Monthly Archives: October 2011
SpamExperts and Cartika IT Solutions team up under the SpamExperts’ Hosting Partner Program
Amsterdam – October 11, 2011 – SpamExperts, the leading provider of e-mail security products from Amsterdam, happily announced today that Cartika has joined their Hosting Partner Program (HPP). Cartika, founded in Toronto, has established itself as a leader in Application Hosting and Hosting Technologies. As their home grown solutions and several appliances did not solve the predicaments caused by spam emails, Cartika implemented SpamExperts’ centralized solutions which seamlessly integrated into their existing systems.
Storage – the backbone of the cloud. To centralize or distribute?
Cloud giants like Amazon and Google are initiating a massive push towards distributed and replicated storage solutions for cloud computing. Their assertion is that the storage backbone for the cloud should be done via replicating data across commodity type of local storage hardware. Essentially, they are talking about network based RAID across multiple local storage servers. Amidst their claims that distributed storage concepts will one day make SAN solutions obsolete, I am strangely reminded of similar claims by Intel and others regarding the future of mainframe computers when 1U pizza boxes hit the market. At the time, it was postulated that distributed processing found in these intel based machines would be preferable to the centralized compute model offered by mainframes, and inevitably would spell the end of mainframes and the concept of consolidated computing. Clearly distributed processing did not put an end to consolidated mainframe computing, as many enterprises today utilize a hybrid approach to computing. Rest assured, the distributed storage model being so heavily promoted by several cloud giants today will not spell the end of consolidated SAN storage platforms. Having said this, there are clear benefits and disadvantages to each approach that must be considered when building a storage backbone for your cloud.