Tata has more than 300 points of presence worldwide, enabling the company to offer what it calls the "first truly global CDN service on a state of the art, single ASN global IP network throughout Europe, Asia, North America and India."
 
The offering is a direct result of the partnership deal that Tata and BitGravity signed back in March where Tata invested $11.5 million in convertible debt in BitGravity, confirming Tata's commitment to develop and offer technology solutions to its customers.

In turn, BitGravity has named Tata Communications' chief technology officer John Hayduk to its board of directors.
 
"The launch of Tata Communications' CDN service is a major milestone in our strategic roadmap to offer unparalleled managed services globally," says Vinod Kumar, chief operating officer at Tata Communications. "We chose to work with BitGravity because it has the best architecture and technology to deliver high quality content and video. Together, Tata Communications and BitGravity's capabilities are a formidable force to deliver high quality content and video."
 
The BitGravity-powered Tata CDN service delivers high performance and reliability while providing immediate access to content, including fluid high-definition video, to end users without any degradation in its delivery from one geographical location to the other.

The service offers a range of other features, including fast forwarding, cache clearing, resolution switching and rate throttling, enabling customers to build a robust application into a Flash Player.

Tata's CDN offerings include Tata Communications CDN, a CDN designed for a wide range of applications, Tata Communications CDN Plus and CDN Secure, which add value designed for the distribution and protection of media assets, and Tata Communications LiveBroadcast, a high quality, flash-based streaming service for broadcasters of live events.

In June, LeaseWeb purchased 10 Gigabits of additional port capacity from Tata Telecommunications and Global Crossing.

In other CDN news, online service provider Internap Network Services announced on Friday its CDN and professional services are delivering customized streaming media services for the Million Dollar Round Table.

As a member of the Tata Group, Tata Communications provides advanced solutions and domain offerings to deliver managed solutions to multi-national and Indian enterprises, service providers and Indian consumers.

According to Microsoft, its System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, Application Virtualization 4.5 and Hyper-V Server 2008 software will be available for download within 30 days of the announcement Monday.

The Canadian leg of Microsoft's global launch was held in Toronto at non-profit, science and technology innovation center MaRS (marsdd.com), where several Canadian IT professionals, analysts and journalists met for a roundtable presentation and discussion.

Microsoft Canada chief security advisor Bruce Cowper led the discussion and introduction of Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008, the latest hypervisor-based server virtualization product evolving from ESXi. System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 will also be released in the coming weeks to manage Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 or VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3.

According to Cowper, Microsoft has incorporated support for VMware (vmware.com) products because they acknowledge that many companies have already invested in virtualization platforms other than its own. Understanding its role as an eager, but late entry into the virtualization sector, Microsoft has also announced plans to provide Citrix support within the month.

IDC Canadian security and software research senior analyst Kevin Restivo said companies of all sizes are finding advantages to virtualization, with half of companies doing so because of mission-critical applications, although reasons for implementation are becoming more diverse. However, more than one third of IT managers are still not familiar with the technology.

Representing the Canadian IT community as a Canadian Information Processing Society (cips.ca) national board member, Adam Cole said virtualization is something IT professionals need to be aware of now. Cole, who is also director of specialty technology solutions at McKesson Canada said, "[Virtualization is] a concept that has been around for a long time and will have a lot of impact for CIPS members."

The flexibility of virtualization was a theme of discussion, but also that deployment takes great skill and planning. As CMS Consulting (cms.ca) president Brian Bourne said, "It's not plug and play ? there are perils and pitfalls," noting that the proliferation of virtual machines could easily become a mess.

While it may not work for everyone, the trend for adoption, according to Restivo, is going strong. "It's a game-changing technology," said Restivo, who said businesses are going to adopt virtualization to cut support and administration costs.  According to IDC statistics, 99 percent of businesses in Canada are small and medium-sized, making enterprise solutions less relevant for the Canadian market. Cowper said smaller businesses looking for managed hosting solutions will benefit from virtualized hosting because they will get services that were previously only enterprise corporations could afford.

The Gearworx Dual Platform shared plans allow users to hosts websites on Linux and Windows hosts while managing all websites from a single management interface.

"We wanted to offer our customers something that most of our competitors won't offer without forcing customers to become a reseller or pay $50+ per month. A simple way of hosting Linux and Windows accounts through a single management interface," said William Gregorian, CEO for Gearworx.

All plans provide PHP5, MS SQL 2005, mySQL 5, Perl, ASP, and ASP.NET (1.1, 2.0 and 3.5) support, along with other standard features already provided in Plesk. Gearworx also offers Anti-Spam and Anti-Virus protection for all email accounts hosted on its servers using MailFoundry's Anti-spam appliances. All of this, backed by Gearworx 60-day money back guarantee makes it an ideal and sensible choice for a web hosting provider.

