OnApp

Media Coverage

February - March, 2012

OnApp Previews Free Cloud Platform, Offers Early Registration to Cloud Connect Attendees

Web Host Industry Review

Nicole Henderson February 14, 2012

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Cloud software and CDN provider OnApp announced on Tuesday that it is offering early registration for a new free version of OnApp Cloud, its cloud platform for building public, private and hybrid clouds, to attendees of the Cloud Connect event in Santa Clara.

According to the announcement, this new free version of OnApp Cloud is available at the event from February 14-16, prior to general availability. The free version allows anyone to build, test and deploy their own cloud and supports clouds with up to 16 hypervisor CPU cores, in any configuration.

This move comes less than a week after OnApp named Carsten Sjoerup chief technology officer to head up its development teams in the UK, Malaysia and Ukraine.

For web hosts attending Cloud Connect this week, the offering from OnApp provides a platform for testing a new cloud software before determining which vendor to select for their cloud infrastructure. Part of the benefits on infrastructure-as-a-service such as OnApp Cloud for web hosts is it eliminates the cost and time burdens.

OnApp will also demo the latest version of its OnApp CDN platform at the event that helps service providers expand their cloud portfolio with global content delivery services. In August 2011, WHIR editor-in-chief Liam Eagle interviewed OnApp CEO Ditlev Bredahl about its CDN for hosting providers.

OnApp Cloud combines infrastructure-as-a-service functionality with billing and user management, an online control panel and rapid deployment model. OnApp customers can download and install OnApp Cloud themselves, with support by the OnApp community.

“Building your own cloud used to be extremely costly and time-consuming,” Ditlev Bredahl, CEO of OnApp said in a statement. “With OnApp Cloud, however, we removed those barriers to entry. It’s easy to deploy and easy to manage, and with our new free version you can experience the same functionality you’d get from a leading cloud provider, free of charge. Now anyone with a little Linux and networking knowledge can build their own cloud, and we want to encourage more businesses, hosts and service providers to try the OnApp Cloud platform and see just how intuitive and efficient the cloud can be.”

According to the press release, OnApp has completed more than 800 cloud deployments since its launch in July 2010. Estimates by OnApp claim that one in three public cloud hosting services is powered by its cloud platform.

Registration Opens for OnApp’s New Free Cloud Hosting Platform at Cloud Connect

vmblog.com David Marshall February 14, 2012

OnApp has announced early registration for a new free version of OnApp Cloud, its next-generation platform for public, private and hybrid cloud deployments. OnApp is a leading provider of cloud and CDN software. The new free version of OnApp Cloud enables anyone to build, test and deploy their own cloud free of charge, and is available exclusively to attendees of the Cloud Connect event in Santa Clara from February 14-16, prior to general availability.

OnApp Cloud is designed to make it as easy as possible to build, launch and run a fully-featured cloud service. It combines cutting-edge IaaS functionality with advanced billing and user management, an easy-to-user web control panel and a rapid deployment model. The free version of OnApp Cloud supports clouds with up to 16 hypervisor CPU cores, in any configuration. Customers will be able to download and install it themselves, with support provided by the OnApp community.

“Building your own cloud used to be extremely costly and time-consuming,” said Ditlev Bredahl, CEO of OnApp. “With OnApp Cloud, however, we removed those barriers to entry. It’s easy to deploy and easy to manage, and with our new free version you can experience the same functionality you’d get from a leading cloud provider, free of charge. Now anyone with a little Linux and networking knowledge can build their own cloud, and we want to encourage more businesses, hosts and service providers to try the OnApp Cloud platform and see just how intuitive and efficient the cloud can be.”

OnApp has completed more than 800 cloud deployments since it launched in July 2010. OnApp estimates that 1 in 3 public cloud hosting services are now powered by its OnApp Cloud platform.

From February 14 – 16 at booth #315 at Cloud Connect in Santa Clara, prospective customers will be able to register for the free version of OnApp Cloud and be the first to preview and test the new product before general availability. OnApp will also demo the latest version of its cutting edge OnApp CDN

platform, which enables service providers to expand their cloud portfolio with global content delivery services, without having to spend millions on CDN infrastructure.

To learn more about OnApp’s new free OnApp Cloud platform and OnApp CDN, visit OnApp at booth #315. If you’d like to arrange a meeting with OnApp CEO Ditlev Bredahl during the event, please email press@onapp.com.

Photos: CloudConnect 2012/Carrier Cloud Forum

Light Reading February 15, 2012

Kosten Metreweli, OnApp's CMO, spreads the word about the company's CDN plans.

OnApp Makes Splash at Cloud Connect with Cloud Hosting Platform

TMCnet

Tammy Wolf February 15, 2012

Cloud and CDN software provider OnApp is certainly finding itself on cloud nine this week, and it has nothing to do with Valentine’s Day.

This week at Cloud Connect, an event bringing together the entire cloud ecosystem to better comprehend how companies are addressing the cloud transformation, OnApp shared with TMCnet its two latest announcements and just how the company is making waves in the cloud market.

First, OnApp revealed on Tuesday that its next-generation platform for public, private and hybrid cloud deployments, OnApp Cloud, is now available for anyone to build, test and deploy their own cloud – at no cost. Those attending Cloud Connect this week can get a sneak tryout before the platform is generally available.

According to Ditlev Bredahl, OnApp CEO, who sat down with TMCnet on the second day of the show, OnApp’s mission is simple: to help hosting companies build successful cloud systems. With OnApp Cloud, users reap the benefits of cutting-edge IaaS functionality with billing and user management, a simplified Web control panel, and a quick deployment model. The free version supports clouds with up to 16 hypervisor CPU cores.

“Building your own cloud used to be extremely costly and time-consuming,” said Bredahl in a prepared statement. “With OnApp Cloud, however, we removed those barriers to entry. It’s easy to deploy and easy to manage, and with our new free version you can experience the same functionality you’d get from a leading cloud provider, free of charge. Now anyone with a little Linux and networking knowledge

can build their own cloud, and we want to encourage more businesses, hosts and service providers to try the OnApp Cloud platform and see just how intuitive and efficient the cloud can be.”

North American growth has also been a core focus for OnApp, as the U.K.-based company also confirmed this week the opening of a new office in Logan Utah, which will become home to its Level-1 support staff and help to further capitalize on OnApp’s dedication to delivering 24/7/365 global phone and e-mail support to customers. Ryan Weight, OnApp’s first line support manager, will be responsible for office operations at the new headquarters, which open later this month.

