New Cloud Services Certification Program by Parallels

The Hosting News – Worldwide cloud enablement leader, Parallels, today launched its new Cloud Services Certification Program to help its Partners become more profitable.

This new Partner Certification Program will be available to all Parallels partners and individuals and will provide dedicated training for its panel, virtualization and automation products.

“We are proud to be one of the first Cloud enablement companies to offer a Certification program and believe this is critical to increasing our Partners credibility and knowledge of our products. We believe that with this training and certification program, we will help partners reduce their operation and support costs,” said Jack Zubarev, President of Worldwide Service Providers at Parallels.

Attendees to the Parallels Summit 2010 can receive a discount of up to 30% on the costs of training depending on the level of Partnership.

“I found the training to be very thorough. It provided in depth knowledge that was useful for veteran Plesk users. If you want to know the ins and outs of Parallels Plesk, this course will certainly deliver,” said Joe Pavoncordero, Training Manager at Media Temple.

Parallels Certification training will provide many benefits including:

• Tier 2 Support that delivers faster response times from professional engineers
• More Highly-Skilled Employees trained as self-sufficient Parallels product experts
• Expert Recognition through the placement of the Parallels Certified logo, website badges and icons ensuring companies are validated as leaders in hosting and cloud services.

Registration is limited to 15 students per class and will be held at the Fontainbleu Hotel, Miami Beach on February 25 2010 so sign-up today and take advantage of this special offer

What is Parallels Helm Control Panel - part 1

In the hosting industry, in order to automate various administration tasks and also to make it easier for the hosting customers to manage their daily tasks (like adding emails, managing databases etc.) a hosting control panel is needed. A control panel is a frontend, a "layer" above the operating system that is user friendly and makes things easier for both administrators and customers. If there were no control panels, then each customer should make support requests to the administrators to complete basic tasks (like creating an email, change the password of an ftp account etc.) - that would drive the work load of a hosting company to crazy levels and would increase the cost of hosting.

Parallels Helm Control Panel is a multiserver control panel for Microsoft Windows Server - it is scalable and supports clustering of services. This means that each service can be installed and run on separate servers. For example you may have 1 box running DNS1 and Mail service, another box running MSSQL and DNS2 and another box running the Web service (IIS). Such setup is highly available and offers better management for the servers and better uptime overall.

For a list of providers, please check our web hosting directory.

The Planet Extends High-Performance SAN to Dedicated Hosting Customers

(The Hosting News) – HOUSTON – The Planet, a global leader in IT hosting, today announced the availability of the Dell PowerVault MD3000i, a high-performance storage area network (SAN) disk array. Ideal for multi-server environments such as virtual and private racks, the MD3000i offers a cost-effective and scalable storage solution.

The MD3000i uses iSCSI Ethernet technology to enable shared storage across multiple servers, eliminating the need to build out a costly fiber channel infrastructure. Up to 16 servers can share the MD3000i, which has 15 internal drive slots for a total storage capacity up to 15 terabytes (TB). In the event more capacity is required, companies can add up to two MD1000 storage arrays to the MD3000i for an additional 45TB.

“One of the most critical business challenges customers face today is data storage, and all too often it’s also one of the most costly,” said Rob Walters, director of product management for The Planet. “The MD3000i lowers the barrier to entry for high-performance, consolidated storage, and also provides a clear path for expansion for companies that expect to see their storage requirements grow.”

About the Dell PowerVault MD3000i

The iSCSI SAN array provides a scalable and low-cost storage solution, which continually protects daily operations and enables an easy path for expansion:

Cost-effective: The MD3000i, The Planet’s lowest-priced SAN, can be shared by as many as 16 servers, which eliminates the high cost of buying individual storage devices for each server.

Scalable: In addition to its 15 internal drive slots, customers can add up to two 15-drive MD1000 disk arrays to the MD3000i, for up to 45TB of storage.

Capable: With its large capacity and high availability, the MD3000i is ideal for businesses running performance-intensive applications, databases, and file or archive storage.

For more information, visit the Web site at http://www.theplanet.com/storage-area-network/.

Through Dec. 31, the company is offering a promotion on the MD3000i and MD1000. Customers will receive either the SAN or DAS enclosure free with purchase of 15 1TB or 300GB hard drives, a savings up to $650 per month. For details, visit http://www.theplanet.com/Direct-Attached-Storage-Offer/.

About The Planet

The Planet is the leading provider of On Demand IT Infrastructure solutions, hosting more than 20,000 small- and medium-size businesses and 18.5 million Web sites worldwide. Customers have the power to choose from the broadest range of hosting solutions in the industry, from dedicated servers, Managed Dedicated Servers, Northstar Managed Hosting™ and data center colocation, all backed by 24?7x365 support.

For additional information, visit http://www.theplanet.com.