.hostway.com/hosted-exchange/.

Reliability is difficult to define and measure as it is different for each company and service. To simplify it, you can think of Reliability as how consistent are you in delivering the "service". The question it is trying to answer is: Can the "service" deliver the same experience, every time, all the time to all users? The service, could be a site, an application, a process, or a series of processes.

For example for Amazon, reliability might answer the question; can a user browse the site, add an item to the cart, checkout and receive the right item on time? For an ad-serving company like DoubleClick (Google), reliability might mean: can the adserver serve the right ad all the time for the right user on the right website, within 200ms.

Reliability is key to every business, but is even more important to vendors that sell services impacting the performance of other products. The service of a CDN, or Adserver, or Widget company can have a huge impact on the performance of a publisher or ecommerce site. Reliability is a key differentiator for such vendors.

To illustrate the Reliability concept, let's compare DoubleClick's Ad-serving system with an unnamed ad-serving company. We are defining reliability as how consistent is the adserver in delivering an ad to an end user. (Because we do not have access to the two products and cannot control the testing, we cannot go more in depth and measure certain things like getting the right ad on the right site.)

Let's start by looking at the overall performance (Response measured in ms):

DoubleClick:

ABC Company:

DoubleClick's Response is consistently below 190 ms as it can be seen by the flat line. The response of the other adserver is fluctuating a lot (between 250 and 850ms). In other words, they are not consistent in delivering their ads.

Using Catchpoint, we were able to easily rule out DNS and Network connectivity issues (they were flat for both) and identified the culprit, the Wait time. (The time from the request was sent to the server to the first byte of response — in other words how long it took for the server to process and respond).

DoubleClick Wait and Response time:

ABC Wait and Response Time:

The other company's adserver response time fluctuates during critical business hours due to the wait time.

DoubleClick's Performance by Hour:

ABC's Performance by Hour:

ABC vs DoubleClick:

Which leads me to believe their servers are overloaded during business hours and cannot handle the requests based on how their application performs. It seems like the company need to take a look at their capacity planning and also optimize their code.

Another way to look at consistency is by using Standard Deviations, as we know by now averages can lie!

Standard Deviation provides a simple way to define consistency: a large standard deviation value indicates a high degree of inconsistency within the measurement population, whereas a low small standard deviation value indicates a higher degree of consistency.

To summarize, Reliability is about how consistent your service is performing. It looks at Speed, Availability, Integrity (delivering the right ad) over time to ensure service is within acceptable thresholds. Reliable services will have flat response lines, or low volatility.

Written by Mehdi Daoudi, CEO at Catchpoint Systems Inc

Todd Benjamin, Vice President of Enterprise Hosting for Hostway: "With FlexCloud Servers we picked and chose the best that cloud technologies and business models have to offer, creating a package of features and functionality that is unparalleled in the industry."

FlexCloud Servers were designed to be one of the most flexible, reliable, and easy to use cloud hosting solutions on the market. An intuitive web-based management console enables users to create and self manage multiple clouds; automating the administration of resources including server instances, CPU/RAM/Disk, IP addresses, security, load balancing and more. Public and private image libraries facilitate saving and cloning of images, user initiated snapshots save multiple states, and backups are automatically scheduled and performed. With FlexCloud, provisioning takes minutes, enabling near real time availability of resources to meet growth and variability requirements.

Unlike most public clouds, FlexCloud Servers incorporates high availability features including automated failover of instances, fully redundant host, network, and storage hardware, and enterprise class Storage Area Networks to increase performance and reliability. With FlexCloud, users sacrifice neither speed nor reliability to gain the flexibility of true cloud computing.

"We're thrilled to write the next chapter of the Hostway leadership in the cloud" says Todd Benjamin, vice president of Enterprise Hosting for Hostway. "With FlexCloud Servers we picked and chose the best that cloud technologies and business models have to offer, creating a package of features and functionality that is unparalleled in the industry."

To further encourage users to experience the benefits of FlexCloud, Hostway is offering a revolutionary pricing model known as Automatic Price Protection. With this model, pricing will automatically be set at the LOWER of the usage based or fixed monthly rating. CIOs can realize the best of both worlds — pay as you go for low or variable utilization, with the predictability of a fixed monthly cap on the amount that a resource will cost. Price Protection is virtually unheard of in the industry today.

FlexCloud Servers can be ordered online starting November 18 at www.hostway.com/cloud-servers.For more information about Hostway's purpose optimized cloud platforms and cloud based applications please visit www.hostway.com.