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San Jose, California - (The Hosting News) - June 30, 2008 - Web host and Internet hardware networking firm, Cisco Systems, has released new products and professional services, designed to assist customers with virtualization efforts for data center operational and energy efficiency.

The company states that the new offerings make the virtual network an efficient platform for delivering data center services - accelerating, providing security, and orchestrating application delivery networks, servers, virtualized computing, and storage, while providing greater responsiveness and resource conservation.

John McCool, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Cisco Data Center, Switching and Services Group, and co-chair of the Cisco EcoBoard noted, ''Real-time collaborative applications, energy concerns and the need to achieve greater efficiency from assets are driving IT managers to transform their data centers through new technologies. By providing virtualization technologies across the data center, Cisco aims to help businesses achieve the agility and resiliency they need to compete on a global scale.''

Cisco Systems, Inc. was founded in 1984, by a group of computer scientists from Stanford University and provides Internet Protocol-based (IP) networking solutions. Cisco employs over 47,000 staff worldwide. The company's core development areas include routing and switching, as well as dvanced technologies such as: IP Communications, Network Security, Wireless LAN, Storage Area Networking, Home Networking, Video Systems, and Application Networking Services.

To learn more about Cisco, please visit: www.cisco.com.

Washington, D.C. - (The Hosting News) - June 30, 2008 - Managed data center hosting provider, Servecentric, has been selected by Tier 1 facilities-based ISP, Cogent, in order to significantly raise Ireland's rating as a location for multi-national Internet companies, with Ireland's only data center.

The Cogent high performance multi-national Tier 1 network carries over 17% of the world's Internet traffic. Cogent's cost effective fibre network will provide Servecentric customers with the ability to have almost limitless multiple Gigabit expansion opportunities.

Dave Schaeffer, CEO at Cogent explained, ''Connecting Dublin was a priority for us because of all the opportunities to serve large bandwidth customers in Dublin. We are happy to be working with Servecentric and look forward to providing the Dublin market with competitive pricing, superior network performance and a very high level of customer service.''

Cogent is consistently ranked as one of the world's top five Internet providers and currently takes its 80 - 200 Gbps backbone network and connects it to over 100 metro markets throughout North America and Europe. The network connects Servecentric to Manchester and Servecentric to London, meaning that it is very secure, with no single point of failure.

Companies that depend on micro-second connections between end-users and the core Internet applications are a key target for the new service. These include online trading, gaming, and voice and video over Internet services, where end-users want to minimise time-wasting network hops. Cogent, as a tier 1 Internet network ensures best quality and fewest possible hops from network-to-network.

Among the seventeen carriers connecting to the Servecentric data center, Cogent has been selected as one of only three providers whom any client can access via Servecentric's core internet mesh.

Lori Brown, VP EU Sales and Product Management, noted, ''Cogent has found that once our presence is established in a data center, customers quickly turn to Cogent for our competitive pricing and quality of service. Customers then experience our award winning customer service and remain a customer for a long period of time.''

Helga Muir, Sales and Marketing Manager at Servecentric commented, ''Our mutual propositions perfectly compliment each other. We have the existing client base with the high bandwidth multi-national needs that Cogent seeks. Similarly, Cogent's low-cost Tier 1 network will provide direct access to many of the world's largest corporations and internet data centers, makes Servecentric's proposition more attractive from a cost and quality point of view. Gaming is a great example of the new generation of services who place a serious value on having a single global network connected to hundreds of millions of people. With Cogent, we can enable gamers from Salzburg to Seattle to play in true real-time on a seamless network that reacts faster than the human reflex.''

Servecentric is a wholly owned, private funded, Irish organisation. It was established in August 2002 and has its headquarters in Blanchardstown Corporate Park in Dublin. It is currently Ireland's leading managed services and data center operator and provides high-quality, scaleable solutions from single cabinet collocation services to full-scale provision of managed services.

Cogent Communications (NASDAQ: CCOI) is a multinational, Tier 1 facilities-based ISP, operating one of the largest capacity IP networks in the world with lit capacities ranging from 80 to 200 Gigabits per second. Cogent specializes in providing businesses with high speed Internet access and point-to-point transport services. Cogent's facilities-based, all-optical IP network backbone provides IP services in over 100 markets located in North America and Europe.

Since Cogent's inception, Cogent has unleashed the benefits of IP technology, building one of the largest and highest capacity IP networks in existence. This network enables Cogent to offer large bandwidth connections at highly competitive prices. Cogent Communications is headquartered at 1015 31st Street, NW, Washington, D.C. 20007.

To learn more about Cogent, please visit: www.cogentco.com.

For more information about Servecentric, please visit: www.servecentric.com.

San Antonio, Texas - (The Hosting News) - June 30, 2008 - Web hosting company, Rackspace Managed Hosting, has included dedicated network-attached storage (DNAS), a scalable and fully-supported file-based storage system, to expand its storage portfolio offerings.

