When you think about it, the booming growth of unstructured data, app and web servers and virtual machines at many companies today is also quite counter-productive to what most companies are seeking in these troubled economic times: capital preservation and operating expense reduction.\r\n

So what\’s the solution? It lies in the cloud, according to a recent http://cloudhosting.ulitzer.com/node/1200132 article I read. The story offers guidance – four key steps – for IT professionals to move their datacenters to the cloud. \r\n

First, companies should identify their most critical business applications as well as the largest consumers of datacenter IT resources. These should then become the primary targets for transforming the datacenter.  \”Rule of thumb is 30% of applications typically consume or create need for 70% or greater of the datacenter infrastructure,\” according to the piece. Next, decompose these apps one at a time or in groups of similar types and then \”measure and map the workload\” across the IT supply chain. Taking this approach to change, firms can do twice the work on half the infrastructure.\r\n

Next, you should \”institute a discipline\” to measure and monitor consumption and performance and that also takes into account the IT supply chain dependencies of every application. The point here is that companies need to understand what an end-to-end application view and dependency looks like before they can virtualize. \r\n

The third step involves standardizing the management strategy of your IT supply chain across the datacenter from the top down. The advice: use building blocks of runtime management and service delivery with holistic virtualization. The building blocks include:\r\n

• dynamic runtime management of workloads (bringing demand to supply as it happens), \r\n
• a combination of datacenter footprints \”that provide optimized physics,\” from energy draw, to heat dissipation, to quantity and types of cables required to connect, communicate and run workloads. (Unified networks, compute, storage, apps and software that match workloads supported by the enterprise creates a simpler, leaner platform.)\r\n
• lifecycle management of provisioning, re-purposing and re-provisioning standard builds on top of the unified footprints.  And the idea here is that your business gets the ability to flex its infrastructure in order to keep pace with fluctuating demand – at the same time taking advantage of optimized footprints and matching workload on a dynamic basis. \r\n

The fourth step is to turn these building blocks into a new way of delivering instantaneous support of IT – as business requires it.  Mix in approval processes and standard operating procedures. And IT should constantly analyze data in order to \”proactively predict, tune and adjust the infrastructure.        \r\n

While this article at times might sound a bit complex (and perhaps daunting), I think it provides good advice on taking a step-by-step approach to enabling data centers for the cloud and saving your company money.\r\n

Press release

San Jose, CA – December 9, 2009 – Monitis, the leading provider of 100% Cloud-based network and systems monitoring solutions, today announced the launch of Website Instant Check, a free service to check website response times from different locations.

This free, simple, easy to use Website Check tool allows IT managers and system administrators to instantly check the availability of their websites and web page-load speeds from multiple locations worldwide outside of their servers’ network. Monitis’ Website Instant Check checks the following functions:

- it sends an HTTP request to your provided URL every 60 seconds from multiple checkpoints around the world.

- it checks Time to First Byte (TTFB), which is the amount of time it takes to deliver the first byte of the requested page to the browser. TTFB represents the confirmation that a website is responding;

- it then checks the full content load speed;

- it then completes the analysis by measuring the DNS resolution time, which measures the translation speed of a domain name into an IP address.

This tool can also be embedded as a widget in user websites and blogs.

According to Hovhannes Avoyan, Monitis’ Founder and CEO, “By helping clients maintain faster web page loads and an ever-improving user experience, the Website Instant Check is yet another in a myriad of small ways that Monitis is helping IT managers and system administrators to keep their companies as profitable and as efficient as possible.” The tool is located at http://portal.monitis.com/web/guest/check-website.

About Monitis All-in-One Monitoring Platform

Monitis is a 100% Cloud-based, complete, and flexible IT monitoring solution which consolidates backend, application, and cloud monitoring in an all-in-one, central monitoring service. The platform is easily customizable and may be used for managing of all kinds of IT assets such as websites, servers, routers, switches, VoIP devices, DNS, databases, processes and any other IP devices.  Monitis provides users with a comprehensive view of their system’s health and performance. 

About Monitis

Monitis believes that the Cloud is the biggest thing to happen in IT management since IT management. Having seen this vision early, Monitis is now the global leader in developing this market.  It is the first affordable network and systems monitoring solution based 100% in the Cloud.  More than 50,000 customers from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies to government agencies and educational institutions have chosen Monitis to reduce system downtime, improve the productivity of their IT staff, and reduce operational expenditures. 

