Category Archives: cartikacloud

451 Group Cartika/Flexiant analysis

Flexiant raises money, releases Cloud Orchestrator v3 with app provisioning
Analyst: Rachel Chalmers
15 Jan, 2013

Cloud orchestration software vendor Flexiant has raised £3m (roughly $5m) to support
continuing expansion, including the launch of Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator version 3. The latest release of its software introduces four new licensing models tailored to the hosting and service-provider market and designed to give companies of all sizes access to the product. The latest version also adds Bento Boxes, a new feature that delivers preconfigured application provisioning. Bento Boxes let service providers offer their customers prepackaged application stacks that are ready to share and deploy.

The 451 Take
We’ve struggled with how to categorize Flexiant. On the one hand, its software is called Cloud Orchestrator and it does overlap functionally with management and automation products like enStratus, Nimbula, ServiceMesh and VMware vCloud Director. On the other hand – and reflecting the company’s heritage – the software is also a true cloud OS, and is most often compared with CloudStack, OnApp and OpenStack. Whichever way you look at it, Flexiant is proving itself in the market.

Cartika Inc Reviews. Reviews for Cartika Hosting, Cartika Inc, CartikaHosting

Internet reviews, especially in the hosting industry, are an interesting challenge. I wanted to provide a resource where I could post our customers reviews, allow our customers to add their comments and direct potential customers to reputable 3rd party review sites they can look to for the good, the bad and the ugly about Cartika. Obviously a company our size will have some negative customer feedback.  We consider this constructive and are continually working to improve. What I am trying to address however is a scenario where 1 malicious person can spam invalid complaints around the internet and help potential customers weed through the noise to get a real understanding of our company and the level of services we offer.

For our part, Cartika has never really participated much in this arena. We historically have never published our key customer list, nor published customer testimonials on our sites. We have done this because we have tried to remove the intrusion that this sort of activity can cause our customers. However, we also understand the need for strong partnerships and strong references from our customers. We do this for our key vendors on a regular basis and I think it’s fair that we start to leverage our strong customer relationships in the same way.

As a result of on an ongoing situation we have been engaged in, spanning 3+ years at this point, Cartika has hired an internet reputation firm to help us deal with and address various aspects of our reputation management. The concern is one of fraud and extortion against our company by a single malicious person who has a long history of extorting service providers.

You can read more about this situation HERE

You can see a google search results for this person illustrating the long history of extortion against service providers and other companies HERE.

So, the first thing we are going to do is explain that 99% of the negative reviews about us on the internet are from this single person – who’s intention is to extort money and try and launch a class action lawsuit to extort further money from us.  They prey on small to mid-sized providers (which we were 3 years ago). We do not fear a class action lawsuit, nor the extortion methods of this person – however, we have grown to a size significant enough, where this is something we need to address (as I assure you, every other hosting company has had to address at some point in their evolution from a mid-sized to large sized company).

The next thing we are going to do is show our customers where to find reputable reviews about our company from 3rd party sources. Please understand, all of these negative reviews, if you look at them – are all very similar – and they only exist on review sites which do not regularly remove spam or even do basic research to see that data like domains, IP whois and domain whois, etc do not match and the posts are obviously spam/fraud in nature.  Heck, many of the negative reviews come from myself or our staff apparently, using our names and domains.  Many use legitimate domains on our servers, but, the IPs used to post the reviews are obviously not in the same geography or continent as the domain owner. Unfortunately, some of these review sites are run by our competitors and its not in their best interest to remove such reviews. Other sites simply do not care, and simply want traffic at any cost. This user exploits such things.

Here is a list of reputable 3rd party sites which keep their sites clean of spam and users can find reliable (positive, negative or neutral) reviews of Cartika and our services

• Hostjury
• Webhostingstuff
• Webhostingtalk (search for cartika, cartikahosting, cartikahosting reviews and cartika reviews)
• Webhostingunleashed
• Serchen
• WHreviews
• HostSearch
• Webmastertools (this site pulls in feeds from various sources, sound good, some outage related stuff over the years, but, all legitimate content)
• Microsoft (this one is interesting as there are no customer reviews present – but, it was filled with spammed negative reviews from this single person – we contacted Microsoft to investigate and they easily identified the postings as spam/fraud and removed them – as any legitimate review site would)

Cartika Selects Flexiant as Cloud Platform

Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator selected to deliver Cartika an enterprise grade cloud computing solution

Toronto, Canada and London, UK – 28 November 2012 – Cartika IT Solutions Inc., a leader in application hosting and advanced clustering technologies, has selected Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator V3  over OnApp V3, CloudStack, OpenStack, and in-house development for its on-demand, fully automated provisioning of cloud services.

Both from an internal company requirement and to meet its customers’ expectations of a more automated and flexible solution, Cartika recognised the need to offer a more complete infrastructure as a service (IaaS) solution. Cartika’s legacy system was home-grown, aging and lacking the features required to effectively deliver cloud services to its customers in an automated, profitable way

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.