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.

From: Matt Ferrari, Director of Platform and Storage Engineering

A few months back I had mentioned here that we had the ability for our customers to clone their Cloud Enterprise Virtual Machines on our radar. I’m happy to say that this feature is now available in our customer portal here. Here are a few example use cases that may fit your business need:

- You have five application virtual machines and you need to spin-up five more to accommodate growth. Rather than spending countless hours and incurring operational costs by having your System Administrator customize the application for each new web server, you take the following steps: login to the portal, locate the VM that you want to clone from (i.e. the master VM), evaluate the cost of the new VMs (no cost to clone), choose your quantity, and go.

- You have a business that gets seasonal spikes and uses virtual machines for high volume testing. You already have a parked VM with hosting.com to reduce your cost and you treat it that as the master VM (or image). When it comes time to spin up a ton of VMs, rather than purchase new VMs and then configure them, you choose to clone the parked VM. This saves not only time but money. Another advantage of cloning from the parked VM is that since it is ‘off’ your master VM, it is not getting cluttered with log files or profiles like a production virtual machine would.

Take a peek at the process by visiting our walk through located at our support page. I’d encourage you to watch the video to see how you can accomplish this by viewing the video below.

Order Cloud Enterprise

From: Matt Ferrari, Director of Platform and Storage Engineering

One of our valued partners recently wrote a blog entry that is a very pertinent use case for many of our current and prospective clients today. As mentioned in a previous engineering post, Hosting.com does offer a server replication service, which allows for business continuity in a managed dedicated or cloud based environment. Clients who are looking to fail over from one site to another without losing data or want to avoid a long service interruption to their customer base have embraced this technology. I’d invite you to read through the post by visiting this page and see if your cloud strategy aligns.

From: Daniel Lynn, Platform Engineer

In the near future, Hosting.com will be rolling out a new managed patching service for our managed dedicated and cloud servers. This new process offers a number of great improvements over our previous patching processes – most of them translating directly to advantages for our customers. We are cognizant that our customer’s each have their own operational process and we will continue to introduce functionality that is flexible and can be integrated into such process.

Obviously, we can’t offer better or more patches than our competition. Rather, we’ve tried to improve our patching process by offering our customer more control, more choice, and more visibility. We’ve created a module for our Customer Portal that allows our customer to see what updates will be run on their server and which updates have already been applied (see below).

As you can see, not only is the name of the update to be applied displayed, but you receive a description of that update and the date the update became available to the server.

More Control
You may also notice the 2 thumbs-up/thumbs-down buttons on the left-hand side. This is the part where we’re giving our customers more control. Before being run on a server, all updates must go through an approval process. Our Security Center of Excellence is tasked with ensuring that each update is safe to run on servers before it can be applied. However, each customer has the ability to make their own choices about their patching. A customer may expressly approve an update that they are comfortable running on their server or they may exclude an update, even if it has been approved by our staff. Additionally, these approvals and exclusions can be applied differently on each server a customer has. So, if your database server shouldn’t receive a certain update, excluding it will not prevent your web server from getting it.

More Visibility
Visibility and tracking of security updates is becoming more and more important in business. Our portal will help with this too. In addition to showing what updates will be run in the next patching cycle, a customer can also see updates awaiting approval, updates that have been excluded by our security team as unsafe, and a historic view of all updates on the server.

Take a peek at how the functionality will look by visiting here

From: Wayne Shaw, Platform Engineer

Last week we proudly announced the launch of our Cloud Private product. Simply, it is as a dedicated pool of resources (CPU, memory, storage, and network) for running your applications in a Cloud Environment. All of the same enterprise class infrastructure components that exist in our multi-tenant Cloud Enterprise offering are there in Cloud Private, except in a dedicated, managed environment.

Proven redundancies are built throughout the infrastructure, including redundant network paths to our core networks, HA firewalls, redundant network uplinks on each cloud node, HA cloud server nodes, and multipath fibre channel connections to SAN storage.

100% of the resources are dedicated and guaranteed to be there when you need them at all times, from CPU cycles to storage I/O. From a performance standpoint, the possibility your applications and VMs ever being in contention for resources with other tenants in the Cloud is eliminated. Therefore you don’t have to worry your peak traffic periods conflicting with high traffic periods of other tenants in the Cloud.

As Adam mentioned in the previous blog post, all of the great Cloud related portal enhancements his team has been working on have now been extended to Cloud Private environments. A few examples are:

- current and historical resource usage of your VMs
- self service rapid virtual machine deployments from our product catalog
- virtual machine snapshot management
- reconfiguration of virtual machine resources
- virtual machine power state management

You can now leverage all of these self service Cloud management portal features in a dedicated, Cloud Private environment. In addition to those features, you can monitor the consumption of resources from your dedicated resource pool so that you’ll have visibility and awareness of when it’s time to add or remove resources from your Cloud Private environment.

Scaling resources in Cloud Private offering is extremely flexible and typically does not require any service interruption. Additional CPU, memory, network, or storage resources can be added to your dedicated pool of resources as needed without having to take any production applications offline for maintenance. This offering can be geographically dispersed across multiple sites if desired and is fully compatible in a hybrid environment, such as the addition physical database servers or co-located purpose built hardware devices.

All components of the infrastructure, including the virtual machine OS and software, are fully supported in a managed offering. If at any time assistance is needed with managing any piece of this infrastructure, our support staff if there to help.

For more information about Cloud Private offering, please visit: http://hosting.com/cloudhosting/private/

From: Matt Ferrari, Director of Platform Engineering

I was recently asked to share a summary on the Microsoft Hosting blog of my experience at this year’s Microsoft Hosting Summit. You can read about my thoughts by visiting this page.

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