Multi-Region Performance and Reliability

During December, theCloud will complete a major hardware upgrade to its Auckland site. The outcome will be a significant increase in overall capacity and a mirroring of the Hamilton technology platform. The immediate benefits for customers comes from the inter-site replication of data, theCloud now has two HP 3PAR Storage Networks (Auckland and Hamilton) with industry leading replication ‘smarts’ keeping specific sets of data copied between the sites.

A key objective for theCloud is to operate a standard technology platform in each of the five main centers in New Zealand. With Hamilton and now Auckland taken care of, the focus will shift to Wellington and the first stages of theCloud Wellington are expected to come online in February 2012. The standard build is designed to scale almost infinitely without disruption.

Keeping the technology platforms common ensures portability of services, and more importantly it keeps the business processes and management policies common. This uniformity saves time and money, and makes it easier to maintain the highest possible level of service for customers.

High speed fibre optic connectivity from network partner FX Networks gives theCloud the backbone I needs to deliver these solutions and give customers the ability to connect into theCloud at speeds up to 10 Gigabit per second.

Start benefiting from Infrastructure in theCloud and register today at www.thecloud.net.nz

Category: Cloud Services, Computing Cluster, Hosting Industry, Technology  |  Comment

Education finds convenience in theCloud

With over 62,000 students in more than 800 schools being connected by the middle of 2012, the benefits of the Rural Broadband Initiative (RBI) and Broadband Internet is a hot topic right now. But what does this mean in reality and what opportunities does it present?

For Waikato-based institute of technology the journey to being better connected is under way and its relationship with theCloud is set to drive real innovation for the education sector. In November last year Wintec embarked on a multi-year strategy to reinvent its IT capabilities. A key to this journey is realising the potential of Cloud based services.

Wintec was already in a good position to take advantage of these opportunities by being well connected to several high-speed fibre networks. This enabled the tertiary education provider to transition from in-house server infrastructure to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) from theCloud, whilst maintaining network performance and reliability.

For an established organisation, moving services into a Cloud environment might have seemed risky.

For Wintec the stability and flexibility that Cloud Service offered has resulted in a seamless transition for them. This was combined with benefits such as bringing on new and innovative services for its students quickly as well as affordably. An example of this was the launch of a new platform for colloboration leveraging Microsoft Sharepoint. Infrastructure as a Service enabled the launch of the platform in record time and with the confidence of knowing growing or shrinking the platform was a keystroke away. This fits Wintec’s strategy to be a leader in technology in the education sector.

Servers deployed on theCloud are always isolated in organisational private networks, unique to each customer. This private network configuration creates an opportunity for customers to extend their own local private networks to theCloud over secure point-to-point fibre connections. The end result is that servers deployed on theCloud appear on the local network of the customer as if the servers were deployed in-house. This further reduces any barriers to ‘going cloud’ and has allowed customers like Wintec to transition to theCloud with minimal changes to existing infrastructure.

So if there is any concern about a change in user experience when moving to theCloud, rest assured that the adoption of ultrafast broadband, or other such high-speed connectivity, will help break down these barriers.

Imagine a world with infinite data storage and computing capacity, combined with ease of use and an ever growing catalogue of relevant services – this is theCloud, get on it today!

Category: Cloud Services, Education, High-Speed Internet, Hosting Industry, Technology  |  Comment

What would faster internet access mean to your business?

We are hearing a lot about the Ultra-Fast Broadband work that is going on around the country, and there is a lot of excitement about what it will mean for the average Kiwi business. However, when the conversation digs a little deeper we find that whilst most business owners believe the new high-speed networks will benefit them, there is little or no clarity about how.

If you consider what you use the internet for today, then making it faster would be convenient but not necessarily worth spending more money on. So let’s look at what benefits the high-speed networks will enable for businesses to make it worth-while; saving money, creating efficiencies in the business that drive growth, and removing risk.

Here at theCloud we are working on next generation services that will leverage the high-speed Ultra-Fast Broadband networks; we also already have a range of services that can give your business some of those benefits today. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is when you get server hardware and enterprise class services delivered over the internet as a monthly service rather than it being a capital investment activity.

So how does Infrastructure as a Service provide the benefits that will make high-speed network access a must have?

