F5 Networks recently surveyed 250 companies’ senior IT Personnel about Cloud Computing, and one thing remains consistent – IT managers cannot come together regarding the consensual definition of the term. In fact, the survey represented no less than six separate definitions of cloud computing, and participants could not designate which was “right.”

The two most popular definitions were:

* Cloud computing is on-demand access to virtualized IT resources that are housed outside of your own data center, shared by others, simple to use, paid for via subscription and accessed over the Web.

* Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the “cloud.”

Interestingly, despite this massive confusion as to an exact definition, cloud computing continues to gain ground amongst IT professionals and the general public. In fact, 99% of the respondents to F5?s survey are actively discussing or implementing a cloud solution within their organization. More than half (66%) have set aside sizable budgets to implement said solution.

Additionally, IT Managers have high expectations for what can be “offloaded” to cloud environments. This is, of course, interesting depending on your own vision of what cloud computing is. 75% of the survey respondents believe PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) is part of the cloud. 66% said Iaas (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) should be or already is included. Interestingly, the most popular buzzword of all finds relative obscurity in the survey. SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) registered with only 60% of the participants. Can’t win them all, SaaS.

The things that drive the need for a public cloud are quite different than requirements reported by private cloud users.

* Public Cloud – #1 efficiency, #2 reducing capital costs, #3 easing staffing issues

* Private Cloud – #1 reducing capital costs, #2 agility, #3 easing staffing issues

It’s interesting that there is so little consensus given IT managers and their propensity for wanting to find out how things work. The critical technology must be addressed and defined before 100% of IT managers get behind the idea. The main concerns they want addressed before adopting could computing solutions are Access Control, Network Security, and Server and Storage Virtualization. Once that is done, then cloud will be here to stay.

You may have heard some talk around the office cooler about Alfresco. What is it? What does it do? Most importantly, how will it benefit your business?

Simply put, Alfresco is an open source alternative for enterprise content management(ECM.) ECM, then, is everything and nothing at once. It’s the pretty much an all-purpose term referring to how an organization delivers content and information. Think of a brand being the book cover, and enterprise content management is all of that ooey-gooey information inside of the book. It’s the reality behind the image of a brand. This can be anything from public domain content to employee emails and instant message sessions. So, yeah. Your company probably has a whole lot of enterprise content. And it needs to be managed.

ECM tools, then, allow the management of an enterprise level organization’s information. This is done in a variety of ways and, in the past, primarily done on closed systems such as Sharepoint and Documentum. However, Alfresco is an open source solution. This means the program and code contained therein are allowed to be accessed by users just like you. Poke around, see how it works, tinker with it to make it better to suit your needs. Not a coder? Don’t worry. A lot of other people using it are, and you’ll be sure they are making their revisions available.

The use of an open system offers many benefits, including:

• Speed – Alfresco is five times faster than Traditional Closed Systems
• Cost – Alfresco is 90% Less Expensive than Traditional Closed Systems

So what is Alfresco exactly? It’s an ECM management tool with a set of features to maximize ease of use and stability. Alfresco is:

• Open – Open Source, Open Standards
• Source – Best-of-Breed Open Source Components
• Enterprise – Enterprise-Scale, Enterprise-Infrastructure, Enterprise-Control
• Content – Documents, records, Web Pages, Images, Rich Media
• Management – Most Experienced Team in Content Management in the World from Documentum and Vignette.

The content management is a large system unto itself. Alfresco offers toolsets for document management, web content management, records management and collaborative content management. Anything and everything your company makes record of can be managed using this effective program.

Alfresco is also simpler to use than you’d expect. You don’t have to be a grizzled old IT vet in order to grasp the nuance and subtlety of the program. They even let you try it on the web, without downloading anything, before you get a feel for it. Finally, they offer gads of free online seminars if you are still puzzled.

Many big-name companies have already dropped closed systems in favor for Alfresco’s new approach to ECM, including:

• Toyota
• Yell.com
• Sony Pictures
• NASA
• Merck

If your looking for an easy way to get started with an Alfresco setup visit our Alfresco Hosting plans to get up and running easily with Alfresco.

What is this Liferay you’ve no doubt been hearing about from colleagues/friends/acquaintances/even a few enemies? Yet another confusing Internet platform to make life and business more difficult? Don’t worry. It’s not that bad. Webrulon is here to give you the lowdown on Liferay and what it can do for you and your business. And we’ll do it in baby steps.

Liferay is not the comic book opposite of a death ray, although that would be very cool. No, Liferay is an “Enterprise web platform for building business solutions that deliver immediate results and long-term value.” What does that mean? It’s a suite of programs designed to help you market and maintain your business.