In addition, OnApp revealed the appointment of Behshad Behnam as North American director of Sales, and Chris Younger, a pre-sales specialist. Behnam will be based out of OnApp’s Washington, D.C. office, and Younger will operate from Dallas.

These new hires, as well as two more strategic sales positions in the works, are all part of OnApp’s rapid U.S. expansion, much of which has been fostered by the North American cloud market.

“Whenever we find someone that’s really good, I open a new office around them,” Bredahl said charismatically.

Since OnApp launched in July 2010, the company has completed more than 800 cloud deployments. To date, one in three public cloud hosting services are now powered by its OnApp core cloud platform, which is simply placed in clients’ data centers.

As described by Bredahl, there are three main concerns hosting companies have when it comes to the cloud: time to market; being able to compete with cloud giants like Amazon Web Services (News - Alert); and, not surprisingly, security.

Bredahl said OnApp is addressing all these by having a quick-to-market, competitive, cost-effective and highly secure solutions model.

“What we do is we help hosting companies remain profitable and competitive,” Bredahl told TMCnet. “The best way of doing that is to enable them to be better than big guys out there.”

However, when it comes to security, Bredahl has a rather unique perception on all the hype: “I think it’s been overrated. People have this misconception of data flying around because it’s in the cloud. Data doesn’t like to move. There’s a lot of education to be done here.”

So, what’s next for OnApp?

“Our company has moved from three phases. The first phase was us helping from a software perspective. The second phase is to give clients geographical reach… Our third phase is coming, and that will be where the service part and ecosystem around our platform will be more important than itself,” said Bredahl.

To learn more about OnApp and to get a preview of the company’s new free cloud hosting platform, be sure to stop by booth No. 315, where OnApp will also demo the latest version of its OnApp CDN platform, which allows service providers to broaden their cloud portfolio with global content delivery services without the high expense of a CDN infrastructure.

OnApp Extends U.S. Cloud Service Provider Platform, Presence

Talkin’ Cloud

Matthew Weinberger February 16, 2012

London-based cloud platform provider OnApp used this week’s Cloud Connect 2012 conference in Santa Clara to announce that it’s growing significantly in the United States, adding a new office in Utah and executives across the country, and growing its U.S. support staff by another 50 percent.

OnApp builds its business on helping the more traditional channel organizations become infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud service providers — a company spokesperson told me at Cloud Connect it was OnApp’s consulting services and OnApp Cloud platform that turned PEER 1 Hosting into a cloud player, with many similar stories across the globe. OnApp also offers its service provider customers the ability to “productize” its content delivery network (CDN) platform from the cloud.

The new Utah office will further OnApp’s mission with its first Level 1 support staff in America, providing 24/7/365 telephone and e-mail support to customers when it opens officially later in February 2012, according to the press release. Additionally, OnApp signed on a North American director of sales in the form of Behshad Behnam and Chris Younger, specializing in pre-sales.

“Our software enables hosting companies and other service providers to create their own cloud and CDN services, so they can respond to the threat to their traditional business from large cloud providers. The North American cloud market has played a significant role in our growth to date, and our new office and sales team will help us build on that growth,” said Ditlev Bredahl, CEO of OnApp, in a prepared statement.

If a company like OnApp is ramping up its efforts to help service providers in the United States leap into the cloud (with OnApp boasting that one in three public clouds already use its platform), it doesn’t seem as though it will be very long before TalkinCloud hears from the company again. Of course, not using OpenStack may make it unfashionable in this market. Keep watching for more.

Cloud and CDN Provider OnApp Expands US Presence with Utah Office, New Hires

The WHIR Justin Lee February 16, 2012

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Cloud software and CDN provider OnApp announced on Wednesday it is expanding its US presence to support its North American business with the opening of a new Utah office, key strategic hires across the US, and plans to grow its US staff by 50 percent in 2012.

OnApp has seen significant growth since its launch in July 2010, having completed more than 800 cloud deployments during that time. Along with offering a cloud platform for those companies looking to build public, private and hybrid cloud infrastructure, OnApp also delivers content delivery network services that are specifically designed for hosting providers.

The move comes just a day after OnApp announced it is offering early registration for its latest free version of OnApp Cloud to attendees of this week’s Cloud Connect event in Santa Clara.

OnApp’s new office in Logan, Utah, which will open later this month, will be home to the company’s US Level-1 support staff. The office will provide customers with OnApp’s 24-hour global telephone and email support. First line support manager Ryan Weight will oversee the office operations and staff.

In addition to Weight, OnApp has hired a North American director of sales Behshad Behnam, who is based out of Washington, D.C., and pre sales specialist Chris Younger, who is based out of Dallas. The company also plans to hire two more strategic sales positions in the next few months.

The hires are just the latest additions to OnApp’s team in the past few months, following last week’s appointment of Carsten Sjoerup in the role of chief technology officer, where he will lead OnApp’s development teams in the UK, Malaysia and Ukraine.

“This is an exciting time for OnApp and we’re seeing impressive growth in the North American market,” said Ditlev Bredahl, CEO of OnApp. “Our software enables hosting companies and other service providers to create their own cloud and CDN services, so they can respond to the threat to their traditional business from large cloud providers. The North American cloud market has played a significant role in our growth to date, and our new office and sales team will help us build on that growth.”

OnApp Plans Expansion, Adds Office in Utah

CDN-ADVISOR.com

February 17, 2012 This Wednesday (on February 15, 2012), OnApp, one of the leading providers of cloud optimization and Content Delivery Network software solutions, announced that it is planning to expand its operations in the United States in 2012 by adding a new office at Utah and also opening various hiring openings for strategic positions in the organization. Among the recent hiring includes the appointment of Behshad Behnam as the North American Director of Sales and Chris Younger as a Pre Sales Specialist. Apart from this, OnApp is also planning to hire two more strategic sales positions in the next couple of months to expand its North American operations further. The Company’s new Utah office will be used as a key center for its Level-1 Support operations. This center officially open by the end of February, and its operations will be lead by Ryan Weight, who is the First Line Support Manager. OnApp mentioned that it was seeing huge growth in the North American market, and this expansion will be done to support the growing customer base. The Company will increase its staff in the US region by almost 50% in 2012. Read more about OnApp Plans Expansion, Adds Office in Utah » CDN News | CDN Advisor.com by null

OnApp Steps Up with Worldwide Federated Cloud (Video)

Inside-CLOUD.com

Rich Brueckner

February 29, 2012

Imagine a worldwide cloud full of a worldwide network of 300 cloud service providers. That’s essentially what OnApp has created with something I’m calling the OverCloud.

