Cloud News: Akamai, OpSource, GoGrid

Here’s our review of some of this week’s noteworthy links for the data center industry:

Akamai launches Terra Cloud Catalyst:  Akamai Technologies (AKAM) introduced Terra Cloud Catalyst, a service that allows cloud providers to offer Akamai's CDN (Content Delivery Network) services to customers. Terra Cloud Catalyst is intended to meet the distinct needs of today's IaaS, PaaS and hosted storage vendors. The new service builds on Akamai CDN technology and brings to market a means for public cloud providers of all sizes to seamlessly integrate Akamai technology into their platforms."One organization that is providing its customers with access to CDN features via Akamai is Rackspace. "Rackspace was one of the first Akamai partners to recognize the value of elastic CDN services delivered on demand, and they worked very closely with us to make that possible," said Mark Interrante, vice president of Product Development at Rackspace. "Helping our customers deliver a great experience using our services is part of Rackspace's promise to deliver Fanatical Support. Working together with Akamai, we have been able to grow our Cloud Files service into one of the largest implementations of OpenStack that we know of, giving our customers not only great performance leveraging Akamai's scalable platform, but also helping them avoid lock-in with a proprietary platform for their content."

OpSource partners with Zadara: OpSource announced it has teamed with Zadara Storage, Inc., a provider of enterprise-class storage in the public cloud, to deliver on-demand Virtual Private Storage Arrays (VPSAs) to businesses. Making use of the Zadara CloudFabric enterprise public cloud users and users of OpSource’s Managed Hosting Environment now have the option to migrate mission-critical applications to the public cloud while still maintaining a high level of performance. “Public cloud users who create a VPSA with Zadara experience a true, single-tenant server environment, ensuring the high performance and high availability they require does not vary over time,” said Mark Spowart, CEO of Zadara. “OpSource users are also able to utilize Microsoft Failover Cluster in the cloud natively due to OpSource’s architecture, resulting in unmatched ease of use in migrating existing IT applications to the cloud.”

GoGrid selected by Martini Media:  GoGrid announced that Martini Media, the leading digital platform for advertisers to reach affluent US consumers, has selected GoGrid to host the Big Data infrastructure for its platform. Martini Media's goal is to serve ads within 150 to 200 milliseconds no matter where the recipient is located within the United States. Based on two identical infrastructures hosted at GoGrid's East and West Coast data centers, Martini Media's solution delivers. Martin Media's Big Data implementation uses Casandra and has prompted it to expand to incorporate Hadoop as well - making it one of the first customers to deploy GoGrid's Big Data Solution. "Hybrid is optimal for Big Data," says Manicka Babu, vice president of engineering at Martini Media. "We considered four providers, and only GoGrid offered everything we wanted for a reasonable price. Most important was the hybrid architecture. GoGrid allowed us to use virtualized cloud servers for non-database functions and single-tenant hardware to run our Cassandra databases."