Think of it this way. Think of a website like Kraft.com or even Youtube.com. Wow. They have some cool things there. Where would a smaller business even start to approach that level of big money functionality? That’s where Liferay comes in. Think of it as a shell, an outer casing that, by adding and deleting functions, you can shape to your liking, to give your web and online business presence any amount of luster you desire.

Here are some of the services Liferay offers:

• Self-Service Portals
• Knowledge Sharing Workspaces
• Dynamic Web 2.0 Websites
• Revenue-generating Social Networks
• Enterprise Application Integration

Pretty much anything you see on an established website, you can do here. Think of it as your very own Internet sandbox. Only instead of sand castles, you’ll be building increased profit margins and sustainability. The company vows it will run with your current infrastructure and, best of all, Liferay is open source.

Open source – Open source is a new-fangled web term that essentially means you can do whatever you want with it. More PC. Less Apple. You can tinker, get in to the source code and do what you want legally and easily. “But I can’t program” you say. Well, the good thing about open source software isn’t that you are tinkering with it. It’s that everyone else is. Open source software is sure to attain more functionality than it’s closed counterparts simply because the whole world is in there with their virtual screw drivers, trying new things, tooling around. Sometimes the stuff garden variety consumers come up with is ten thousand times more imaginative and useful than what big companies cook up. In short, open source is good and Liferay has it.

What else does Liferay bring to the table?

• Highly scalable, supporting more than 3,300 concurrent transactions per server
• Real-world performance of millions of page views and 1.3 million users
• Clusterable configuration for high availability
• Implements top ten OWASP-recommended security practices
• Options for Terracotta, Oracle RAC, and other scalability solutions
• Deployable to the Cloud and available as SaaS
• Runs PHP, Ruby, Python, Grails and other lightweight scripting technologies within a robust Java framework

The pricing is scalable depending on your needs and your installed customer base. Fill out the form here to get a quote. Put your browser here to download a free demo. It should give you enough of an idea as to whether or not this is the right direction to take your company’s web presence . Also, just to be sure, click here to look over the tech specs to see if you can handle it. Don’t worry. You probably will be fine. Only games cause you to need hardware upgrades.

If you are looking for Liferay Hosting, webRulon offers various Liferay Hosting Plans which can help you easily start to take advantage of all that Liferay has to offer.

Give it some thought. And in the meantime, here are a few sites built using the service to give you an idea of what it can do for you:

Autozone

Fox Network (Germany)

Monster Energy Drink

A Virtual Private Server (VPS) is a simulation of hardware by a host operating system that allows another operating system to run on it.  Simply put, this allows web developers to host multiple “virtual” servers on just one physical server. To a developer, the benefits seem readily apparent:

Each virtual server, or “private” server, are separated from one another  and only accessible via the host server. This means only the host server can access the RAM, CPU, Disk Space, Network throughput etc. For instance, a server may have 2GB RAM, 100GB of disk space, and 2 x 2GHz processors, with 10 VPSes on it.  Now depending on what VPS software you go with on the host, each virtual setup either share hardware resources, or have guaranteed access to 200MB RAM, a disk space limit of 10GB, and an effective CPU of 400Mhz. This, of course, is oversimplified a bit in order to help you get the idea.

Most VPS plans are hosted via Linux or FreeBSD, but Windows is not without it’s share of options. However, research has indicated that a Windows plan tends to err on the expensive side and you might be better off going with Linux. So, having said that, for the purpose of this article we will be illustrating using a Linux setup.

Is VPS hosting right for you?

Basically, a VPS hosting plan is something of a middle ground between entry level web hosting plans that rely on services such as PHP/MySQL and co-location setups, which has you owning and managing the hardware and simply renting the “rack space” and the Internet connection from a data center. If you are ready to move on from an entry level plan, but you are not ready to shell out the dough or a co-location, then a VPS hosting plan could be your Shangri-la.

Of course, there is also another option. There is something known as dedicated (or managed) hosting. This is often cheaper than co-location and becoming mo reasonably priced by the month. Dedicated hosting is actually more affordable than you tink. As the name indicates, this option gives you a dedicated server. You are, in essence, renting the server from the hosting company, rather than just renting the space. Consider it like those “Rents to own” furniture places that advertise on billboards from time to time.

But I digress. VPS hosting plans offer the following advantages and uses:

• Root access gives you the ability to install and configure any programs you want. For instance, you run PHP with PostgreSQL instead of MySQL? Go ahead and try it. Want to try out Zope/Plone? Go ahead and try it. The sky truly is the limit here.
• You can host an unlimited number of Websites through Apache’s Virtual Hosts. Convenient.
• You can host other services, such as a mail server, an FTP server, or any type of server you want.
• You can use the server for backup, file storage, or anything you need.