In this slidecast, Kosten Meteweli from OnApp presents: The Federated Cloud: What’s New for Hosts and Service Providers.

The OnApp CDN Federation is a global network of CDN PoPs, and a marketplace where you can buy and sell CDN capacity on demand. Hosts can buy CDN bandwidth from other Federation members and resell it to end users. It’s an easy way to build a global CDN service without investing millions in global infrastructure.

OnApp Steps Up with Worldwide Federated Cloud (Video)

InsideHPC.com

Rich Brueckner

February 29, 2012

Imagine a worldwide cloud full of a worldwide network of 300 cloud service providers. That’s essentially what OnApp has created with something I’m calling the OverCloud.

In this slidecast, Kosten Meteweli from OnApp presents: The Federated Cloud: What’s New for Hosts and Service Providers.

The OnApp CDN Federation is a global network of CDN PoPs, and a marketplace where you can buy and sell CDN capacity on demand. Hosts can buy CDN bandwidth from other Federation members and resell it to end users. It’s an easy way to build a global CDN service without investing millions in global infrastructure.

The Federated Cloud: What’s New for Hosts and Service Providers

CDN Kings

March 10, 2012 Imagine a worldwide cloud full of a worldwide network of 300 cloud service providers. That’s essentially what OnApp has created–something I’m calling the OverCloud. In this podcast, Kosten Meteweli from OnApp presents: The Federated Cloud: What’s New for Hosts and Service Providers. “The OnApp CDN Federation is a global network of CDN PoPs, and a marketplace where you can buy and sell CDN capacity on demand. Hosts can buy CDN bandwidth from other Federation members and resell it to end users. It’s an easy way to build a global CDN service without investing millions in global infrastructure.” Learn more at: onapp.com

Federated Clouds: For When One Cloud Isn’t Good Enough

GigaOM Pro

Barb Darrow March 13, 2012

There are times when putting a company’s computing workload on a single cloud just isn’t the best idea.

Take Zynga. When the über-popular game maker launched new games and was unable to gauge demand for them, it ran the bulk (80 percent) of new traffic at each launch on Amazon Web Services and the rest in-house. Last year, that ratio flipped so that 80 percent of launch traffic runs in Zynga’s cloud (Z cloud), not AWS. Zynga CTO Allan Leinwand recently told GigaOM that his company was able to optimize its go-to cloud by studying games-specific workloads.

“We built storage in a way that lets people go from one game board to another very fast,” he said. “We ended up using one server in Zynga where we used three in AWS.”

That ability to shift workloads from internal to external clouds or between external clouds is what is known as federation. Now a new flock of vendors is offering federation that would enable similar private-to-public cloud bursting between clouds to meet data privacy mandates, offer high availability to customers, and provide geographic reach. Those are areas that a federated cloud model can address, because it yokes resources from different providers together by overlaying them with a single software “fabric,” or the connective tissue that links the various clouds and makes sure they can interoperate.

In cloud computing, one size does not fit all, said Matt Richards, the VP of products for ownCloud, which specializes in open-source cloud-storage management. Companies have to pick the cloud or clouds that meet their different needs. “Some of your applications and data will be local, some in public clouds. That is the definition of a federated cloud which provides, in the end, the flexibility to get the job done,” Richards said.

In theory, these federated clouds offer the benefit of wide geographic coverage with more-granular control of where the data and applications actually sit. Because there is an array of providers available, workloads can be rolled over to another site in the event of a disruption to one part of the network. And, as the Zynga example illustrates, the very notion of a federation means that smaller, more-nimble cloud providers can compete with AWS for enterprise workloads.

The benefits of federated clouds

The fact remains that proximity matters in cloud computing. For companies with a global reach and data privacy mandates, it’s not enough to put workloads in some nebulous region, be it the European Union or the Eastern U.S. They need assurances that some data will be stored — and stay stored — in a specific country for specific reasons. For example, there is a growing movement afoot in Europe to make sure that data on local citizens stays in Europe-only clouds to prevent seizure by U.S. authorities citing the Patriot Act. Application workloads also need to be placed close to users, no matter where those users are, to mitigate network latency issues.

A federated model also has advantages for disaster recovery and failover, even for smaller companies, said Reuven Cohen, the founder of Enomaly, who is now Virtustream’s SVP of cloud community. “What if you develop an application for one particular data center or cloud and that cloud is no longer available? A federation lets you cheaply create continuity in case of an outage.”

Tier 3 targets service providers — hosting companies, telcos — as its primary audience, pitching the federated cloud services as something these service providers can resell, although there is no reason a large company could not also partake. With Virtustream’s acquisition of Enomaly, Tier 3’s first federation partner CFN Services, and OnApp, companies are assembling such “fabric” that links data center resources in a way that can be very attractive to big companies, says Capgemini CTO Joe Coyle.

But there are many federated cloud options. CA AppLogic is also used to create federated clouds. And the open-source OpenStack cloud infrastructure initiative is also heading toward a federated model. In theory, as more OpenStack clouds get implemented — by Rackspace, Hewlett-Packard and others — there is an opportunity for federation between different OpenStack clouds down the road, says James Staten, VP and principal analyst with Forrester Research. In that scenario, if an HP OpenStack cloud has strengths in one area and a Citrix OpenStack cloud offers other specialized talents, a user could use both sets of capabilties.

Many clouds, one face

Such federations offer a broad scope of services from a single “virtual provider,” said cloud consultant Shlomo Swidler, the founder of Orchestratus, who also cites latency as a primary issue to be addressed. Classic content delivery networks (CDNs) aren’t much help, because many of these workloads are dynamic apps — not static data, Swidler said. A federation lets them put their apps in a location to optimize performance.

Some federations share a single underlying technology base (VMware in Tier 3’s case). Others, like Virtustream, promise to be platform-agnostic across the federation.

End-user enterprises can also pony up their own resources for use by other federation members, opening up a potential revenue stream. Virtustream, for example, is building a community cloud where different entities “can literally rent or loan excess capacity to other community members,” including to other enterprises, said Capgemini’s Coyle. “That is a very powerful model for any enterprise with excess capacity.”

