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I don't have a Second Life account. I've never been completely clear on the merits of the program, though I wouldn't argue necessarily that they don't exist. For me, it wasn't so much a question of whether it was a good virtual world as it was a question of whether I needed to experience a virtual world at all. I don't, I think. Not just now, anyway.

So when IBM announced earlier this year that it was launching a virtual green data center in Second Life, it made for an interesting story, but didn't immediately strike me as something to check out. As I said, I don't have a Second Life account.

And I'll admit that, not having the perspective of a user, the concept of a data center in Second Life puzzles me somewhat - it's sort of the opposite of a data center in the sense that it actually takes up space in one.

Of course, I understand the demonstration aspect of the thing. And the fact that it's showing off the company's green technologies is cool. I just wasn't going to go visit it.

Fortunately, somebody else did.

On the Enterprise IT Planet blog, Pedro Hernandez, apparently more intrepid than I, ventured into Second Life, and posted a travelogue of his visit to IBM's green data center, complete with screencaps.

Rather than repeat too much of the review, I'm just going to recommend that you go read it.

Some of the highlights of the tour: hot and cold air design demos, data center case studies, an actual server room (which I imagine would be particularly interesting to someone who hadn't been in a server room), the NOC and a variety of multi-media presentations.

All told, it looks like a pretty interesting means of presenting these ideas, and I'm sure it would be even more exciting if I had a relationship with Second Life. If using the program to build demonstrations like this becomes more of a common project, I suppose I'll have to acquaint myself with it.

Hey. This probably shouldn't come as a surprise either, but while doing a bit of poking around in Google for notes on IBM's virtual data center, I came across a couple of YouTube clips.

This one even has a fairly informative "Project Big Green" voiceover:

La Habra, California - (The Hosting News) - September 30, 2008 - Web Hosting provider, Lunarpages, has deployed the customized alert system of JustUptime's to suit their needs, Lunarpages began adding all of their technicians into their contact base.

Amy Armitage, Head of Business Development for Lunarpages remarked, ''We knew this was a great solution when we saw it. JustUptime really does represent the future of what online service delivery should be: easy to use, transparent, seamless and technologically advanced. The increased reliability really gave us an edge in our industry; there simply isn't a better solution for monitoring servers available on the market.''

Lunarpages currently hosts over 150,000 customers on a wide range of servers each requiring maximum uptime and quick response time for their users. Their advantage is reliability and their selection of JustUptime has actually allowed them to increase sales based on this factor.

Monitoring such a large number of servers is an impossible task for any webhosting company not willing to invest thousands on development of an in-house solution. Lunarpages contacted JustUptime to improve their company's performance and were immediately setup with a set of logins to their control panel. Lunarpages found Just Uptime's control panel easy enough to begin monitoring their first server within minutes and appreciated the user friendly look and feel of the service.

To customize JustUptime's alert system to suit their needs, Lunarpages began adding all of their technicians into their contact base. They were then able to configure each monitor to alert individual technicians by either SMS, email or both. This meant Lunarpages could now alert the appropriate technician in every possible communications method ensuring the issue would be resolved quickly.

By using JustUptime to monitor their entire network of servers, Lunarpages increased their response time to server issues and reduced the number of downtime related support tickets by 96%. Incredibly their response time to server issues meant their downtime was shortened so much that to customers hadn't even felt the impact.

Aside from alerts, Lunarpages technicians were able to use the uptime and response time data to present graphs and reports from within the JustUptime control panel. These helped with weekly meetings and provided hard copy proof of their uptime which they proudly display via a link in the footer of their website. In short this has helped them develop new sales, based on reliability.

Just Uptime is a web based server and website monitoring service offering immediate real time alerts to downtime incidents. Just Uptime has a global reach and provides vivid and detailed flash logs of monitored sites. Just Uptime is part of the 'Just Develop It' group.

Lunarpages Web Hosting, based in California and serving over 150,000 customers, offers affordable award winning shared and dedicated web hosting and web design services. Lunarpages offers the webmaster community to easily and quickly build and maintain a website that is customized to individual needs. The company is consistently rated the most dependable, responsive and recommended host, while encouraging community interaction via the Lunarpages Forums and the Lunarpages Blog. Lunarpages.com provides a free domain for life to customers,with multiple domain packages for shared and dedicated accounts, hosted on UNIX and Windows Servers.

For more information about JustUptime, please visit: www.justuptime.com.

To learn more about LunarPages, please visit: www.lunarpages.com.

London, United Kingdom - (The Hosting News) - September 30, 2008 - Reseller web hosting provider, ResellersPanel has recently launched a new website, offering detailed descriptions, demo versions and the free installation of over 30 open source PHP scripts.