"We went on a hiatus to do our homework and find out what our customers really wanted" said Daniel Gomez, Operations manager for Gearworx. "Plesk Expand provides a unified platform to centrally manage web hosting accounts, to that end, our customers are also able to take advantage of Plesk Expand by adding their own VPS server and create their own web hosting services " he continued to add.

According to the Gearworx, their dual platform plans combine multiple Plesk servers into an integrated hosting platform, giving customers the ability to centrally manage Linux and Windows Plesk servers. Features include the ability to deploy websites within minutes, create backups to a central backup storage, switch accounts to another hosting plan, and create new plans and more, login to hosted domains.

A service that is used to provide a huge amount of electrical equipment that can be either computers or other communication equipment is known as a data center. It is an association that is solely maintained for the purpose of managing or organizing data that is essentially required to be used for daily operations. For example, the data center of a bank would store all detailed information of its customers. All companies have a data center of their own large scale companies may even multiple data centers. For the large cities, the data centers are provided with their own individual data location to prevent theft of data and to maintain security of the important data contained.

The organizations providing the data center service handle the data contained by them with utmost security as it is the lifeline of the company. Therefore the data center organization maintains high level or integrity and provides optimum functionality of the computer environment that it hosts for. This is usually shown by the general layout of the data center.

The data center can cover the area of a room to an entire building depending upon its size. Most of the data are stored in for of racks with corridors provided between them for easy access. The servers that are available vary from 1u servers to huge silos that occupy various tiles stacked upon the floor. Some of the mainframe computers and storage devices are often as big as the racks and are placed next to them.
The communications are mostly based on the ip protocol service in most data centers. They are equipped with routers and switches which comprise of the critical components that act as transporters of traffic to the outside world from the servers. Using two or more upstream service providers provide redundancy to the available internet connection.
Some of the datacenters run the basic internet and intranet services like email servers, proxy servers, DNS servers etc.

As mentioned earlier, the data that is available in the centers are treated with utmost security. Many network security elements are employed to keep the data safe. Such as firewalls, VpN gateway, Intrusion detection systems to detect malicious activities etc. are incorporated. Common monitoring systems and other such applications are also available. For added security for emergency situations such as failure of communication inside the data center, offsite monitoring systems are also provided.

It is quite commonplace to observe that in many kinds of markets a particular brand tries to secure the majority of consumers. Such a habit is termed as monopoly. When it comes to the operating systems for personal computers Microsoft is a corporation that is accused of this practice. With its hugely popular Windows family of operating systems Microsoft enjoys a large part of domestic and corporate customer base. However, in recent times certain small contenders have raised their head to give it some serious competition. In the sphere of web servers, the most prevalent operating system is Microsoft Windows 2000, which is touted by the company as a true server class OS. It holds a large share of the server operating systems. But in recent times Linux has risen to a challenging position and it is being considered by many as the proverbial Goliath to counter Microsoft’s monopoly.

Many people believe that Microsoft is the supreme as far as computer system is concerned. However there are serious challenges to the issue now with other hosting services as Linux stepping in. It cannot be denied that even today most people prefer Microsoft to any thing else. However as per the current trend the hosting services as Linux too are gaining immense popularity. What makes this hosting service popular? How does these two systems compare? In the article below we discuss the pros and cons.

Using a Windows OS does not require you to opt for Windows web hosting. Linux is a suitable contender. If you have the technical know how of using your web publishing application and FTP, you can resort to the web host you like. It actually depends on the purpose you want your site to serve. As a matter of fact interactive websites use languages like PHP, Perl or ASP.

For web hosting purposes Linux is said to have more benefits than Windows. It is relatively more steady, secured and efficient and meets the requirements of challenging environments of Web servers. Only if you use Microsoft oriented languages you should resort to Windows. For mainly informative sites Linux is the best choice. But when it comes to having interactive chat sites or databases in your site Windows 2000 is a better choice.

A web address developed for a Linux based server can easily be moved to a Windows based server. The opposite is not so easy. Linux traditionally gives a stable and rock solid foundation to your site. A web site based on Linux hosting usually has superior up-time than its windows counterpart. The Linux, as everyone knows, comes for free or occasionally at a meager distribution rate. This has led to its popularity among cash-stripped users. It bundles many applications with the OS that comes in handy in work and are as reliable as the OS. A Linux based web hosting is more suitable for upgrading and modifying an existing web site since it offers more scalability than Windows

Before hosting a web site on a web server so that millions around the world can view your site, a lot of efforts is made to provide the site with a good content. Experts are hired to provide a good and meaningful content to a site. A meaningful content attracts a user and provides him the necessary information. Millions of dollars are spent so as to promote a site. To continuously get traffic to a site, various techniques are practiced.

