The acquisition comes as a result of a increased demand for Cloud services. It’s clear to us that South African businesses are waking up to the advantages of Cloud hosting as opposed to traditional hosting models like in-sourced Data Centres and dedicated servers. We also believe that the prolific emergence of innovative technology companies and supporting community-driven bodies such as Silicon Cape are also factors spurring the growth of Cloud services in the mother city.

Earlier this year we introduced South Africa’s first true Cloud Server product, offering consumers needing to host locally a Cloud hosting experience only available through overseas Cloud giants such as Rackspace and Amazon. To date, over two thousand Cloud servers have been provisioned on the RSAWEB Cloud!

One of the most significant aspects of the new DC is the ability to enable dual Data Centre redundancy. The geographic location of the new facility in relation to our flagship Data Centre in Cape Town is a huge competitive advantage. Both Data Centres are directly connected by fibre links – enabling us to replicate data and provide unparalleled redundancy for mission-critical hosting solutions. Further redundancy is added as both Data Centres operate on separate Eskom power grids, and are connected via separate Telkom exchanges. The new facility also boasts high-speed fibre links to Telkom, Neotel and RSAWEB’s own fibre network.

As has been the case historically, our strategy going forward is to build and own our own Data Centres. Looking to the future, we have Johannesburg in our sights for future acquisitions, and are currently looking for suitable opportunities.

The new DC is currently being upgraded, and is set to come online in late December 2010.

If your business is web-enabled in some way or form, it would be in your best interests to understand what the geeks are droning on about.

We’ve created a simple guide to Cloud Computing for those who are wanting to gain a basic understanding of the topic – a concise guide for the uninitiated.

Read it online here. Or download it and share it with friends in pdf format.

Enjoy.

1. Cloud based Technologies
With the success and rapid adoption of cloud based technologies in international markets, it’s only a matter of time before this game-changer reaches our shores, offering services that are faster to market than ever before. Expect some big developments in this space from RSAWEB in the near future.

2. Modular Data Center design
A more modular approach to data centre design will be employed, only providing resources for space being utilized. Previously, newly-built data centers often had huge areas of vacant floor space, fully powered and backed by an uninterruptible power supply (UPS), water-and air-cooled while they were predominantly empty.

3. Flash Memory
Flash memory is not a new technology, but it is only now beginning to gain momentum as the price drops with increasing demand.

According to international research company Gartner, at the current rate of price drops, this technology will enjoy more than a 100 percent compound annual growth rate during the new few years and become strategic in many IT areas including consumer devices, entertainment equipment and other embedded IT systems.

4. Virtualization for Availability
Recent developments in virtualization technology such as live migration, has brought a new focus on this technology, which now provides higher availability than before. Such developments will allow for the cost and complexity systems to be reduced.

5. Mobile Applications
An often overlooked factor in a country that has 3 times more mobile internet users than broadband users. By the end of 2010, Gartner predicts that world wide 1.2 billion people will carry handsets capable of rich, mobile commerce providing a prosperous environment for the convergence of mobility and the Web.

Virtualisation in the context of hosting has come a long way in recent years. Creating and using VM’s was once a risky business, used only by the brave on low risk projects.

These days, virtualisation is fast becoming an industry standard, as the technology behind it has matured, offering a totally robust and reliable product. Businesses across the globe are already taking advantage of the overwhelming benefits that virtualisation provides:

Better utilisation of resources
Multiple virtual servers / applications can be consolidated onto fewer sets of physical hardware, making better usage of physical resources. Though the virtual environment is ‘shared’ across physical hardware, each virtual server still has its own dedicated physical resources (RAM, CPU etc.).

Reduced risk
The architecture of Virtual environments allows for more redundancies (such as centralized SAN storage) to be built in, significantly reducing down-time in the event of hardware or software failure. Things can fail independently. For instance, one operating system can fail while others running on the same machine continue to function normally.

Virtual servers consist of a single system file, which means you can easily create a backup copy of your entire VM. If you encounter problems, you can replace your existing VM with your backup copy.

Scalability, Flexibility and Availability
The process of ‘installing’ new servers or allocating additional resources to a particular virtual server is now faster and easier to achieve, it can be done in minutes instead of having to do a physical machine upgrade and buying new hardware. We can just ‘turn it on’ by giving your system more RAM, CPU and storage.

Combined with shared storage device, virtualisation enables you to migrate from one physical machine to another without a single second of downtime allowing easier maintenance of physical hardware. Should a server have a hardware issue, the virtual machines can quickly and easily be restarted on another physical set of hardware, minimising any downtime.

It’s Greener
Better utilisation of resources reduces energy consumption in data centre environments. As much as 70% energy consumption can be achieved in most cases.

RSAWEB has extensive experience with virtualisation technology in various different applications. Many of our Dedicated Server & Managed Hosting Server customers are currently utilising virtual platforms to great effect. Give us a shout to find out how virtualisation can benefit you.

Data Centres are really the backbone of the Internet. Often taken for granted by the general public, they provide the infrastructure that houses the applications and data that we access on a daily basis.

We encourage people at levels of the Internet technology chain learn more about the hardware and environments behind hosting technology, and gain a more holistic understanding of how it all fits together.

RSAWEB Data Centre tours offer you the chance to come and experience first hand the inner-workings of our flagship Cape Town Data Centre. On the tour, our team of technical virtuosos will bring you up to speed on:

• New technologies such as Virtualisation & SAN Storage.
• The nuts and bolts behind popular products such as Colocation, Dedicated Servers & Shared hosting.
• Why Data Centre environments are fast replacing onsite hosting solutions.

Want to join our latest tour? Sign up on www.rsaweb.co.za for our latest scheduled tour on 6 August 2009.

Disasters
Fires, floods and other disasters always can catch us unaware at the best of times. Your average business will have their physical assets covered by insurance – smart businesses will have their data covered with a backup solution.

Theft
Laptops, servers & other storage devices are rarely recovered in the event of theft. A good backup solution provides a highly secure environment for data storage hardware.

Accidental deletion
Statistically, this constitutes the highest percentage of data loss causes. Human error should always be factored into the equation where business-critical data is concerned.

Hardware failures
It’s no secret that PC & laptop hard-drives crash on a regular basis. Daily automated backups help to effectively minimize the data loss resulting from hardware failure.

We cannot foresee what obstacles might get thrown our way, but we can control how we recover from them. With RSAWEB’s online backup service you can be rest assured that your precious data is given the five star treatment it deserves.

RSAWEB provide a strictly confidential vault for your data’s safe-keeping and only you determine who has access to the information. With the Desktop License Package, you can backup up to 2GB of data for only R75 per desktop per month and with the Server License, you get access to backup 5GB of data for only R245 per server per month.

Still not convinced? RSAWEB is offering a 30 day trial version that you can download from the website for an instant 1GB data backup, it’s quick and easy and definitely worthwhile, cause let’s be honest…. There’re just some things money can’t buy back.

For more info visit our online backup website.