PhpBB2, WordPress, Joomla, Mambo, osCommerce, Drupal, Coppermine and many others, are grouped in the following categories: Blog, Forum, CMS, E-Commerce, Photo Gallery, Wiki, Classified Ads, Calendar, Guestbook, Project Management, Client Management, Ad Management, Customer Support. The one-click automated script installation available through the new Elefante Installer website will help users avoid the difficulties related to the otherwise quite complicated PHP script installation process, which requires at least some basic knowledge of MySQL, phpMyAdmin, the Apache web server, on their part.

Nick Blaskov, CFO of ResellersPanel, indicated that the new Elefante Installer website is designed to help people who would like to have a website of their own establish a successful online presence, that now even novices can install popular PHP packages and create a blog, a forum, an e-shop, a gallery or a guestbook in a matter of seconds, without having to possess PHP script configuration and installation knowledge or any server administration, web design and programming skills, and without the help of a professional webmaster, and that all accounts ordered through the Elefante website will be hosted on an entirely new in-house developed semi-cluster platform, wherein last generation Quad-Core servers distribute the load generated by the different hosting services between each other, thus making it several times faster than the widespread one-server ones.

Typing the elefanteinstaller.com URL into a web browser will take the visitors to a website where they can see detailed explanations of the functionalities of the various PHP scripts and learn how each script is working in real website environment through the admin and client demo accounts provided. However, if a given reseller's customer opens elefanteinstaller.com through the respective link placed on that reseller's web store, the Elefante website will also display the hosting offers of the very reseller whose store the client has been referred from. In this case the name of that reseller's store will appear in the URL of the Elefante website immediately after the domain name itself, which will increase its brand awareness, and elefanteinstaller.com will in fact serve as an additional reseller web store.

Each web hosting plan offered on the reseller web stores and, respectively, on the new Elefante website, has been optimized to accommodate websites based on the various scripts elefanteinstaller.com is offering, and comes with a free website builder, free domain name registration and PHP script installation options, and a set of free marketing tools for boosting website popularity. Moreover, all users can download for free any of the Joomla templates and WordPress themes currently on offer, and create dynamic, content-rich, professionally-looking, multi-language personal and business websites, online communities, blogs or e-commerce portals quickly and easily.

Launched in April 2003, ResellersPanel offers a completely free, fully-automated reseller hosting program, which has developed the private label reseller idea to the fullest by helping approximately 100 000 resellers to establish their own full-blown web hosting companies and create brand awareness. ResellersPanel is an innovator in yet another aspect, namely that unlike other alternatives on the market, the entire platform, web hosting control panels, website building tools, turn-key templates and application programming interface software allowing a full customization of client websites, have been created, developed and designed in-house by ResellersPanel entirely on its own. In addition to the free program, the company offers also a cPanel reseller hosting program, dedicated, semi-dedicated and virtual private servers, domain name registration, and boasts one of the fastest and most reliable client support teams in the industry.

To learn more, please visit: www.resellerspanel.com.

Fairfield, New Jersey - (The Hosting News) - September 30, 2008 - Business automation solutions provider, Archive Systems, has debuted the introduction of another addition to its suite of ASPEN 360 Accounts Payable solutions.

The AP-Virtual File Edition (AP-VFE), which provides web-based image hosting and viewing of invoices, expense reports, and journal entries through an affordable, subscription-based document management service.

Dave Craig, President of Archive Systems noted, ''This is an exciting product for any company that wants to improve its Accounts Payable department right now, but isn't yet ready to embrace full AP imaging and workflow automation. AP-VFE delivers immediate results. AP departments can sign up and start using the system the same day. Think of it; no more lost files, no more endless searching through file cabinets, no more wasted effort tracking down invoice payment information. And you can start using it today because there's no hardware to install, support, and upgrade, and no software to modify, implement, and maintain.''

AP-VFE takes the invoices, expense reports, and journal entries out of the filing cabinets of the back office and makes them instantly available from any authorized desktop - Internet speed and 'e-world' efficiency replaces the 'old world' of hand pulling, copying, routing, and refilling countless pieces of paper.

Documents can be scanned, indexed and uploaded into AP-VFE directly by a user. Alternatively, scan, index and upload can be performed by the ASPEN 360 Team at one of their Invoice Virtualization Centers (IVC). Uploaded invoices and expense reports are immediately available for retrieval and reviewing through the AP-VFE's powerful search engine and comprehensive editor. The editor supports: index entry and modification; annotations; notes; history and audit trail.