As big and as fast-evolving as AWS is, some companies just need to be more hands-on with their clouds. Amazon doesn’t even like to disclose where its data centers are, let alone let people check them out. Terremark, on the other hand, “shows off our data centers every day,” said Ellen Rubin, the VP of cloud services for the company, which fields its own VMware-based federated cloud network.

The challenge for the multicloud federations coming out from Tier 3, Virtustream, OnApp and others is to preserve all of those feature-rich cloud resources — which can vary by provider — while offering a real, unified front end so that customers feel as if they are dealing with one, not many, entities.

The downside of federation

Because a federation by nature has more moving parts and comprises companies with differing agendas, complexity is a factor. “All the issues surrounding the choice of a single cloud service provider are compounded with a federation,” Swidler said.

Would-be customers — whether they are service providers or end-user companies — need to ensure that security, identity and service quality will be addressed consistently across all federation members, he said.

David Linthicum, the founder of Blue Mountain Labs, advises enterprises and service providers to ask lots of questions. “It’s tough to figure out what these federations are really — is there provisioning? Use-based accounting services?” he asked.

Some of what are being pitched as federated clouds appear to be “cloud-in-a-box” frameworks with basic services that service providers can use to get to the cloud fast, in Linthicum’s view. “Cloud in a box” refers to a preconfigured software, server and storage configuration– often available as an appliance — that is pitched as an easy way to get to the cloud (Oracle Exalogic is one example). But purists maintain these frameworks are not all that cloudlike, since they don’t scale beyond their current configuration.

Industry powers AWS, Rackspace, Microsoft and Google have so many resources at their disposal that it will be hard for even the largest confederation of smaller companies to keep up. Just in the past three months, AWS has rolled out a new storage gateway, new workflow services and NoSQL database services. When it is not trotting out new services, it is cutting prices on those services it already offers.

But the biggest question is whether federations that bind together diverse data centers and services around the world can really compete with those big players, all of which are building out data centers and cloud services at lightning speed. Linthicum said he wouldn’t bet on it, given the resources that those industry giants are bringing to bear on cloud computing infrastructure.

It is unclear to him and others whether these smaller players will be able to “stand up” as truly competitive cloud computing offerings at this stage of the game.

“Considering the traction that the larger cloud computing players have already experienced,” Linthicum said, “it will be hard for these smaller companies to compete.”

OnApp Unveils SAN Storage Solution at WHD.global

Ping!Zine

March 20, 2012

On Tuesday, cloud solutions provider OnApp unveiled its new SAN solution. Simply called OnApp Storage, the platform is intended for both enterprises and service providers and relies on hypervisor servers.

The solution itself is based on what the company calls a “pay-as-you-grow” model. The move was announced by OnApp in Germany at this year’s WHD.global conference.

“Storage is typically the biggest cost for a company deploying a public or private cloud, and it is also the most important component: if your SAN fails, people lose data,” explained OnApp CEO Ditlev Bredahl when discussing the matter in a press release.

With the company’s other solutions, OnApp also offers its own content delivery network, providing clients with access to POPs (points of presence) worldwide. OnApp Storage is currently in beta form and interested parties can register through the company’s website. For more information regarding the matter, view a press release by OnApp here (onapp.com).

OnApp Takes on Amazon with a New Breed of Cloud

Silicon ANGLE

Maria Deutscher March 20, 2012

Amazon Web Services is the titan of the platform-as-a-service space, a status it has achieved thanks to its level of service, maintained by its sheer scale and reach today. As always, however, the IT market is an extremely competitive one, and OnApp is looking to challenge AWS with its new offering.

The OnApp Storage Software transforms physical drives into storage nodes with individual I/O controllers baked into them, creating a cloud platform running on top of a data center operator’s traditional infrastructure. OnApp goes beyond just this core concept by offering some added value as well, in the form of reduced bandwidth consumption (thanks to those controllers), and dedupe.

“The software also has deduplication and lets administrators choose the amount of redundancy they want for each piece of data,” writes ZDNet UK. For example, one file could be replicated once to every physical drive within the cloud SAN, for maximum redundancy.”

OnApp Storage lets smaller players setup a cloud environment of their own, and one that can be competitive at that. But it does face competition from a few other vendors that discovered the same opportunity, and the solution currently works only with OnApp Cloud. This is expected to change, as support will be extended to include major hypervisors and custom hardware in the future.

Vendors are targeting enterprises with new cloud services – with ones that are running on the client’s own on-premise deployment, as well public cloud-based offerings that seek to offer the same business edge.

Another development from this week falls under the latter category. Egnyte revealed a new service called HybridCloud File Sharing for the Enterprise, which will try to compete with the many alternatives out there by simply justifying its name. The platform can be scaled to power up to 10,000 concurrent users and 1 billion files.

WHD 2012 – OnApp Launches SAN Tool, Urges Cloud Hosting Cooperation

The WHIR

Nicole Henderson March 20, 2012

Cloud and CDN provider OnApp announced on Tuesday at World Hosting Days that it has launched OnApp Storage, a storage platform that builds SANs using standard SATA and SSD drives in hypervisor servers. Designed for enterprises and service providers, it uses “smart disk” technology to overcome the limitations of scalability and cost of typical SAN products, and is available through a pay-as-you-go model.

In a presentation at WHD on Tuesday morning, Ditlev Bredahl, CEO of OnApp, says that OnApps aim is to keep its service provider clients profitable and competitive. This new storage offering will help service providers save money on SAN, and enable OnApp’s clients to complement the existing OnApp cloud services.

According to a press release, OnApp designed its new storage platform to address the need for resiliant and affordable SAN. Before this, OnApp says that service providers have had to choose between expensive enterprise SANs, with high upgrade and maintenance costs, open source SAN, or low-end SANs, which are more affordable but lack scalability and performance.

The smart disks are self-managing, self-discovering, self-healing and self-contained units, according to OnApp.

OnApp Storage is the third product launched by OnApp, joining its OnApp Cloud and OnApp CDN. OnApp Cloud is an end-to-end software cloud solution for service providers to offer public clouds to customers, and OnApp CDN enables web hosts to sell CDN services. OnApp CDN ties together idle resources through its marketplace across its service provider client base where they can buy and sell capacity to other OnApp clients.

Bredahl outlined some challenges he sees service providers dealing with in terms of competition in the cloud space.

Amazon is a headache for service providers and is taking clients from cloud providers because it has scale, geographical reach, and “unmatched product breadth.” He referred to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for cloud and pointed out that AWS is leading, while other cloud providers like SoftLayer are lagging behind.