Advertisements are posted on the websites, and the sites earn a large amount of money from these advertisements. Companies today pay quite a sum of money to increase the ranking of their site. Apart from advertisements and promotions, a quality web hosting server is a necessity. Web hosting is a technique that facilitates the servers to host the site.

There are a number of companies that provide web hosting facility to users. Some of them provide the service for free while others charge you. However, it is advisable that you select a paid web hosting service as you will be provided with customer service and uptime guarantee, which is not the case with service providers that provide the facility for free. Also, if a person requires saving a large number of images and graphics, a free service will not serve the purpose. There are various kinds of web hosting, they are,

• Reseller hosting

• E-mail hosting

• Clustered hosting

• Free hosting

• File hosting

• Game server hosting

• Shared hosting

• Video hosting

• Blog hosting

• Image hosting

• Wiki farms

• Guild hosting

• DNS hosting

Since there are several web hosting companies available, you should select the best web hosting service provider. Narrow down the number of service providers as per your need and budget. The most important point to be kept in mind is not to subscribe for the feature that you may not use. It is advisable that you read blogs and web hosting reviews on the Internet. It will give you a true picture of the quality of the services provided by web hosts service providers.
The sites give rankings to a number of service providers on the basis of the feedbacks provided by the users.

Other factors that must be considered while subscribing to a web service provider are,

• reputation

• server space

• control panel

• bandwidth

• script access

• support

The service providers should be compared on the basis of their customer service support staff, traffic, price and space. The additional features differ from one provider to another. It is recommended that you select the company that suits your needs instead of selecting a top web hosting service provider that may or may not be affordable.
There is a very high possibility that you may face problems in the web hosting process. In such a case, only a company that provides 24 hour customer service will be useful. Server space and bandwidth should be considered as per your usage. It is important to choose a good quality web hosting service provider as it increases effectiveness of your organization.

There are a host of opportunities available to anyone interested in having an online business and the first thing they should do is to consider web hosting and e-commerce for their websites. If you are not sure what e-commerce really means, well it is nothing but the act of making sales as well as purchases of goods through the medium of the internet. Thus, if this is what you need to do then you need to check out e-commerce web hosting which will be sure to throw up many different plans that will provide you with good support as far as your online business needs are concerned.

After you have built up your website you will need to make it run so that it brings in increased profits for you and the basic thing you will need is to organize yourself for e-commerce web hosting. This is especially important because the world of the Internet is increasingly becoming faster paced and there are all types of companies engaged in selling and buying online including small as well as large companies. Also, these companies need a lot of flexibility in their operations, and need to be secure and also appreciate great performance as well as reliability from their website and this is a very good reason why the need for e-commerce web hosting has greatly increased in recent times.

Using ecommerce web hosting, you can get the very latest in technology and make it suit the style of your company and it is also helpful in providing solutions for the website as far as its functioning and scale are concerned. The benefits to using ecommerce web hosting are felt by both the buyer and also the seller when they conduct business online and you can find many suitable e-commerce web hosting services. In fact, such services are of great interest to a wide range of people including web developers and most certainly to those who are engaged in business and who need to hone in the latest in commerce that is conducted electronically and this is most noticeable in the fields of finance and also retail selling.
What’s more, most of the websites hosting packages that are available today are pretty affordable and they also come with their fair share of web tools that help considerably in getting the most out of your website. And, with E-Commerce web hosting the online business will certainly flourish much more and you can use it for having wide-ranging catalogues that are stored online and which include all the goods and products that you are interested in selling and which can be searched or are just used for processing credit card sales and purchases that occur in real-time. That is where ecommerce web hosting will prove its worth to online business community. Ecommerce web hosting is thus considered as one of the top web hosting methods and with this new method of web hosting you can grow your online business and prosper and achieve all that you want to as far as online business transactions are concerned.

We all know that web hosting is the basis of all web sites. It helps us attract visitors, it displays what we are desperately trying to get across, and it allows us to survive in the cut throat internet world. While these are all important qualities that come with web hosting, there are many other opportunities. Dying to make extra cash? Surprisingly, web hosting can actually help with your bills. In a few simple steps, you will be on your way to a richer lifestyle.

Fortunately, there is a new trend in the web industry. Reseller Hosting, which consists of purchasing a web hosting package and reselling it for a larger price, has been making webmasters just a few cents richer. Although this sounds like a daunting task, it actually only requires a large amount of space. Once the webmaster acquires such a large server and bandwidth, he/she is able to divide it up among other people. As long as they are willing to pay a monthly fee, you will never get screwed over.