Saving Money – Virtual Servers on theCloud are very competitively priced, taking advantage of vast economies of scale, with a much lower overall cost if you consider the total cost of ownership when operating hardware onsite in your own business.

Creating Efficiencies – Deploying Servers on theCloud, anytime night or day, takes less than five minutes and means you are up and running when you need to be rather than waiting for hardware to arrive and time spent setting it up. Operational efficiencies are also created since theCloud support staff take care of all aspects of keeping your server online, including maintenance, security and the backup and restore of data.

Removing Risk – The typical scenario for a small business is that a single server will house all files and applications for the business and in some cases the email system too.

The decision to buy a single server would have been one of scale and cost, but this presents a number of issues:

• The server will last several years so you need to spend more today to get the performance and capacity you might need later.
• If the server fails, the down-time can be measured in days as you wait to have the server fixed or replaced. If the data is lost you then become reliant on the backups that may or may not have been successful in the last week.
• In three years when the warranty expires, you will need to undertake a fairly painful and costly transition to new hardware, and repeat this each cycle.

When you deploy a server on theCloud you instantly get the following benefits that mitigate the risks described above:

• The ability to add CPU, RAM and Hard Drive space as required so you only pay for the capacity and performance you need when you need it.
• Fault-tolerant storage and processing. All of theCloud Infrastructure Platforms are built using industry leading technologies with inherent fault-tolerance. Meaning if the physical host underneath fails, theCloud will simply reboot your server on another physical host, with no loss of data.
• Even hardware on theCloud has to be replaced every three years, but because we can move your server to another host while it is still running (you won’t notice anything) we can remove and replace our hardware without any down-time for customers.

If you would like to know more about Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or any of the exciting plans theCloud has for the Ultra-Fast Broadband networks in the future, get in touch today!

www.theCloud.net.nz

Category: Cloud Services, High-Speed Internet, Hosting Industry, Technology  |  Comment

Improve IT security by adopting Cloud Services

Your businesses can improve its IT security defences by embracing cloud services. In a recent survey conducted by Symantec, the vast majority of businesses believed that cloud services could make a difference for them in terms of guarding their data. In the same survey, 87 per cent of respondents said they expected to benefit from enhanced security precautions when they embrace cloud services.

However, many companies still remain cautious about the security implications of moving to cloud services – the service delivery model which sees them hand over control of their IT to a third-party. Whilst the cautious approach is fully appreciated, companies need to be confident when approaching cloud services and related computing techniques, embrace the change and working with it.

For your organisation to be confident in the cloud, you must take measures to ensure you have the adequate visibility and control of your information and applications. This is where your choice of provider becomes critical, if you don’t get the visibility you need then you are basically putting your IT infrastructure in a “black box” and hoping for the best.

What is your “going cloud” strategy?

Tags: cloud security, Cloud Services, going cloud
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HP 3PAR Utility Storage

Recently theCloud concluded negotiations with HP (Hewlett Packard) to adopt a Utility Ready Storage model involving the implementation of HP 3PAR SAN technology at the heart of theCloud Virtual Server platforms. Widely known as the next generation of Tier 1 storage, HP 3PAR Utility Storage was built from the ground up to exceed the economic and operational requirements of even the most demanding and dynamic IT environments. HP 3PAR Utility Storage delivers 100% of the agility and efficiency demanded by theCloud and its customers. It does this through an innovative, purpose-built architecture that offers secure multi-tenancy, built-in thin processing capabilities, and unique autonomic management and storage tiering features.

HP 3PAR Utility Storage represents a new class of storage whose benefits extend well beyond the boundaries of traditional storage devices. With breakthrough hardware and software innovations, HP 3PAR Utility Storage enables theCloud to overcome the complexities, cost, and functional limitations of other storage solutions. HP 3PAR helps restore simplicity to our mission critical storage environments through a broadly scalable, highly efficient, and controllable storage platform.

The leading business challenges confronting CIOs and IT managers today include: cost-effective utilisation of IT infrastructure, responsiveness in supporting new business initiatives, and flexibility in adapting to organisational changes. These problems are compounded by tightening IT budgets, compressed timelines and skills shortages.

Cloud Services represent a fundamental technological innovation that allows IT managers to deploy infrastructure and services on-demand to address these business challenges. Here at theCloud we employ VMware ESX Servers and HP 3PAR Utility Storage to guarantee that customers can scale on-demand and that being in a shared infrastructure environment does not mean reduced performance.