Monitis was founded in 2005 by a team of seasoned entrepreneurs and fed-up and worn-out developers who were tired of complaining about the limits of software-based tools, while inspired by the promise of the Cloud.  Headquartered in San Jose, CA, Monitis is lead by a team of IT professionals with deep experience running enterprise-grade IT businesses, as well as starting and selling several IT start-ups.  Using a global workforce, particularly its R&D team based in Yerevan, Armenia, Monitis is poised to move from strength to strength.  At present, it has a loyal and enthusiastic user community of 50,000, and an average month-on-month revenue growth of over 10%.

Contact:

Monitis Inc.
Sales & Marketing Department
info@monitis.com
http://www.monitis.com
US & Canada Toll Free: +1-800-657-7949
UK + International: +44-845-527-3346
France + International: +33-48-607-9035
2880 Zanker Road Suite 203
San Jose, CA-95134
USA

Press release

San Jose, CA – December 7, 2009 – Monitis, the leading provider of 100% Cloud-based network, server and application monitoring software as a service (SaaS), today announced yet another world-first: the ability for IT managers to create custom, end-to-end server monitoring locations for within the Monitis system.

The traditional Monitis offering has always included the ability to monitor servers’ availability and performance end-to-end from eight different geographic locations: US-East, US-West (recently added), US-Center, UK, Germany, China, Australia, and Central America.

With Monitis’ new Custom Server Monitoring Locations tool, IT managers and system administrators can now define for themselves where they want to monitor from. This ability to have monitoring that is highly geographically customizable is a tremendous asset for websites wanting to monitor and improve their load-time performance in targeted markets.

As with all Monitis products, set-up is easy and quick. Simply install a small internal agent, define an unlimited number of locations to monitor from, and you are off and running.

Hovhannes Avoyan, Monitis’ Founder and CEO, commented, “Custom Server Monitoring Locations is a simple idea, but one that will give an enormous about of power to IT managers. It’s another of the numerous ways that Monitis is changing the servers and network monitoring game.”

About Monitis All-in-One Monitoring Platform

Monitis (http://www.monitis.com) is a 100% Cloud-based, complete, and flexible IT monitoring solution which consolidates backend, application, and cloud monitoring in an all-in-one, central monitoring service. The platform is easily customizable and may be used for managing of all kinds of IT assets such as websites, servers, routers, switches, VoIP devices, DNS, databases, processes and any other IP devices.  Monitis provides users with a comprehensive view of their system’s health and performance. 

About Monitis

Monitis believes that the Cloud is the biggest thing to happen in IT management since IT management. Having seen this vision early, Monitis is now the global leader in developing this market.  It is the first affordable network and systems monitoring solution based 100% in the Cloud.  More than 50,000 customers from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies to government agencies and educational institutions have chosen Monitis to reduce system downtime, improve the productivity of their IT staff, and reduce operational expenditures. 

Monitis was founded in 2005 by a team of seasoned entrepreneurs and fed-up and worn-out developers who were tired of complaining about the limits of software-based tools, while inspired by the promise of the Cloud.  Headquartered in San Jose, CA, Monitis is lead by a team of IT professionals with deep experience running enterprise-grade IT businesses, as well as starting and selling several IT start-ups.  Using a global workforce, particularly its R&D team based in Yerevan, Armenia, Monitis is poised to move from strength to strength.  At present, it has a loyal and enthusiastic user community of 50,000, and an average month-on-month revenue growth of over 12%.

Contact:

Monitis Inc.
Sales & Marketing Department
info@monitis.com
http://www.monitis.com
US & Canada Toll Free: +1-800-657-7949
UK + International: +44-845-527-3346
France + International: +33-48-607-9035
2880 Zanker Road Suite 203
San Jose, CA-95134
USA

Most people and businesses pay attention to what they think are a few important features when picking a web-hosting service. First there’s price, which, more than ever, seems a major consideration these days.

Another consideration are features that the service provides, for example, data storage and bandwidth capacity.

Businesses also want the comfort of support guarantees – for example, live chat, email and phone for help trouble shooting and more. Along this line, service is another big factor in choosing a web hosting service. Companies want assistance not just building their sites, but also marketing them, for example, with SEO services and reporting of traffic and other statistics.

In terms of choice, there are certainly many providers to choose from, including some well-known companies: Arvixe, BlueHost, FatCow, GoDaddy, Green Geeks, HostClear, HostGator, HostMonster, InMotion, iPowerWeb, ix Web Hosting, JustHost, Lunarpages, midphase, MochaHost, Rackspace, StartLogic, SuperGreen, WebhostGIANT, WebHostingPad.

