From Daniel Lynn, Platform Engineer

Today Hosting.com will begin offering Unlimi-Tech Software’s FileCatalyst Direct as a preinstalled managed software package on both our cloud and dedicated server platforms.

What is FileCatalyst?

With the kinds of files passed between servers on the internet expanding to include rich media and even whole disk images, the size of the files we transfer has gotten much larger – often tens or hundreds of GBs.  These files are often impractical to transfer over traditional protocols such as FTP.  FileCatalyst is a robust file transfer server whose proprietary UDP-based protocol offers incredible performance benefits over those traditional methods. Other optional features such as delta transfers (only transfer the part of a file that has changed) make FileCatalyst a great tool for anyone who has to do large or frequent file transfers.

FileCatalyst also has a wide array of client applications for different transfer circumstances. In addition to the Express client, which most users of FTP clients should find familiar, FileCatalyst offers HotFolder which allows you to link local computer folders to folders on the server and schedule regular transfers, a command-line interface for writing scripts to automate file transfers, and Applets and an SDK for integrating FileCatalyst’s transfer protocol directly into your existing applications.

For an illustration of how you might be able to leverage FileCatalyst, take a look at this diagram.

What is Managed Software?

Since this is the first time on this blog we’ve talked about managed software packages, I’d like to explain what that means to a Hosting.com customer. As a Managed Hosting Provider, it is important to us and our customers that we don’t just support the hardware, but that we support the software running on it. When we integrate a piece of software into our Managed Software Catalog, this means we’ve done a few different things:

Automated Deployment: Our regular readers may recall this article from Matt Ferrari about our new Deployment Portal: http://engineering.hosting.com/2010/02/deployment-in-remote-sites/. When we integrate a new software package, a deployment process is created so that when a server is requested with this software, it is automatically installed during the deployment and the customer receives the server with this software installed, configured, and tested.

Support Training: Our support staff is trained on each piece of managed software that we offer. This means that if a customer calls in for help using, configuring, or troubleshooting their software, our support team is already familiar with it, resulting in faster, more accurate support resolutions.

Customer Portal Integration: When applicable, we want to extend features of our software and services into our Customer Portal. For FileCatalyst, we were able to use the Server API to extend user management functionality into our Customer Portal. This portal module will become available in the coming weeks and will allow customers to manage FileCatalyst users on all of their servers from one convenient location. A server-status widget will also test connectivity to any FileCatalyst server that a customer has and alert him to any problems reaching that server.

Why at Hosting.com?

In addition to all of the benefits I’ve enumerated already, there’s a giant advantage in deploying your FileCatalyst server at Hosting.com.  Unlimi-tech has arranged a licensing option with us that allows customers to easily try out the server or use if for a short period of time without having to invest in the full cost of the license. FileCatalyst servers deployed at Hosting.com take advantage of a tiered monthly license cost as low as $60/mo.

For more information about FileCatalyst or to order a FileCatalyst cloud server, please visit: http://www.hosting.com/filecatalyst

From: Matt Ferrari, Director of Platform Engineering

We recently participated in a program with Microsoft, one of our key partners, which dove a little deeper into the enhancements that Windows Server 2008 R2 brings both to us internally as well as to our customer base.  At the start of the program the thought was we would simply test the stability of R2 in both our dedicated and cloud enterprise environments, update our automated provisioning services, and begin the offering to our customers.  After all, we’ve been going through revisions of our partners managed operating systems, applications, and services for years… so what could be different, right?  Just a few of the technical features that we are seeing our customers leverage and would like to expand on include:

- IIS 7.5.  I’ve been on quite a few client conference calls recently that are focused on reducing the amount of effort it takes to troubleshoot down to the application level.  Perhaps the client is not leveraging some of the 3rd party application monitoring tools available for their platform out on the market.  IIS 7.5 has a new Configuration Logging feature that enables auditing of change to application configuration which goes all the way down to the application pool level.  Adding onto this is new failed request tracking for FastCGI, which I was seeing previously as a large client request for those using PHP for Windows in hybrid coding environments.  What I have seen is that clients are now starting to using the more robust logging functionality as a means to track not only issues but change management on their servers themselves.

- R2 supports larger workloads on individuals servers.  What we have seen between R2 and the new Intel Nehalem processor architecture is a significant leap in terms of performance.  Thanks to this we are seeing clients that are able to require less servers for the same workload, whether it be the density of virtual machines within their architecture or dedicated servers across the environment.  As a matter of fact, the number of logical processors support with R2 now scales to 256.

- Reliability has always been a sticking point with any technical system administrator in the industry.  One of the ways Microsoft continues to improve their platform for service providers is by adding new Windows Hardware Error Architecture (WHEA), which was enhanced to support Machine Check Architecture (MCA) recovery.  This allows the operating system to recover from items such as ECC errors in memory without interrupting applications such as IIS.  In addition to this, for fault tolerant hardware (servers that may have extra power supplies or RAM), R2 now supports fault tolerant memory synchronization.  This feature accounts for the scenario that if a primary component fails, the secondary one assumes control without loss of application services (and can notify the system administrator).

- There is numerous other features as well, such as new modules for PHP, an updated version of Powershell and better power management in the data center.  We have been offering R2 for quite some time at Hosting.com, but if you haven’t taken a look yet, now may be the time.