The HP 3PAR technology allows theCloud to manage quality of service levels on the fly with no disruption.

And just like our VMWare vCloud clusters, the HP 3PAR solution provides for infinite scalability, something we are very excited about since we seem to constantly need more and more storage!

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theCloud teams up with international leader to bring businesses out of the technological haze

In a time of increasing business accountability and scrutiny of online safety, there is a silver lining in the hazy confusion that often accompanies cloud technology. New Zealand business theCloud, a leading on-demand cloud services provider and New Relic, the leading provider of SaaS (software as a service) application performance management tools, have partnered to provide a cost-free solution to NZ businesses.

Bringing together two progressive online services, the partnership of theCloud and New Relic has the potential to significantly reduce business overheads. Although cloud technology is still somewhat hazy for many businesses, the biggest benefit is the elimination of the costs associated with buying and maintaining hardware. theCloud’s virtual services enable businesses to scale their requirements up or down as required, such as additional or reduced RAM, CPU or storage, and to remain accountable as they do it. Permanency and the need to update hardware is now become a thing of the past, as are the traditionally associated costs.

theCloud Founder and CEO Bruce Trevarthen says, “Many companies are now investing in cloud computing and some experts say cloud based systems are the way of the future. I of course believe this, and it’s the reason theCloud was created. Our partnership with New Relic adds another dimension, introducing web application monitoring and management into the mix. This ultimately makes web technology a lot more reliable for New Zealand IT managers who want to control the cost and complexity of business critical applications and data. Many people seeking this type of system want to do it within the country if they can, and theCloud makes both aspects possible.”

Bill Lapcevic, VP of Business Development at New Relic says of the partnership, “As more and more organizations take advantage of cloud computing, it’s important that we partner with industry leaders to give customers the tools they need to be successful. The solutions this collaboration offers New Zealand businesses is the flexibility, reliability and savings that IT operations and application development teams need in today’s ever changing environment.”

Trevarthen says the shift in demand for flexible virtual options is reflected in the forward-thinking market already taking on theCloud’s concept. “We’ve been amazed by the take up since we launched, and it’s due to those businesspeople who are on the move, willing to adapt and want to rapidly increase business efficiency with the assistance of technology. We’re finding as time goes on, and now that we have New Relic on board providing additional visibility and control for clients, that group will soon be the majority of the business population, so we’re gearing up for a lot of cloudy days – in a good way of course!”

Visit blog.newrelic.com for the partnership announcement.

Visit theCloud.net.nz and register today! Find out what all the fuss is about.

Category: Application Performance, Cloud Services, Hosting Industry, Technology  |  3 Comments

The Need for Speed – Part 1

As a follow up to our discussion on security, this is the first of a series of articles detailing how we increased the speed of theCloud, so you can sort out your hosting requirements faster.

For those of you following theCloud’s progress, we recently released a new UI, heavily based on jQuery. We were very happy with the result. The UI is more intuitive, and looks much nicer than the original one. But these improvements came at a price. Our initial page loads were sitting at around 5 – 6 seconds to load the main page. So we decided there was some serious work to be done. We’ve had great results as well. An initial page load with an empty cache will now load in 0.7 – 1.4 seconds.

The first step was to fire up Yahoo!s YSlow addon and Google’s Page Speed addon for Firefox, and see what we could do to speed things up. We found one of the main issues was that we were loading so many different css and js files that it was slowing everything right down to a crawl. It was decided that the first step was for us combine there into one file. On top of this, we also needed to minify our CSS and JS, to make sure the files we were sending were as small as possible. This can make development very difficult though, if not impossible. This meant that for us to do this correctly, we needed to have the standard CSS and JS files during development, and have them combine automatically when deploying. We discovered the Yahoo! Yui Compressor. All we needed was a way to use this compressor automatically while deploying. In comes Powershell.

Powershell is very handy when working with Windows servers. As we run theCloud on IIS7 we were able to modify it with our Powershell script. Combine this with some code to export the code from SVN, modify the code as required, and then updating IIS to point to the new code base, we now have an all-in-one deployment script that leaves us with a restore point in case anything goes wrong, minifies and combines all of our CSS and JS files, and cleans up anything that doesnt need to be on the server.