However, any sun that rises also sets. Here are several disadvantages to using a VPS hosting plan:

• You are in control, so  you are also responsible for all installation, maintenance, security and updates. If you are inexperienced with administering a Linux Server. This is a big drawback to those of you lazy folks out there. The learning curve can be steep.
• While a VPS hosting plan gives you an entire operating system of your own to work with, you still share hardware resources (CPU, RAM, etc.) with other VPSes on the same host server. Therefore, if performance is key, or you’re running RAM-intensive programs, you may be better off with co-location. This depends, of course, on your hardware setup.

How does this VPS stuff work anyways?

A whole lot of interesting technologies working in tandem make Virtual Private Servers possible: There are commercial companies, such as VMWare, and Microsoft’s own Virtual PC.  Open Source programs such as User Mode Linux, QEMU, and, more recently, XEN.  XEN is a hot topic in the VPS world recently and has been  receiving a lot of press and support. There’s even the possibility that it may be bundled with forthcoming releases of Linux. This can only be a good thing for Web developers, as the more widespread the use of Virtualization and VPS is in Web hosting, the more freedom it will provide at a lower cost. Freedom, usually, is a good thing

Getting down to the root of the matter

So what’s in it for you when getting a VPS account? A lot, actually. The one thing you get for sure is root access to your server. As you read above, if you are comfortable being an admin on a Linxus server remotely this is a great boon. It’ll give you absolute control. You can install anything you want whenever you want. The virtual world is your virtual oyster. However, with great power comes great responsbility. The configuration and implentation is in your hands. If this causes you great anxiety, maybe a VPS isn’t right for you.

Does this mean you’ll need to install the entire OS from scratch? Not really. Most VPS plans come with disk images to choose from, which means a set of schematics and timestamps that will get you started right away. You’ll simply have to specify which disk image suits your fancy, and it will be instantly configured on your VPS in minutes. Once you’ve established an account, the root access is granted via ssh. You can then log in and customize your server as you see fit. Get the ball rolling by installing new software, removing unwanted software and updating the software that’s already there.

Choosing the right VPS company

So you’ve decided to make the jump. Now what? How can you choose the right company? Here are some things to look out for.

First of all, know the details of your hardware and your available resources:

• What are the exact specs of your host server? (RAM, CPU, Network throughput, etc.)
• How many VPS instances are run on the host server that you’ll be on? This is important as you’ll be vying for host space with other VPS setups.
• How are the resources handled? In other words, what happens if all the other VPSes on your host server are running CPU/RAM-intensive processes? Do you have a dedicated minimum amount of RAM/CPU/Network usage? If so, how much?

You also gotta know the details of your virtualization technolgy:

• What is the underlying OS used with the server: Linux, FreeBSD, Windows?
• If Linux, what distros are offered?
• Are they using User Mode Linux, QEMU, or XEN?
• How are the hardware upgrades handled? What are the additional costs of upgrading RAM or getting more disk space? What is the procedure for going about such an upgrade?

You have to also recognize the abilities of the specific web hosting company. These are some broad questions that could be posited across the board when choosing any web hoster:

• What kind of support is offered? Can you get a real person on the telephone when you have a problem?
• How long has the company been open for business?
• What is the company’s client retention rate?
• How much downtime have they experienced in the last 12/24 months?
• What backup/redundancy measures do they have in place?

Prices at these hosting companies range from $20 a month for basic service to more than $100 per month for the higher end services. Beware though, a higher price doesn’t always indicate a better product. Do your research. Check message boards and read customer comments. If you are curious but unsure if a VPS plan is right for you, start small. Check out one of the lower priced plans for a few months and try out all of the features. Then you’ll know if it’s worth it to upgrade. Just be sure to choose a hosting company that can accomodate said upgrade. And, remember, if you need a lot more hardware resources, don’t be afraid to go the co-location route.

As we all know, WordPress is a popular blog/CMS choice. One of the great things about WordPress can also be the worst. Dynamic is a great way to describe the platform. This is great most of the time, except when you are getting a ton of page views. Every time a page is accessed, its pulls a dynamically created page. That can be very taxing on your server. Thankfully WordPress has great plugin expandability.

The Plugin of the hour is WPSuperCache. This fantastic plugin creates static HTML pages from the WordPress dynamic pages. This allows the server to serve the pages faster and with less load. When matched with a professional heavy duty server, this plugin can serve millions of pages an hour.

It is great when you realize all this stuff, minus the hosting is free! Got to love open source.