Another challenge for service providers is commoditization. Bredahl says the IaaS business model becomes commoditised very fast, and AWS accelerates that process.

He says that service providers are almost giving up in this respect because of the limitations of marketing. He calls this “Where’s Waldo Marketing” in that it’s hard for customers to see the difference between the marketing of AWS and of other providers that offer commoditized cloud.

The third challenge is CAPEX, Bredahl says.

What works, according to Bredahl, is decommoditization. His clients have built highly specialized server images, focus on slim verticals, and by moving into new geographical markets, especially IaaS providers. Finally, he says OnApp clients build bespoke integrations with third party products.

Specializing works, he says, and service providers need to forget about competing with AWS on price/CPAs and build niches that are not reliant on CAPEX intensive investments.

The holy grail of hosting is the federation, and service providers will have success when they team up with data centers, service providers and ISVs, and use each others competencies. This federation would eliminate CAPEX concerns. Teaming up is the only way to compete with the big guys like Amazon, Bredahl says.

Free Version of OnApp Cloud Introduced by OnApp

infoTECHSpotlight.com

March 21, 2012 Mar 21, 2012 (TELECOMWORLDWIRE via COMTEX) -- Cloud management, CDN and storage software developer OnApp announced on Wednesday a new free version of OnApp Cloud, which is available for download from http://onapp.com. According to the company, OnApp Cloud enables service providers and enterprises to easily build and run their own public, private and hybrid clouds. The free version of OnApp Cloud offers similar functionality, scalability and resilience as the full version. It is suitable for companies looking to test, develop and launch their own cloud services, free of charge. The free version of OnApp Cloud allows companies to build a fully-functional cloud on Xen hypervisors with up to 16 CPU cores, without commercial restrictions on usage. It can be used by service providers launching public clouds, enterprises launching private clouds, or developers of cloud applications, Platform-as-a-Service or Software-as-a-Service offerings. The free version of the solution can be installed on standard off-the-shelf hardware. It is supported through the company's community forums, with a simple upgrade path for users who grow beyond the 16-core limit or who require OnApp's 24/7 global support services.

Hey, Guys, Let’s Build a CDN!

Light Reading

Craig Matsumoto March 21, 2012

If you've got a bunch of data centers lying around, why not tie them together into a content delivery network (CDN)?

Some software companies are looking into the possibility, using customers' or partners' data centers to create an alternative to the services provided by the likes of Akamai Technologies Inc. (Nasdaq: AKAM) and Limelight Networks Inc. (Nasdaq: LLNW).

OnApp Ltd. is one example. Its real business is to provide software for cloud services, which has given OnApp a customer base of more than 400 data center owners in the past 18 months, CEO Ditlev Bredahl told Light Reading in February.

Those customers span the globe, and many of them have unused computing capacity and bandwidth on any given day. So, OnApp is putting those resources to use. In August, it acquired CDN software by buying the assets of a Malaysian company called Aflexi Sdn. Bhd.

Combine that with those data-center resources, and voila: easy-bake CDN. It's done with the data center owners' permission, of course, and OnApp does vet each potential point of presence (POP) for performance issues. As of last month, OnApp had established 50 POPs that could be knitted together to form ad hoc CDNs.

What's in it for the customers is that they get paid for the trouble. "Up until recently, I sent my clients an invoice every month. Now they [sometimes] get a check instead," Bredahl says.

Kosten Metreweli (chief marketing officer) and Ditlev Bredahl (CEO), itching to get out of the press room

at CloudConnect.

OnApp isn't the only company onto this idea.

Enomaly tried to do something similar with its SpotCloud offering (based on Aflexi software, it turns out). Virtustream acquired Enomaly in December and is hoping to use it as the basis of a federated cloud service, possibly starting late this year, GigaOm reported.

And a startup called 3Crowd, which sells software for building CDNs, has talked about doing its own CDN through an upcoming service named XDN.

One thing these companies can provide is reach, which is the No. 1 barrier to building a CDN. OnApp's target customers are the small businesses that don't happen to own data centers, let alone data centers spread around the country or the world, Bredahl says.

That doesn't mean a CDN with reach is necessarily an easy sell.

"This is a business and more than technology. You need a sales team to sell this stuff, and it's much harder for a smaller operator to invest in a sales team to sell into content owners," writes Heavy Reading analyst Adi Kishore in an email to Light Reading.

Hard margins The real reason for OnApp starting its CDN business was to deepen relationships with clients, Bredahl says. But as a former CDN customer at previous jobs, he's quick with revolutionary talk about providing a service more cheaply than Akamai does.

"I wouldn't say they're milking it, but -- they're milking it," Bredahl says. "Nobody has disrupted the CDN market. There's no JetBlue there."

Bredahl might consider Akamai's margins rich, but margins for plain CDN services have gotten thin, as some speakers noted at Light Reading's Carrier Cloud Forum, held alongside CloudConnect in February.

"The CDN market is pretty hard now, especially for pure-play CDNs," said Ari Banerjee, Heavy Reading analyst, during a panel on cloud models. "Akamai is making money, but the rest of the other CDNs -- not so much." (Akamai's gross margins are about 70 percent, while Limelight's are closer to 40 percent.)

Part of the reason is competition, a factor that OnApp, 3Crowd and others will be contributing to. On top of that, service providers are getting more serious about running their own CDNs.

"Akamai is in a hard spot, to be honest, because their core business is commoditized to an extent," said consultant Stefan Bewley of Altman Vilandrie & Company during the same panel.

CDN companies themselves are recognizing this and moving into other areas of business. Akamai, for instance, has been emphasizing other areas such as cloud services, and it's getting into mobile-application acceleration with the purchase of Cotendo. (See Akamai Goes Mobile by Acquiring Cotendo.)

OnApp Announces High Performance Pay-as-you-Grow SAN

SC Online

Saqib Kazmi March 21, 2012

OnApp has announced OnApp Storage, a new storage platform for service providers and enterprises that, for the first time, offers the performance and resilience of high-end SAN products using off-the-shelf disks and server hardware. OnApp Storage is a distributed block storage platform that enables companies to build high performance, highly resilient SANs using standard SATA and SSD drives in hypervisor servers. It uses patent-pending, ‘smart disk’ technology to overcome the performance, scalability and price limitations of legacy SAN products, creating a fast, resilient storage platform with simple pay-as-you-grow pricing.