Regardless of how much money you want to make, purchasing this re-seller hosting does not cost much. For an average of $30/month, you can purchase enough space to make a profit. While all of these websites will be on a shared server, the majority of webmasters do not mind this downside. After all, not everyone can shell out thousands a month just to acquire their own dedicated server. Once you have found a few loyal customers who will not create any illegal material, you will be generating a profit every single month out of the year. Fortunately, until you stop your hosting, you will never be out of a job.

In order to sell this type of hosting, you absolutely need to network. Regrettably, there are many webmasters trying to follow the trend. For this reason alone, you should look in unpopulated areas. Try and find a website or forum that has not yet been tackled by other masses of website owners. For instance, find websites similar to your own. If you do not have one, look on webmaster-related forums such as Digital Point or Webmaster-Talk. These areas are populated with thousands of interested clients, who will be more than happy to jump on the bandwagon, if you do have a great deal.

Still desperately trying to find other ways to market? Many website owners advertise through blogs and buy text link ads. As a result, people will be more apt to find what you are offering. If this doesn't work, you could even start marketing in a local newspaper or a newsletter that goes out to professional companies who are always looking for alternatives. Nevertheless, there are plenty of consumers out there. You just need to be creative and put in the effort, in order to get anywhere.

For years web hosting has been flooding the market. However, it has just recently become a form of revenue for webmasters who just don't own their own web hosting company. It is a wonderful alternative to an additional part time job, especially if this is what you love to do. Networking with others, controlling a server, while working on your website certainly sounds like the perfect occupation.

Rackspace Hosting, a web hosting company, today announced the opening of its Asian headquarters and data center in Hong Kong. The company states that its expansion into Asia marks its continued investment in customer service and exhibits its confidence in the business opportunity that Asia represents.

The company claims that it selected Hong Kong due to its reputation within the global business economy, its IT infrastructure, multiple telecommunication providers and talent pool. Rackspace also solicited feedback from its current customer base in the Asian Pacific region and the majority of those respondents confirmed their preference for doing business in Hong Kong. The new data center will initially have approximately 9,500 gross square feet and will be expandable to about 18,000 gross square feet. The operation in Hong Kong will offer the full range of Rackspace service offerings including managed hosting, cloud hosting, virtualization, security and email services, storage and backup and professional services.  The sales and support will be handled on a global basis with teams located in Hong Kong, the US and UK.

"As our customers expand to other regions, they want a partner that will grow with them, and our expansion into Asia is an important step towards meeting our goal of becoming one of the world's great service companies," said Lanham Napier, president and CEO, Rackspace Hosting. "Hong Kong has a strong local economy and growing customer demand for hosting, especially in the financial services area, so we look forward to a successful expansion in the Hong Kong market."

"Asia represents a significant growth opportunity for Rackspace. The foundation of our success is hiring new "Rackers" in Hong Kong to join our unique work environment and bring a fresh perspective of service to our award-winning Fanatical Support," says Jim Fagan, managing director, Rackspace Hosting Asia.

Free web hosting service: is free, (sometimes) advertisement-supported web hosting, and is often limited when compared to paid hosting.

Shared web hosting service: one's Web site is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few to hundreds or thousands. Typically, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. A shared website may be hosted with a reseller.

Reseller web hosting: allows clients to become web hosts themselves. Resellers could function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated with as a provider. Resellers' accounts may vary
tremendously in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server.

Virtual Dedicated Server: dividing a server into virtual servers, where each user feels like they're on their own dedicated server, but they're actually sharing a server with many other users. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. This is also known as a virtual private server or VPS.

Dedicated hosting service: the user gets his or her own Web server and gains full control over it (root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user typically does not own the server. Another type of Dedicated hosting is Self-Managed or Unmanaged. This is usually the least expensive for Dedicated plans. The user has full administrative access to the box, which means the client is responsible for the security and maintenance of his own dedicated box.

Managed hosting service: the user gets his or her own Web server but is not allowed full control over it (root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they are allowed to manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The user is disallowed full control so that the provider can guarantee quality of service by not allowing the user to modify the server or potentially create configuration problems. The user typically does not own the server. The server is leased to the client.

Colocation web hosting service: similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the user owns the colo server; the hosting company provides physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the server. This is the most powerful and expensive type of the web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no support directly for their client's machine, providing only the electrical, Internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colo, the client would have his own administrator visit the data center on site to do any hardware upgrades or changes.

Clustered hosting: having multiple servers hosting the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered Servers are a perfect solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable web hosting solution.

Grid hosting : this form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.

Home server: usually a single machine placed in a private residence can be used to host one or more web sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly old PC's.