First of all, we create a tag of the release in SVN based on the deployment time/date. We will also be using this tag as a version number later on.

#This will get the SVN username and password from whoever is doing the release

$credentials = Get-Credential
$SVNCredentials = $credentials.GetNetworkCredential()

$basePath = "" #this is where you put the base url of your SVN repository

$project = "" #this is the name of your project in SVN

$tag = Get-Date -Format yyyyMMddhhmm

$tagURL = "$basePath/$project/tags/$tag"

$trunkURL = "$basePath/$project/trunk"

#create the tag in SVN

svn copy $trunkURL $tagURL --username $SVNCredentials.username --password $SVNCredentials.password --message "tagging release"

#export a copy of the codebase to the local server

$baseFolder = "C:\inetpub\wwwroot\"

svn export $tagURL $newPath --username $SVNCredentials.username --password $SVNCredentials.password

$newPath = $baseFolder + $project + "_v" + $tag

Once this has completed you should have a copy of the new code base sitting in a folder in your web root. Now, we adjust the code by minifying and combining the JS and CSS files, as well as removing any test code or other files that are included in SVN, that we dont want on the live site. The YUI Compressor is available as a JAR file, which can be run directly from within the Powershell script. We keep a copy of the JAR file in the root folder of our site in SVN, so that it is pulled down with our code export.

Get-Content $newPath/js/*.js | java -jar $newPath/yuicompressor-2.4.2.jar --type js -o $newPath/js/thecloud-$tag.min.js

Get-Content $newPath/css/*.css | java -jar $newPath/yuicompressor-2.4.2.jar --type css -o $newPath/css/thecloud-$tag.min.css

Notice that we are using the version number to tag the resultant file’s name, so that no two deployments have the same name. This is important, as it will force a clients browser to download the latest version of the file each time you deploy, and can avoid caching issues. The issue now is that the references in our HTML code need to be updated so that they point at the correct filename. Again, we can do this inside our Powershell script automatically. Our initial code in our index page will look like this:

<link href="/css/thecloud.min.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

<script type="text/javascript" src="/js/thecloud.min.js"></script>

We open the file in Powershell, and use a string replacement on the content and modify it before saving the file.

$indexPage = Get-Content "$newPath/index.cfm"

$indexPage -replace "thecloud\.min", "thecloud-$tag.min" | Set-Content -Path $newPath/index.cfm

Next, we delete the unwanted files from the site. This includes our test files (we use MX Unit Tests), our YUI Compressor,  and anything else that we dont want live.

Remove-Item "$newPath\mxunit" -Recurse -Force #removes the folder and its contents

Remove-Item "$newPath\yuicompressor-2.4.2.jar" -Force #remove the file

You can also use this to remove your un-modified JS and CSS files. We achieve this by having them in a sub-directory of the main folder, and then saving them to the main folder after modifying them. Then, you simply remove the folder from your code and it’s done.

Now, you have a clean, minified version of your code sitting on your server, waiting to be deployed. The last step is to use Powershell to update IIS to point the root folder of your site at the new site.

$siteName = "theCloud" #this is the name of your site in IIS

[Void][Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.Web.Administration") #this loads the library needed to interact with IIS in Powershell

$serverManager = New-Object Microsoft.Web.Administration.ServerManager
$site = $serverManager.Sites | where { $_.Name -eq $siteName }
$rootApp = $site.Applications | where { $_.Path -eq "/" }
$rootVdir = $rootApp.VirtualDirectories | where { $_.Path -eq "/" }

$rootVdir.PhysicalPath = $newPath
$serverManager.CommitChanges()

And that’s it. The site is now deployed.

In our next post, we will discuss configuration of IIS7 to decrease your page load times.

Tags: Cloud Services, Deployment, IIS7, Minification, Powershell, theCloud
Category: Cloud Services  |  1 Comment

Keeping your data safe

At theCloud we realise that keeping your data safe is a huge concern. We have taken many steps to ensure that your data is secure.

1. All data is sent securely

Once you log in to theCloud, everything that is sent between you and the server is sent using an SSL Certificate. This ensures that the data is encrypted, and helps prevent people from intercepting the data and being able to see what is being sent.