Storage has always been the biggest headache for service providers and enterprises deploying public and private clouds. Until now, they have faced a stark choice between high-end enterprise SANs with very large entry costs, and even larger upgrade and maintenance costs; open source SAN products, which tend to be complex and lack reliable support; and low-end SANs, which sacrifice true scalability, performance and resilience for affordability. OnApp Storage overcomes the limitations of each approach in a single platform.

“OnApp Storage is on the cutting edge of storage virtualization and cloud technology,” said Daniel Hoffman, CTO of SlicedTech, a provider of secure cloud services for government and enterprise clients. “By adding OnApp Storage to our OnApp cloud platform, we can increase the flexibility or our tiered storage offering without impacting our existing service delivery framework. OnApp Storage allows us to offer more robust and tailored storage solutions while, at the same time, saving money on rack space, power and cooling.”

Ditlev Bredahl, CEO of OnApp, said: “Storage is typically the biggest cost for a company deploying a public or private cloud, and it is also the most important component: if your SAN fails, people lose data. Our distributed storage model does away with the bottlenecks and scaling issues of traditional SANs – while keeping data safe – and doesn’t require massive capital outlay on proprietary hardware. We have removed the barriers for cloud providers to achieve fast, reliable and affordable storage, bringing high-performance storage to companies that would never previously have been able to afford it.”

OnApp Storage was announced today at the WHD.global 2012 exhibition in Germany, the world’s largest event for hosting and Internet service providers. OnApp also announced a beta program for the new storage platform, and is now accepting registrations at http://onapp.com/storage.

OnApp Storage is developed in OnApp’s R&D center in Cambridge, UK. The OnApp Storage team includes developers of the original OSS Xen and Citrix XenServer platform storage stack, and is led by Storage & Virtualization Architect Julian Chesterfield. Pricing details will be announced when the generally available version of OnApp Storage is launched in the second half of 2012.

Central to the effectiveness of the OnApp Storage platform is OnApp’s patent-pending, ‘smart disk’ technology.

It provides a number of benefits:

• All disks in an OnApp Storage installation are self-managing, self-discovering, self-healing and self-contained units. There is no centralized management system for the SAN, so there is no single point of failure at the storage management layer. • Cloud environments tend to produce massively parallelized and highly duplicated content. OnApp Storage features a highly efficient data de-duplication engine, so that disks need only store one instance of a unique piece of data, resulting in greater scalability and more efficient use of hardware. • Disks can be removed and added to the platform at will to simplify disaster recovery and content migration. Storage capacity and I/O performance grows proportionally you’re your cloud infrastructure, and scaling your storage capacity is as easy as adding more disks. • OnApp Storage optimizes I/O for each disk, and enables companies to optimize storage performance to minimize the impact on network bandwidth, or to maximize stripe parallelization potential. • OnApp Storage has configurable striping and redundancy options for data stored on the platform, so you can create as many redundant copies or stripes as you have disks.

OnApp Launches Free Version of OnApp Cloud, Its Leading Cloud Deployment and Management Platform

SC Online

Saqib Kazmi March 21, 2012

OnApp has announced a new free version of OnApp Cloud, which is available for download today from http://onapp.com . OnApp Cloud enables service providers and enterprises to build and run their own public, private and hybrid clouds, quickly and easily. The free version of OnApp Cloud offers similar class-leading functionality, scalability and resilience as the full version. It’s an ideal platform for companies looking to test, develop and launch their own cloud services, free of charge.

The free version of OnApp Cloud enables companies to build a fully-functional cloud on Xen hypervisors with up to 16 CPU cores, without commercial restrictions on usage. It can be used by service providers launching public clouds, enterprises launching private clouds, or developers of cloud applications, Platform-as-a-Service or Software-as-a-Service offerings.

One example is San Francisco-based NodeSocket, which is using OnApp Cloud to build a node.js hosting platform and community for developers. Justin Keller, Founder of NodeSocket, said: "OnApp has worked out amazingly well for us. It manages all the low-level hypervisor virtualization and allows us to focus on building our node.js platform stack inside the virtual machines. Using OnApp has greatly increased productivity and efficiency in our development and beta phases."

Commenting on the launch, OnApp CEO, Ditlev Bredahl said: “Our mission has always been to remove entry barriers to the cloud, and the free version of OnApp Cloud is the next logical step. There are other ‘free’ platforms, of course, but there are three crucial differences with OnApp: it’s a technology proven in more than 1,000 cloud deployments worldwide, including hundreds of service providers; it doesn't require months of development to get production ready; and you can upgrade to 24x7 support whenever you need to.”

The free version of OnApp Cloud can be installed on standard off-the-shelf hardware in just a few hours. It is supported through OnApp’s new community forums, with a simple upgrade path for users who grow beyond the 16-core limit, or who require OnApp’s 24x7 global support services. A comparison of the full and free versions is available at http://onapp.com/cloud/pricing .

OnApp launched the free version of OnApp Cloud at WHD.global in Germany, the world’s largest event for hosting and Internet service providers. Also at the show, OnApp launched a new distributed storage platform, OnApp Storage, which brings high-end SAN performance to commodity cloud infrastructure for the first time.

OnApp Launches Free Version of OnApp Cloud, Its Leading Cloud Deployment and Management Platform

vmblog.com

David Marshall March 21, 2012

OnApp has announced a new free version of OnApp Cloud, which is available for download today from http://onapp.com. OnApp Cloud enables service providers and enterprises to build and run their own public, private and hybrid clouds, quickly and easily. The free version of OnApp Cloud offers similar class-leading functionality, scalability and resilience as the full version. It’s an ideal platform for companies looking to test, develop and launch their own cloud services, free of charge.

The free version of OnApp Cloud enables companies to build a fully-functional cloud on Xen hypervisors with up to 16 CPU cores, without commercial restrictions on usage. It can be used by service providers launching public clouds, enterprises launching private clouds, or developers of cloud applications, Platform-as-a-Service or Software-as-a-Service offerings.

One example is San Francisco-based NodeSocket, which is using OnApp Cloud to build a node.js hosting platform and community for developers. Justin Keller, Founder of NodeSocket, said: "OnApp has worked out amazingly well for us. It manages all the low-level hypervisor virtualization and allows us to focus on building our node.js platform stack inside the virtual machines. Using OnApp has greatly increased productivity and efficiency in our development and beta phases."

