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Engineering Blog

Archive for October, 2010

Network Attached Storage Preview

Friday, October 22nd, 2010

From: Daniel Lynn, Platform Engineer

Hosting.com’s Upcoming Network Attached Storage Offering (Or IP Storage)

In the coming months, Hosting.com will be releasing its new IP Storage offering. We’ve redesigned the offering from the ground up to improve 4 key areas:  availability, scalability, accessibility, and performance.

Availability

We have built out our  IP Storage infrastructure to ensure that every component of the system is redundant, leaving no single point of failure from your server to the disks where your data  resides.  At Hosting.com, we have the understanding that hardware and software will inevitably fail and Hosting.com guarantees high availability with our solution; there is no single point of failure.

Scalability

Hosting.com has changed the platform our IP Storage runs on to a more hardware-agnostic system. What this means for scalability is that we can upgrade the components of the system in zero-downtime maintenance windows to account for heavier load  as the need presents itself. We can transparently switch to new, larger servers for the IP Storage nodes as the environment grows. Being able to keep ahead of demand with zero-downtime maintenance means our customers will never need to experience trouble due to resource constraints.  Hosting.com is the innovator of the future of IP-based storage.

Our scalability is also increased substantially by the capabilities of the file system: ZFS. To illustrate, imagine if the surface of the Earth were covered with 1 TB drives.  The Zettabyte File System (ZFS) could theoretically accommodate 2,363,284,800 (the surface area of the earth in Inches) TBs of data. One single ZFS file system can grow to 16,777,216 terabytes (16.7 Exabytes) and  ZFS can support over 264 file systems.  Might as well throw in Jupiter and Saturn and we might be pushing ZFS’ capacity limitations.

Accessibility

Our new IP Storage offering can be provisioned and attached to servers quickly through our customer portal. Shares in our IP Storage can be created, edited, and deleted at the click of a button. Additionally, upcoming automation in networking will allow us to connect a share to most customer servers immediately without manual intervention.

Performance

In addition to our robust, scalable IP Storage, our solution leverages varying drive levels including solid-state drives to deliver the best read and write performance possible to our customers.  Our solution uses the most forward-thinking, yet stable technologies: from the file system, solid state drives, 6 Gb/s SAS controllers and massive parallelism, you can be assured performance will never be an issue.

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Hosting.com at InterOP NYC: A Gradual Migration to the Cloud

Tuesday, October 12th, 2010

From: Adam C. Greenfield, Platform Product Manager

During the last webinar I presented a comment was made that bugged me a little bit. The comment was that the presentation seemed to much like a sales pitch. Delivering the sales message is important, but the reason that I enjoy communicating directly with other organizations (our customers, potential customers or even people that won’t ever be Hosting.com customers) is that I want to ensure the great work being done in our engineering organization gets communicated directly to our customers and benefits from direct customer feedback.

When this engineering blog was little more than an idea one night after work Matt and I agreed to do it original on the premise that we would be able to speak directly, without direct oversight by sales or marketing. We value that direct channel to the world and it is the reason this was worth spending our time writing. Since I’ve assumed a new role in the organization I haven’t had as much time as I might like to post here Matt, Trent, Derek, Aaron and other have kept the initial idea of very direct communication alive in my absence.

Next week, at Interop NYC on Wednesday, October 20, 2010, 2:20 PM-2:40 PM, I will be presenting an all new material entitled “Look Before You Leap: A Gradual Migration to the Cloud”. I would invite everyone in the area to join me for the talk and provide direct feedback. I’ll also work with our internal Marketing/Communications team to get a webinar with my new material in the coming weeks. Keeping with the spirit of improving on the feedback I received this material will focus on a way to leverage cutting edge Cloud technology options to improve your organization’s IT infrastructure in a realistic path (rather than taking the plunge all at once).
Please know that while we might not respond to every individual piece of feedback, it is greatly appreciated – and taking to heart. We want to hear from you often and in depth so that we can provide the most value resources possible to the community at large.

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Patch Management Control & Visibility

Thursday, October 7th, 2010

We are increasing the functionality of our Patch Management solution with new Standard Patching.

Our existing Basic Patching provides testing of patches, notification of patch availability, and implementation of patches onto servers. This service is beneficial towards alleviating you from routine work that is crucial towards maintaining your servers’ security and stability.

The new Standard Patching service includes the features of Basic, in addition to added self-service control and visibility via the Hosting.com Customer Portal. The patch management portal widget provides you with access to past and present patches, and the ability to implement or exclude approved patches to individual servers. This is of benefit to customers who want to maintain decision making control of which patches to implement, while Hosting.com performs the necessary patch testing.

See how this new feature works by watching the Patch Management Customer Portal Demo.

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