Designed for enterprises requiring access to large storage, the application is built on the NetApp[R] FAS2000 series storage system. Rackspace DNAS comes in multiple flexible configurations designed by Rackspace storage experts, all of which include several data protection solutions to offer instant backup and data recovery while ensuring the highest security and reliability of customers' stored data. DNAS is offered in a modular architecture allowing customers to buy smaller storage 'packs' providing multiple terabytes of usable storage space.

John Engates, CTO, Rackspace Hosting noted, ''Regulatory requirements, sophisticated applications and the flood of media-rich Web 2.0 sites and software as a service are pushing enterprises to collect and store vast amounts of data. These growing needs require very different storage options. We've responded to our customers' requests by pushing storage to the forefront of our product roadmap, unveiling a breadth of solutions ranging from our CloudFS offering designed for developers and businesses that need highly scalable and low-cost storage up to a fully dedicated NAS offering for enterprises requiring large, file-based storage.''

Rackspace DNAS includes access to a team of dedicated NAS experts to help customers design, scale and maintain an optimal storage configuration for their enterprise architecture. For many customers operating on heterogeneous IT environments, DNAS also allows simultaneous access to stored data from both Windows and Linux platforms, a unique capability among industry NAS offerings.

Steven Wilson, Director of IT, PointRoll noted, ''As a provider of rich media advertising technology, our storage needs are considerable with the amount of digital content we develop. As one of Rackspace's first customers to start pushing for a dedicated NAS offering, we have been able to provide valuable input on what web 2.0 companies are looking for. Rackspace's new DNAS offering provides the scalability we need, allowing us to buy additional storage packs as our business grows instead of paying for a large amount that we may or may not need up front. This modular access coupled with Rackspace's support and technical expertise makes it a storage investment that is hard to beat in the industry.''

In addition to its new dedicated NAS offering, Rackspace's expanding storage portfolio includes:

* CloudFS, a web-based storage offering that is currently undergoing beta testing and provided through the company's cloud hosting division, Mosso. CloudFS allows developers to securely store a virtually unlimited amount of data on the web connected through the Rackspace infrastructure.

* Direct attached storage (DAS), a dedicated storage solution for applications that require a lower-cost entry-level cluster or that need an economical solution for expanded storage.

* Storage area network (SAN), an enterprise-class block-based storage option for applications such as databases that require storage that is tuned for optimized performance, low latency, scalability, flexibility and reliability.

Rackspace delivers a diverse suite of enterprise-class hosted IT services to businesses of all sizes. Customers choose Rackspace for its hosting specialization and expertise, backed by the company's award-winning Fanatical Support. By integrating the industry's best technologies and delivering them as services, Rackspace serves as an extension of its customers' IT departments. Because Rackspace removes the burden of infrastructure maintenance and management, customers can focus on their core business. Rackspace's portfolio of companies also includes the Mosso (www.mosso.com) cloud computing platform and Mailtrust (www.mailtrust.com) a provider of business-class hosted email solutions.

To learn more about Rackspace's dedicated NAS and other storage offerings, please visit: www.rackspace.com/solutions/storage/dnas.php.

For more information about Rackspace Managed Hosting, please visit: www.rackspace.com.

Day three of Layered Tech's third annual LT PACT started bright and early at 8:30 a.m. (perhaps a little too early considering it's Vegas, according to a few of the attendees) with a keynote by Tier 1 Research's founder Andy Schroepfer, someone we haven't seen as much of at hosting events as of late. But, as always, he was an absolute pleasure to listen to.

Insightful, engaging and well-spoken, Schroepfer's presentation "The $1.2 Billion Dollar Bet Against Hosting" took a look at the state of the declining American economy in general versus rising oil prices and how much of a game changer that has been for the IT industry.

Schroepfer talked about how rising oil prices affected business on the Web and encouraged a digital economy. What this translates to is the more expensive gas gets, the less people will want to go OUT shopping. Thus, they will be more inclined to turn to the Web to spend their money. So businesses need focus on being able to deliver their product or service effectively through the Internet.

The keynote also touched on one of the biggest topics throughout the event, cloud computing. Last year it was all about the grid, this year it's all about the cloud. Schroepfer expects the cloud to become relevant to enterprise very soon - much sooner than James Staten's projected timeline for when cloud computing would be embraced by the enterprise market - and believes it will eventually "kill" the dedicated market because end-users will be demanding a pay per play hosting model.

Other interesting highlights throughout the day included an interactive panel about the business of blogging (moderated by Aaron Phillips, VP of sales and marketing for FastServers and featuring Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, John Pozadzides, CMO for Layered Tech and Lorelle VanFossen, a woman who was blogging about blogging before blogging was called blogging. Say that three times fast!) and The Nutbra. I'm not even kidding. It somehow pertains to intellectual property. But you quite possibly had to be there to believe it.

The event wrapped up with Layered Tech's annual Texas Hold'em Poker Tournament (which, I admittedly did quite poorly on) BUT WHIRtv producer/videographer Matt did the WHIR team some justice by placing in 6th!!

Check out the pics from the event from our Flickr page here.

June 27, 2008 -- ( <http://www.thewhir.com> WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- A group of Turkish hackers calling themselves "NetDevilz" defaced on Thursday the official sites of Internet governing bodies IANA and ICANN, according to researchers.