Roundup: Akamai, Nimsoft, Rackspace, Raritan

Here’s a roundup of this week’s headlines from the data center and hosting industry:

Rackspace extends support to the cloud. Rackspace (RAX) announced that it is offering a managed cloud offering, made up of cloud servers with a managed service level, providing businesses with proactive monitoring, troubleshooting and guidance on how to leverage cloud computing. Additionally Rackspace will extend its Fanatical Support into the cloud, by combining 24x7x365 managed service level with its highly scalable on-demand Cloud Servers offering. Features of the managed cloud include 24x7x365 rapid response to monitoring alerts, a variety of operating systems to choose from, technical guidance for growth and optimization, administrative level access, and anytime, anywhere accessibility. “Although the first era of the cloud was for developers and early adopters, now the rest of the world wants to use this incredible technology, and Rackspace is making this possible," said Pat Matthews, senior vice president of cloud at Rackspace. "Many businesses want the help and expertise to make cloud computing work for them. We listened to our customers and now provide unmatched service in the cloud so companies can focus on what they know best — their core business — while Rackspace takes care of the rest."

Akamai selected by Diesel and protecting against DDoS. Akamai (AKAM) announced that Diesel, the international lifestyle brand, has selected Akamai's Dynamic Site Accelerator and Media Delivery solutions to accelerate and distribute the contents of its website to customers.  Instead of further investing in internal resources Diesel relied on Akamai's global network and guaranteed the maximum usability of its website.  "Fashion brands' websites typically include rich media content, like catwalk videos and collections images", stated Henri D'Oriola, Director Southern Europe, Akamai Technologies. "Diesel is a prestigious and internationally recognized brand and has the need to offer all the people interested in its style a top quality online experience, with no slowdowns. Now, thanks to Akamai's technology, all Diesel fans around the world can fully enjoy and dive into the brand's philosophy".  Akamai also announced that it shielded several leading retailers from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks during the three-day period following Cyber Monday. The attacks, which were highly distributed, caused some of the websites to experience up to 10,000 times their normal daily traffic. With protection from Akamai, the retailers were able to sustain the attacks, allowing them to stay in business during some of the busiest shopping days of the year.

Nimsoft selected by Basefarm.  Nimsoft announced that Basefarm, a Northern European provider of operational and IT services, is deploying the Nimsoft Monitoring Solution (NMS) across its infrastructure of 3,000 servers and the services and the applications running on those servers.  Basefarm's clients span a broad range of industries and NMS will replace a variety of open source and commercial solutions previously used for monitoring.  "NMS will be a key technology enabler as Basefarm expands its offerings to address clients' rapidly evolving cloud strategies," said Bjart  Kvarme, CTO at Basefarm.

Raritan updates dcTrack. Raritan announced that its dcTrack data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software solution is now available as a VMware-ready virtual appliance.  In addition, platform operating system and database licensing costs are eliminated, along with their associated integration costs.  With version 2.4 dcTrack provides easy, point-and-click access to asset information and Visio-like visualization tools to help improve data center utilization.  "It eliminates the complexity of multiple spreadsheets, floor plans and connection diagrams by incorporating all data center information into a single consolidated solution for better correlation and analysis. This makes moves, adds and changes, and capacity management easier, faster and more accurate.  It helps improve data center efficiency and productivity, thereby lowering the cost of data center operations," said James Cerwinski, Manager Software Products at Raritan.