Commenting on the launch, OnApp CEO, Ditlev Bredahl said: “Our mission has always been to remove entry barriers to the cloud, and the free version of OnApp Cloud is the next logical step. There are other ‘free’ platforms, of course, but there are three crucial differences with OnApp: it’s a technology proven in more than 1,000 cloud deployments worldwide, including hundreds of service providers; it doesn't require months of development to get production ready; and you can upgrade to 24x7 support whenever you need to.”

The free version of OnApp Cloud can be installed on standard off-the-shelf hardware in just a few hours. It is supported through OnApp’s new community forums, with a simple upgrade path for users who

grow beyond the 16-core limit, or who require OnApp’s 24x7 global support services. A comparison of the full and free versions is available at http://onapp.com/cloud/pricing.

OnApp launched the free version of OnApp Cloud at WHD.global in Germany, the world’s largest event for hosting and Internet service providers. Also at the show, OnApp launched a new distributed storage platform, OnApp Storage, which brings high-end SAN performance to commodity cloud infrastructure for the first time.

WHD 2012 – OnApp Releases Free Version of IaaS Cloud Hosting Software

The WHIR

Liam Eagle March 21, 2012

Cloud hosting software developer OnApp announced Wednesday that it has released a free version of its platform for building infrastructure-as-a-service cloud hosting environments, making it possible for hosting providers and other users to try building a cloud environment without any up-front investment.

The free version of OnApp is available for environments of up to 16 cores.

On Tuesday, at World Hosting Days, OnApp announced that it had launched a new SAN storage software component for its platform, which also includes the IaaS software and a content delivery network system.

http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/onapp-launches-san-tool-urges-cloud-hosting-cooperation

A free entry-level version makes OnApp, already a popular cloud hosting software platform, a more attractive option for hosting providers looking to start small when launching a cloud hosting service.

In a conversation with the WHIR at World Hosting Days in Germany, chief visionary officer Carlos Rego says OnApp’s free version is also aimed at attracting small-volume users with tight budgetary restrictions, such as university students, looking to build cloud infrastructure for the first time.

Users in that circumstance tend to go with open source tools, which, in the cloud hosting space, would likely mean OpenStack.

If such a user has an opportunity to get comfortable with OnApp for free, says Rego, they’re more likely to regard it as an option at some later date when, for instance, they might be working at an organization with some larger-volume requirements for building a cloud.

Of course, a commercial cloud hosting solution built on the free version of the tool certainly has the potential to grow beyond the 16-core limit, creating another paying OnApp customer. In the press release, the company says the system is designed to make it simple for cloud hosting providers to move from the free version to a paid version.

“Our mission has always been to remove entry barriers to the cloud, and the free version of OnApp Cloud is the next logical step,” says OnApp CEO Ditlev Bredahl, quoted in the press release. “There are other ‘free’ platforms, of course, but there are three crucial differences with OnApp: it’s a technology proven in more than 1,000 cloud deployments worldwide, including hundreds of service providers; it doesn’t require months of development to get production ready; and you can upgrade to 24×7 support whenever you need to.”

According to the announcement, support for the free version is provided via the OnApp forums. Support from OnApp itself is another reason a user might migrate to the paid version.

OnApp Unveils Free Version of OnApp Cloud CDN – Advisor.com March 22,2012 Yesterday (on March 21, 2012), OnApp, one of the leading providers of cloud based solutions, announced that it had launched a Free version of its leading cloud deployment and management platform, the OnApp cloud to allow customers to create public, private or hybrid clouds quickly and easily without paying any money. OnApp management mentioned that creating a free solution was always on the cards, and this was aimed at making it easy for new customers to try the power of the cloud without paying anything. While the solution is extremely easy to install and can be deployed on standard hardware in just a few hours, it also does not have any commercial restrictions. The major difference with respect to the full version is that the free version allows creation of Xen hypervisors up to 16 cores and do not come with the 24×7 global support from OnApp staff, however, upgrading to full version from the free version is also seamless and extremely easy. OnApp mentioned that the free cloud offering would help various businesses to leverage cloud for their Platform-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service solutions, and the Company mentioned the launch of its distributed storage system, the OnApp storage.

At WHD.global, OnApp Looks Back on 6 Month Expansion

Ping!Zine

March 22, 2012

Today Amazon Web Services represents one of the largest companies partaking in the cloud hosting industry. Particularly, the company’s low latency content distribution solution known as CloudFront has had its own success in the market.

Aside from receiving competition from other CDN providers including Akamai, Amazon CloudFront also faces a growing CDN market in general. On Thursday, cloud CDN provider OnApp touted its own expansion efforts during the past six months, citing sixty new CDN locations worldwide. According to OnApp, it’s an expansion that actually makes the provider’s network twice as large as Amazon’s CloudFront network.

OnApp CDN is maintained through various PoPs (Points of Presence) worldwide, a system that is based on a federated model, allowing hosting providers to purchase and resell bandwidth.

Discussing the matter in a press release, OnApp CEO Ditlev Bredahl discussed the OnApp CDN Federation. “The federated model is the only real way that service providers can compete with cloud companies like Amazon,” stated Bredahl.

“Even a large provider stands little chance against their scale and resources. Together, however, the world’s service provider community can offer more scale, better platform support, better application support and more flexible pricing,” Bredahl continued. The OnApp CEO also talked about how the OnApp CDN allows service providers to gain better profitability.

OnApp’s announcement shortly follows the company’s launch of a free version of its cloud deployment and management service OnApp Cloud on Wednesday. The company is currently partaking in WHD.global, a web hosting industry conference being held in Germany. The event is set to conclude

Friday. For more information regarding OnApp’s announcement, view a press release here (OnApp.com).

OnApp Launches Storage Platform for Cloud Service Providers

Talkin’ Cloud

Brian Taylor March 22, 2012

OnApp, a London-based cloud platform provider, announced its new storage platform “OnApp Storage” at the WHD.global 2012 exhibition in Germany. OnApp Storage is intended for service providers and enterprises and in the company’s words, “offers the performance and resilience of high-end SAN products using off-the-shelf disks and server hardware.”

OnApp is targeting a big, fast-growing marklet. Earlier this week, EVault President Terry Cunningham estimated that roughly 1,600 companies now offer cloud storage services and online backup services. And EVault, owned by Seagate Technologies, is aiming to make some acquisitions while also consolidating the market.

Still, it’s early in the cloud storage market. Thousands of VARs and MSPs are trying to figure out whether to launch their own cloud storage services. OnApp hopes to empower those potential partners with its cloud-oriented storage platform.