But there are many other important factors that, unfortunately, many fail to consider when choosing web hosting services, among them:

- Ranking – a list of the effectiveness and popularity of hosting services, for example site traffic reporting. This information is easily accessible and comes from very reliable sources. For example, Google ranks hosting services, and the higher the number the better. Meanwhile, Alexa’s rankings show the lower number as the best. Compete also ranks services, and, like Alexa, the lower the number the better.

- Uptime. Ask your prospective site-hosting service for daily, weekly and monthly uptime statistics, as well as downtime statistics. From this information, you can make a good determination about the reliability of your prospective provider’s performance.

- Virtual capacity. Check into your prospective provider’s ability to host from any point globally. Ask such questions as: “How connected are you to top-tier network providers?” Also, consider a provider’s location and whether that will impact their ability to provide 24-hour assistance – whether for troubleshooting or off-hour marketing and other assistance.

These are just a few suggestions to help you get the most out of your web hosting service.

Further, I highly suggest you read more on what to expect from your web hosting service and how to monitor their performance, including using such tools as an on-demand load tester.

When you think about it, the booming growth of unstructured data, app and web servers and virtual machines at many companies today is also quite counter-productive to what most companies are seeking in these troubled economic times: capital preservation and operating expense reduction.

So what’s the solution? It lies in the cloud, according to a recent http://cloudhosting.ulitzer.com/node/1200132 article I read. The story offers guidance – four key steps – for IT professionals to move their datacenters to the cloud.

First, companies should identify their most critical business applications as well as the largest consumers of datacenter IT resources. These should then become the primary targets for transforming the datacenter.  “Rule of thumb is 30% of applications typically consume or create need for 70% or greater of the datacenter infrastructure,” according to the piece. Next, decompose these apps one at a time or in groups of similar types and then “measure and map the workload” across the IT supply chain. Taking this approach to change, firms can do twice the work on half the infrastructure.

Next, you should “institute a discipline” to measure and monitor consumption and performance and that also takes into account the IT supply chain dependencies of every application. The point here is that companies need to understand what an end-to-end application view and dependency looks like before they can virtualize.

The third step involves standardizing the management strategy of your IT supply chain across the datacenter from the top down. The advice: use building blocks of runtime management and service delivery with holistic virtualization. The building blocks include:

1. dynamic runtime management of workloads (bringing demand to supply as it happens),
2. a combination of datacenter footprints “that provide optimized physics,” from energy draw, to heat dissipation, to quantity and types of cables required to connect, communicate and run workloads. (Unified networks, compute, storage, apps and software that match workloads supported by the enterprise creates a simpler, leaner platform.)
3. lifecycle management of provisioning, re-purposing and re-provisioning standard builds on top of the unified footprints.  And the idea here is that your business gets the ability to flex its infrastructure in order to keep pace with fluctuating demand – at the same time taking advantage of optimized footprints and matching workload on a dynamic basis.

The fourth step is to turn these building blocks into a new way of delivering instantaneous support of IT – as business requires it.  Mix in approval processes and standard operating procedures. And IT should constantly analyze data in order to “proactively predict, tune and adjust the infrastructure.        

While this article at times might sound a bit complex (and perhaps daunting), I think it provides good advice on taking a step-by-step approach to enabling data centers for the cloud and saving your company money.

Cloud management platform provider RightScale plans to offer self-service utility computing in first-quarter 2010 that works across all of its supported clouds and will include additional accessibility, control, codified best practices and accountability.

The move reflects RightScale’s expansion into the enterprise. Indeed, some of its enterprise customers are already codifying corporate best practices as wikis that are being used to check compliance before additional projects are farmed out to the cloud.

Why is this so important? According to analysts at The 451 Group, the “ability to distribute workloads across multiple clouds is getting closer to becoming a reality,” and it’s clear that RightScale is moving in this direction.

RightScale has more than 100 paying customers, who mainly use the cloud platform for Web 2.0, databases), front ends to more-complex back-office systems, content delivery networks, self-service utility and internal IaaS deployments.

Amazon, too, is creating a growing number of tools for scaling, managing, monitoring and ‘dashboarding’ across the Amazon Web Services (AWS) landscape. But nontechnical users will find it hard going creating and managing instances and workloads.

Of course, there are a host of other third-party tools for managing AWS deployments, as well as incumbent vendors and integrators via product offerings.

Creating the ability for companies to easily and centrally use the cloud for multiple purposes – data access, application usage, and other purposes – will advance cloud computing overall.