Mr. Craig added, ''The future of AP processing is crystal clear; it will revolve around paperless invoices and fully automated workflows; but there are practical issues that will determine just how fast each organization adopts this change. Organizations that wish to approach the future at a slightly less aggressive pace will find AP-VFE the perfect next step.''

Archive Systems, Inc. provides services that automate, streamline, and optimize complex processes to manage the flow of document-based work throughout an organization. The company's flagship solution, ASPEN 360, bridges the automation gaps, those places where people, paper and process collide, that are so prevalent in back-office business processes. ASPEN 360 Accounts Payable Edition combines best practices AP Automation with ZeroTouch AP imaging and workflow. The Virtual File Room Edition allows organizations to image and access a wide range of content including HR employee records and I-9 forms as well as legal documents and leases. The product includes ASPEN 360 Paper Virtualization Center which removes from the client all tasks associated with document imaging, data capture, document classification, indexing, and OCR. Physical records management services are also provided through a number of Record Center locations.

For more information, please visit: www.archivesystems.com.

London, United Kingdom - (The Hosting News) - September 30, 2008 - Data center services company, ControlCircle, is supporting the nation's most vulnerable young people and their families, by taking part in an annual IT industry event.

Highlighing the whole issue of youth homelessness, ControlCircle's Chief executive officer, Damian Milkins, along with Ben Radomski, corporate communications manager, will give up a night in bed, take to their sleeping bags and sleep out in Potter's Field, near London Bridge.

Barbara Gill, Senior Fundraising Executive, at Action for Children noted, ''What better way for people to really understand the vulnerability that comes from having no home than to experience it for themselves, even it's for just one evening. That's what the Byte Night experience sets out to do.''

This year marks the 10th anniversary of Byte Night and, since it began, over 1.6 million has been raised by people working in IT to give young people a better future.

In 1998, just 35 people slept out and raised 35,000. Since then, Byte Night has grown to become nationwide with this year's event on Friday October 3, 2008 expected to see 500 people in London, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Manchester and the Thames Valley taking part to raise what is hoped will be 500,000 pounds to fund vital Action for Children projects.

Ken Deeks, founder of Byte Night added, ''The idea for Byte Night came to me when I saw an Action for Children poster on the Underground seeking funding to help end youth homelessness by the millennium. At the time, the IT industry was making huge sums of money on Y2K bug fixes so I thought I'd put the two together and get a hugely rich industry to support a charity which had a pressing need for assistance to solve a really important social problem.''

While much has been done to reduce it, at least 75,000 children and young people experienced homelessness in the UK in the past year, in other words 1 out of every 100 person aged between 16 and 24.(1) The reasons for this are complex but typically result from young people leaving the care system, trauma during childhood or having to leave home because their parents will not accommodate them. And the effects are significant. A third of all young homeless people attempt suicide and, according to the Home Office, 70% are diagnosed with depression or other mental health disorders, or have concerns about their mental health.

Damian Milkins, Chief Executive Officer remarked, ''Frankly most of us have the unconditional support from family to cope with life ups and downs. For those that don't, things can get tricky with some young people ending up in difficulty. That's where Action for Children steps in and we're proud to be supporting such a worthy organisation.''

Action for Children is the new name for NCH, the children's charity, one of the UK's leading children's charities established in 1869. Action for Children works in partnership to run nearly 450 services for nearly 170,000 of the UK's most vulnerable children, young people and their families.

ControlCircle, a City-based datacentre services company, is focused on designing, implementing and providing ongoing monitoring and management of mission critical networks and systems for companies and e-commerce sites who need complete confidence in system uptime and security.

Vendor neutral, with a consultative approach to meet clients' needs, ControlCircle offers an end-to-end solution covering data storage, network security, networking and connectivity, hosting and managed services. And it is the breadth of its managed services, SAN and 24/7/365 monitoring and support which sets ControlCircle apart.

For further information about Byte Night, please visit: www.bytenight.org.uk.

To learn more about ControlCircle, please visit: www.controlcircle.com.

September 30, 2008 -- ( <http://www.thewhir.com> WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Distributed denial-of-service mitigation solution provider IntruGuard application has been granted a patent that covers core elements of an effective DDoS mitigation solution if a hacker tries to cripple a site with a DDoS attack.

September 30, 2008 -- ( <http://www.thewhir.com> WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Domain aftermarket provider Moniker announced on Tuesday that more than $3 million in premium domain names were purchased during Moniker's live auctions at the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. New York domain conference last week.

September 30, 2008 -- ( <http://www.thewhir.com> WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Distributed denial-of-service mitigation solution provider IntruGuard application has been granted a patent that covers core elements of an effective DDoS mitigation solution if a hacker tries to cripple a site with a DDoS attack.