Indeed, OnApp says its solution overcomes enterprise SAN issues (high entry and maintenance costs), open source options that lack reliable support, and low-end products that lack scalability and performance. OnApp based the new storage platform on “patent-pending, ‘smart disk’ technology” and claim that OnApp Storage solves the problems of each of three approaches named above.

This past month Talkin’ Cloud reported that OnApp opened a new office in Utah and added 50% more support staff in the U.S. The Utah will provide Level 1 tech support. An OnApp spokesperson told us last month that they build their business by helping the more traditional channel organizations become

infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers. OnApp also offers OnApp Cloud and a content delivery network (CDN) platform.

OnApp adopters include SlicedTech, a cloud services provider in Australia. “OnApp Storage is on the cutting edge of storage virtualization and cloud technology,” said Daniel Hoffman, CTO of SlicedTech, in a prepared statement. “By adding OnApp Storage to our OnApp cloud platform, we can increase the flexibility or our tiered storage offering without impacting our existing service delivery framework.”

OnApp Storage was developed in the firm’s R&D center in Cambridge, UK. The OnApp Storage team included developers of the original OSS Xen and Citrix XenServer platform storage stack. OnApp will announce pricing when OnApp Storage is launched in the second half of 2012. The company has launched a beta program for the new storage platform; you can register to potentially participate here: http://onapp.com/storage.

OnApp Launches Storage Product

Structure Research

Phil Shih March 23, 2012

Product: OnApp Storage enables service providers to build a SAN-like storage environment with standard local drives on commodity servers (that are virtualized and running virtual/cloud instances) that power existing cloud infrastructures. OnApp Storage basically takes each physical disk that sits within existing cloud infrastructure environments and brings them together – in virtual data stores – to replicate a SAN’s functionality. The disks can be grouped by performance capacity, which enables tiered storage. OnApp has built a GUI that enables all this to be done through a web-based user interface.

Details: Once the storage infrastructure is set up, service providers can allocate storage to virtual machines in a cloud. Each data store can be replicated for redundancy and is compressed for efficiency. The architecture is modular, allowing service providers to scale the storage infrastructure by simply adding more servers and allocating the local disks.

Important features: On the performance side of things, OnApp has built technology – an option to prioritize local reads (that can also be turned off) – that optimizes i/o throughput. OnApp Storage also delivers redundancy. Physical disks can be hot swapped and moved and there is no centralized disk management system, with storage that can be moved around and load balanced across a cloud infrastructure environment – ensuring no single point of failure.

Use cases: While OnApp has targeted the storage product for service providers running OnApp cloud infrastructures it can also be deployed by enterprises for internal clouds.

Angle: OnApp is trying to create an effective low-cost storage solution that does not require significant outlays of capex but can deliver similar performance levels. It is a formidable challenge to be sure and OnApp has come up with something that may very well be an answer. OnApp has moved the storage solution into beta and there will be more details coming. But the most intriguing thing here is the potential for productization. OnApp Storage is clearly designed to work with the OnApp cloud infrastructure platform and helps augment that offering and provides a point of differentiation. But we can also see how it can be deployed as a standalone cloud storage solution. No doubt OnApp is very cognizant of Amazon’s presence and impact on the hosting sector and has built a product that combines features and capabilities with cost effectiveness that is designed to help hosters compete.

OnApp CDN Adds Twice the Global Locations as Compared to CloudFront CDN – Advisor.com March 25,2012 Yesterday (on March 21, 2012), OnApp, one of the leading providers of cloud based solutions, announced that it had launched a Free version of its leading cloud deployment and management platform, the OnApp cloud to allow customers to create public, private or hybrid clouds quickly and easily without paying any money. OnApp management mentioned that creating a free solution was always on the cards, and this was aimed at making it easy for new customers to try the power of the cloud without paying anything. While the solution is extremely easy to install and can be deployed on standard hardware in just a few hours, it also does not have any commercial restrictions. The major difference with respect to the full version is that the free version allows creation of Xen hypervisors up to 16 cores and do not come with the 24×7 global support from OnApp staff, however, upgrading to full version from the free version is also seamless and extremely easy. OnApp mentioned that the free cloud offering would help various businesses to leverage cloud for their Platform-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service solutions, and the Company mentioned the launch of its distributed storage system, the OnApp storage.

Products of the Week 4.2.12 – OnApp Cloud

Network World

March 30, 2012

Product name: OnApp Cloud

Key features: OnApp Cloud is a complete cloud management platform for service providers and enterprises, with class-leading scalability, resilience and ease of use. There’s also a free version for testing, development and small public and private clouds. More info.

Product name: OnApp Storage

UnitedHosting Directors to Actually Drive OnApp and SpamExperts Sponsored UK Racecar

The WHIR

Nicole Henderson March 30, 2012

Email security provider SpamExperts announced on Friday that in partnership with cPanel, onApp, backup provider Protexia, and dedicated server provider RackSRV, it is sponsoring the Hot Badger Motorsport car racing team. This sponsorship is unusual in that the directors of web host UnitedHosting (and a SpamExperts customer) are the drivers on the Hot Badger team.

According to its website, Hot Badger Motorsport is competing in the UK Toyota MR2 Championship and will race at UK circuits including Silverstone, Brands Hatch, Donington Park, Mallory Park, Cadwell Park, and Anglesey. The first race takes place on Sunday at Silverstone.

The car racing industry has seen quite a lot of interest from web hosting providers, most notably Go Daddy sponsoring NASCAR driver Danica Patrick and the Andretti family. More commonly, web hosts approach the industry in a service provider role rather than a sponsorship role. In March, web host Internap announced that it is providing web hosting and content delivery network services to Sahara Force India, a Formula One racing team also based in Silverstone. Two months ago, web host Tata Communications announced it would provide connectivity, web hosting and content delivery services to Formula1.com.

This group sponsorship approach is different, and may be a more affordable way for companies to advertise through sponsorships. The Go Daddy approach has seldom been copied because of the cost involved, but if companies offering complementary services band together, it becomes more of a viable advertising model.

“We are glad that we can sponsor the racing team as United Hosting is one of our valued clients and well known in the hosting industry,” Sam Renkema, founder and CEO of SpamExperts said in a statement. “This sponsorship demonstrates our commitment to our customers. We wish Matt and Simon the best of luck during the races!”

At World Hosting Days last week, cloud hosting software developer OnApp CEO Ditlev Bredahl talked about its new SAN technology and the release of a free version of its platform for building IaaS hosting environments.