Roundup: Windstream, Rackspace, IO, CoreLink

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

Windstream introduces Disaster Recovery as a Service.  Windstream Hosted Solutions announced its new Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solution, combining the best of replication and cloud technologies, and offering a fully hosted and managed disaster recovery solution. The DRaaS solution provides a variety of cost-effective methods to replicate and recover a customer's infrastructure and run it in the Windstream cloud. DRaaS is available immediately with replication and managed recovery architectures to suit a variety of requirements. "Managed disaster recovery in the cloud can deliver protection that is better, cheaper and faster than internal solutions," said Rob Carter, Windstream'sdirector of managed hosted solutions. "It isn't just a matter of cost. A fully managed Disaster Recovery as a Service solution also reduces the burden of infrastructure tasks and expertise during the testing or real world enactment of disaster recovery plans on businesses."

Rackspace enhances Cloud Sites for Ad Agencies. At the 2012 ad:tech conference in San Francisco Tuesday Rackspace announced an enhanced feature set for its Cloud Sites solution, which is designed to help companies seamlessly host reliable and scalable websites and blogs. Used by many advertising agencies and web design shops such as GSD&M, Sitewaves.net, Future Buro and Southern Web Group, Cloud Sites is helping these companies create sites that are stable and scalable. Cloud Sites is a fully managed Platform as a Service (PaaS) and supports both Linux (LAMP) and Microsoft Windows (.NET) hosting. “As a small company working with big brands, we don’t have the time, money or manpower to set up and manage our own infrastructure to manage traffic spikes, OS security staging environments, etc.” said Andrew Bateman, Technical Director of Future Buro, a digital creative agency who has produced work for Red Bull, Coca-Cola Amatil and Virgin Mobile. “Cloud Sites has made a real difference to our business.”

IO selected by BlueChannel.  IO announced that it has been awarded a contract with boutique web services firm BlueChannel. From its Phoenix data center IO will provide BlueChannel with its Data Center as a Service (DCaaS) through its modular technology platform IO.Anywhere. "We are moving to IO Phoenix after eight years with our previous data center provider because of the higher quality customer service and highly reliable power and infrastructure that IO provides," said Paul DeCrette, President, BlueChannel. "We promise our customers a world-class hosting experience and are confident that IO's world-class data center infrastructure will help us deliver on our commitment."

CoreLink selected by Aioi Nissay Dowa Insurance.  CoreLink Data Centers announced that it has been selected by Aioi Nissay Dowa Insurance Company of America for hosting and disaster recovery services from its Chicago data center.  “In our research, which included visits to CoreLink’s Chicago data center facility and several other companies’ data centers, it became clear CoreLink most closely delivered the level of customer service and expert help that our company has always provided to our client base,” said Mikitomo “Mickey” Ushijima, the insurer’s corporate secretary. “The CoreLink Operations team also conveyed the kind of openness and expertise we were looking for in a data center service provider. We believe CoreLink truly delivers on its promise of relentless service and full transparency.”