Good Omens For American Managed And Dedicated Hosting Market
August 31, 2006
The American web hosting market is “stable and mature” and all majour providers have an operational expertise, says Gartner Group, in a summary of its “Magic Quadrant for North American Web Hosting, 2006″. The 12 page document can be purchased for $495 on analyst firm’s web site.
According to analysts most hosting providers have improved customer service and succeded competently to deliver Managed web hosting services. Gartner also says that the managed web hosts still distinguish themselves by different criterion such as service and roduct portfolio, flexibility, pricing policy, and their ability to manage complexity, and the quality of their customer service.
Report says that American hostign market continues to mature. The largest vendors have overcomed the decline that followed the dot-com boom and the subsequent economic downtrend. Smaller web hosts however are struggling and mergers and acquisitions continue.
Savvis, Rackspace, AT&T, IBM and Datareturn has been pointed as market leaders in the Managed Hosting market. The companies chalanging the “Magic Quadrant” are CSC and Verizone Business.
Gartners adds that there is less and less differentiation between basic Managed web hostign services, the most successful vendors have developed their unique market niches based primarly on their approach to service deliver and their customers requirements. Report also says that customers still must carefully select web hosting providers. The reason is that while the technologial expertise is becoming a commodity, the service expertise isn’t.
The successful Managed and Dedicated Hosting business is a bundled service that includes Internet data facilities; Network Bandwidth; WAN and LAN equipment including routers, switches, firewalls, and load balancers; Dedicated server hardware, management of the facilities, WAN and LAN, server hardware and server operating system; management of storage including backup and recovery; Management of security; as well as Management of infrastructure software such as web server software, application servers and database servers.
The definition of Managed and Dedicated Hosting service also includes professional service associated with web hosting - arcitecture, capacity planning, performance testing and security auditing.
The whole report is available on Gartner Group’s web site.
A Cheaper Alternative To Expensive Data Centers
August 29, 2006
Server Pipeline, a CPM edition reported that at last week’s LinuxWorld conference, the biggest buzz involved the prospect of Linux virtualization taking over more of the data center. The insurance company Nationwide Mutual, announced that it plans to consolidate 600 Linux servers as virtual machines on two IBM mainframes by the end of 2006.
By moving to Virtual Linux the Insurance company expects to save money on electricity, data center space and to cust server costs. It estimated that the new technology will save $15 million within the next three years. The company officials reported that approximately 350 of its servers have already been consolidated. Nationwide Mutual revealed that 78% of the its 5,000 servers used 10% or less of their capacity.
More information at Serverpipeline.com
