Greatresponder.com – 2010-08-06 – XPC Web Hosting is pleased to announce that we have launched a green enterprise hosting initiative. Over the past month we have successfully moved our entire hosting operation into the RackForce Cloud hosting system located in the GigaCenter green data center in Kelowna, British Columbia.

“As a business grade web hosting company in Vancouver we are proud that our operations are now located in the RackForce GigaCenter and running off their enterprise cloud solution.” says Shone Anstey VP operations for XPC Web Hosting. “In addition our clients have expressed their approval and excitement to have their websites at such an eco friendly environment.”

“XPC Web Hosting has been with RackForce for almost 2 years now. They are a fast growing web hosting company and recently needed to add more powerful infrastructure to meet their growing needs.” Brian Fry, RackForce Vice President – Sales and Marketing “By migrating their operations to the RackForce enterprise cloud infrastructure they have positioned themselves for rapid growth.”

Datacenters are one of the largest consumers of electrical energy in North America and thus one of the largest contributors of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Ensuring that they are as environmentally responsible as possible has become critical due to both the rising cost of energy and the onset of global climate change. There are a lot of factors that contribute to a green datacenter, among those power source and power consumption are the two biggest.

Datacenters in many areas are powered by coal-fired or natural gas electrical generation plants. These datacenters emit tremendous amounts of CO2 as a bi-product of their power consumption.

Tapping into British Columbia’s abundant supply of clean hydroelectric power, the RackForce GigaCenter has a carbon footprint which is 50 times smaller than the average coal-powered North American datacenter.

In addition by locating the data center in the Okanagan’s temperate climate, it uses new technology to take advantage of cool outside temperatures to regulate the temperature inside the data center. In addition, design choices like cold aisle containment and modular construction seriously reduce power use. Finally, technologies like virtualization, unified fabric network, and cloud computing improve IT efficiency.

About XPC Web Hosting:
XPC Web Hosting is located in Vancouver Canada, and specializes in business and ecommerce hosting with expertise in Magento shopping carts and WordPress websites. We have been in the hosting industry since 2004.

Source: PRweb

Greatresponder.com – 2010-07-29 – Managing open source hypervisors, including Xen and KVM, became a lot easier today with the release of ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise edition from Convirture Corp.

The open source version of ConVirt has been available for more than three years and is broadly deployed and well-tested in real-world data centers — having been downloaded more than 30,000 times. In fact, ConVirt1.x is included in most major Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Open SUSE, Debian and others.

ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise extends ConVirt Open Source with the advanced automation and scalability features necessary for running large-scale or mission-critical virtualized environments. By delivering high availability, backup and recovery, storage and network automation, and enterprise-grade security, ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise enables IT managers to meet and exceed service levels while using infrastructure in the most efficient way.

ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise is also the go-to tool for enterprises ready to move beyond virtualized infrastructure management towards a hosted or private cloud model. With an extensive cloud management feature set, which includes multi-tenant security, delegated control, scheduled provisioning, resource limiting, and many more, ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise enables IT organizations to offer infrastructure-as-a-service, while ensuring full isolation and compliance with corporate policies.

“We’ve implemented a variety of virtualization platforms over the years and managing them all – especially the open source hypervisors – has always been the single biggest pain point,” said Steven Scoleri, Principal Architect at GSI Commerce, a leading provider of e-commerce and interactive marketing services. “Our beta test of ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise has gone very well and we think it just may be the game-changer we’ve been looking for. We no longer need experts on hand at all times to complete simple virtualization tasks. We look forward to further exploring ConVirt’s capabilities and using it to manage our entire open source-based virtual data center.”

“Until now, any organization that wanted a complete solution for managing and automating a virtual data center was locked into expensive and proprietary solutions like VMware vCenter,”,” said Arsalan Farooq, CEO of Convirture. “That changes today as ConVirt 2.0′s advanced automation, private cloud management, enterprise scalability and datacenter integration features now meet or exceed what’s available from proprietary platform vendors. With ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise, organizations considering Xen or KVM as open source alternatives to commercial virtualization platforms are no longer forced to compromise on manageability. ”

About ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise

ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise supports all of the features available with the ConVirt 2.0 Open Source product including:

• Server pool-based management
• Templates-based provisioning
• Monitoring and configuration management
• Comprehensive virtual machine administration
• Highly scalable, 3-tier, standards-based architecture

In addition, ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise delivers scalability, automation, and private cloud management features that were previously available only for proprietary virtualization platforms, including:

• High availability: ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise ensures that mission-critical applications are always up and running by delivering a comprehensive high availability feature set, including virtual and physical machine failover;
• Backup and recovery: A full backup and recovery feature set ensures successful recovery from planned and unplanned outages. Scheduled and on-demand backups are supported. Restore modes can be for the most recent state or any earlier backup. Both virtual machine state and storage are captured, so virtual machines are brought up in a consistent state.
• Private Cloud Management: A data center that has been virtualized can be turned into a private, infrastructure-as-a-service cloud in a scalable and secure way, with support for full multi-tenant security, delegated control, scheduled provisioning, resource limiting and the ability to create virtual appliances that comply with corporate standards and publish them effortlessly to cloud users.
• Storage and network automation with ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise significantly streamlines the error-prone and time-consuming tasks of configuring network and storage in a virtualized environment. Storage configuration standardizes storage across a server pool by automating configuration of all storage types, including NFS, iSCSi, AOE, Fiber Channel and LVM. Network integration provides a centralized interface for managing virtual networks.
• Enterprise Integration: ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise provides a full suite of integration capabilities, including an open repository, command line interface, and programmatic APIs.

Pricing and Availability

ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise is available immediately direct from Convirture. Pricing starts at $1,495 per host for up to 10 hosts, with volume pricing available for larger environments. A “per virtual machine” pricing package is also available for ISP’s and hosting providers. More information is available at http://www.convirture.com/contact.html

About Convirture

Convirture was founded in 2006 to help organizations effectively manage open source virtualization platforms. More information is available at www.convirture.com.

VEXXHOST Web Hosting announced a 25% discount for its entire VPS web hosting plans. All the virtual servers are using Xen virtualization technology backed up with full hardware and network redundancy with an affordable prices staring from $24.72/month.

All the physical servers that host these virtual servers are located in their premium Data center located in the heart of Montreal downtown, Canada connected to VEXXHOST premium redundant network which is connected to the Internet by four global Internet providers for perfect redundancy also they are using the best network hardware possible such as Cisco routers and switched for 100% network availability.

The physical servers that host the VPS’s also use hardware RAID 10 for data performance and redundancy. Quad core Xeon processors and a minimum of 16 GB RAM.

All VPS physical servers are equipped with dual power supply, datacenter has a redundant electric power supply systems using UPS’s, electric power generators and the national power grid which make the availability of power supply approach to 100%.

The benefit of using Xen VPS web hosting is that all clients are having their own dedicated RAM, disk space & bandwidth. Also Xen VPS web hosting is different than any other method of virtualization as it gives customers complete access with full resources, also Xen VPS isolate every individual VPS and has its own kernel which protect VPS’s from crashes if one of the VPS’s in the same server  crashes .