(The Hosting News) – Hosting.com, the leading provider of managed hosting, cloud hosting and colocation solutions, today announced the ability for customers to park virtual machines within its Cloud Enterprise solution. Cloud parking is the latest release from Hosting.com that makes cloud hosting cost-effective and simple for VMware customers to upload, park and manage their virtual machines in a service provider cloud.

Cloud Enterprise is the first multi-tenant cloud hosting environment to introduce virtual machine parking. Parking stores a virtual machine in a powered-down state to be brought back to a live state at a time of need. Parked virtual machines may be brought back up in just a few minutes, with all system state information, applications, data and configuration settings identical to their state prior to being parked. While a virtual machine is parked, the resource cost is substantially less than a running virtual machine, providing a customer significant cost savings.

Customers began utilizing the VMDK upload functionality upon its release in late 2009. Customer feedback and requests led to the quick development of the parking functionality within Cloud Enterprise. Requests for cloud parking were made to allow existing customers to park virtual machines until the file is needed primarily for cost-effective disaster recovery purposes. Many customers will also hibernate virtual machines during the development life cycle to test functionality prior to a product release.

Fred Strelzoff, Hosting.com Cloud Product Manager, added, “There is a huge demand for customers seeking to store all the system state information of a virtual machine in a “parked” state for use at a later time. The largest use case we see for this service today is for business continuance services. Parking allows customers to park a warm copy of a virtual machine that can be activated within a minute or two in the event of a disaster.”

Many of Hosting.com’s customers are equally concerned with cloud security, functionality and also management. For cloud and virtual machine management, Hosting.com customers utilize a secure web-based Customer Portal to manage and provision their Cloud Hosting solutions. The Customer Portal provides the ability to administer virtual machines, adjust resources, add services, view and create alarms, and perform other functions such as parking. Modifications made via the Customer Portal are available immediately.

Cloud Enterprise is a VMware-based, Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud hosting solution providing customer’s on-demand provisioning, rapid deployment of compute and disk resources, no required contracts, and interconnectivity to private cloud and dedicated hosting environments.

Cloud Enterprise leverages the latest in virtualization platform technology with VMware vSphere 4, and is highly available on both the computing and disk infrastructures. Hosting.com has made significant investments in enterprise-class technologies such as EMC, Dell, Juniper, F5, and Intel to deliver a robust, standards-based cloud infrastructure to clients demanding unparalleled performance and security.

 

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Hosting.com is a global provider of enterprise-class IT infrastructure solutions, services and facilities. Hosting.com’s geographically-dispersed data centers and Cloud Super Sites coupled with the industry’s top networking and connectivity technologies provide clients with the highest levels of security, reliability and support. The most recognized names in Retail, Financial Services, Healthcare, Government, Technology and Web 2.0 rely on Hosting.com’s colocation, cloud hosting, dedicated and managed hosting solutions.

Hosting.com currently operates SAS 70 Type II certified datacenters in Irvine, CA; Louisville, KY; Newark, DE; San Francisco, CA; and Denver, CO.

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Hosting.com Introduces Virtual Machine Parking to Cloud Marketplace