2. Passwords cant be retrieved from the database

You may have noticed that if you forget one of your passwords, we don’t send your old password to you. Instead, we request that you reset your password. This is because we don’t know your password. In fact, it is impossible for us to figure out your password from the encrypted version we store in the database. We also temporarily deactivate your login, so no one can access your account until you click on the link in the email we send you.

3. Auto-logout

Leave your computer unlocked with theCloud logged in? After 20 minutes with no activity you are automatically logged out of theCloud. This prevents people who are walking past from accessing your account and changing things.

4. Administrator and Non-Administrator accounts

If you create a user and set them as a non-administrator, then they can log into theCloud, and see information about your account, but they cant change anything. In the future, we aim to make this much more granular, and let you control exactly what each user can do in theCloud.

5. Validation

We check all the information you give us to make sure it is valid before we do anything with it.

6. Password Strength

Noticed the Password Strength indicator on theCloud when typing in a password? We use defined standards to make sure that your password is secure enough to prevent basic hacking attempts, and wont let you use a weak password.

7. Credit Card Payments

We use Direct Payment Solutions for all credit card transactions, and no credit card details are stored by us.

8. We Record Everything

And when we say everything we mean everything. Every time you log into theCloud and change something, we store a record of it. This way, if something doesnt seem right, we can go back later and double check who did what and when.

9. Client Verification (warning: tech talk)

theCloud is built using ColdFusion. One the great security features of CFML is the ability to enforce all AJAX functions to verify that the request is verified. A GUID is passed around by the server to the client which must be returned in the AJAX call. If you don’t pass the correct GUID, you don’t get to make the call.

Rest assured we take security very seriously here at theCloud, and you can be sure that we have done everything we can to protect your data.

Tags: Cloud Services, security, theCloud
Category: Cloud Services  |  Comment

Our goals

Here at theCloud we like to think there are 4 main areas to our products that make us a good choice for your online hosting needs.

1. Support

2. Security

3. Speed

4. Stability

So far we think we’ve got Support right on track. You can contact us 24×7 if you have an issue with theCloud, and we have a dedicated team here who is constantly working to try and give you the support you deserve. The other 3 areas are all to do with the site itself. Over the next few weeks we will be showing you just how we have developed the site to give you Security, Speed and Stability.

Tags: Cloud, Cloud Services, theCloud
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Revamped User Interface

Yesterday we launched a revamped version of our UI here at theCloud. The new UI is quite a substantial change from what we previously had so I thought that I’d take the time and compare some of the equivilent screens between the old and new versions.  To start with we will look at the account page, this is the page that you are first greeted with when you log into theCloud.

Account Home

The difference is quite plain, rather than including everything on a single page we have broken up the most of the content into their own tabs, this allows us to easily display more relevant information for each service without cluttering up the page.

Billing Page

Next up is the billing page, previously this had been integrated into the main account page now it is its own page, the only two screenshots we can really compare is adding a credit card from the old version to the new billing page:

The new billing page offers a concise explanation of what you are being billed for and a way to put money on your account.

Activating web hosting

Adding a domain

Adding a domain is still quite similar though it has been updated with the new look and feel:

Configuring web hosting

From this screen you are able to setup domains and view the status and traffic of each domain you have setup with us and assign an exclusive IP address for your hosting.

Activating Exchange

Activating exchange has been simplified removing the extra information, now only requiring you to supply the domain for which you want to activate email for:

Configuring Exchange

Configuring exchange has been redesigned to be be a lot clearer presenting all of the information you need to connect on the page rather than behind a button.  From here you are able to create or remove new email addresses, contacts and distribution lists.

Editing a mailbox

When editing a mailbox you can set the primary address for a user or set if an address is only a forwarding address.

Activating storage

Configuring Storage

Configuring storage has had a face lift to make the alert bar make more sense allowing you to set at what levels you get sent alerts and how much storage you have.  It also separates out connection information from configuration options.

As you can see we have made a lot of changes in the hope of creating a smoother, easier to use user experience.  The best way to get to grips with the changes of course would be to dive in and try them for yourself, you can login or register here. As always we welcome your feedback either as comments on the blog, on our twitter @theCloudNZ or you can email us at support@thecloud.net.nz.

Tags: Cloud, Cloud Services, storage, The Cloud, theCloud, Web Hosting
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