Company

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — January 26, 2012 — Equinix, Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX), a provider of global data center services, today announced that Reality Check Network, a provider of managed hosting services, will continue to leverage its presence within the Equinix International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers to deliver high-end managed hosting services including virtualization, storage, load balancing, VPN and CDN. Since joining Platform Equinix™ in 2008, Reality Check Network has drawn upon the standardization, consistency and network connectivity within the Equinix IBX data centers in New York and Silicon Valley to significantly grow its North American customer base and ensure it delivers on its promise of 100 percent uptime for its hosting customers. Reality Check Network has also opened a storefront in the Equinix Marketplace™ to promote and sell its services to the more than 4,000 potential customers that are on Platform Equinix.

As part of Equinix’s growing ecosystem of more than 800 cloud and IT service providers, Reality Check Network offers managed hosting solutions and powerful dedicated servers that are backed by unparalleled network, server, and application support. Originally launched in 2003, the company delivers proven solutions for some of the most demanding hosting needs, including highly available websites, PCI-compliant e-commerce sites, SaaS platforms, and virtualization. Reality Check Network also offers load balancing and firewall security as well as network storage and CDN services, in highly available configurations.

“At Reality Check Network, our number one goal is to ensure 100 percent uptime for our customers. In order to achieve that, it is crucial that our data center service provider offer the stability, security and compliance necessary for us to follow through on that promise,” said Ben Uretsky, CEO of Reality Check Network. “We specifically chose to work with Equinix because of the company’s superior stability and scalability. In the many years we have been with Equinix, we have never experienced any outages. In addition, the company’s unparalleled network connectivity enables us to reach any network provider within the Equinix ecosystem. Equinix also has the global reach we need as we expand our business both nationally and worldwide.”

“As more and more companies look to partners such as Reality Check Network to provide a vast array of hosting solutions in a secure and high-performance manner, it’s imperative that hosting providers can adapt to customers’ needs in a dynamic and secure environment,” said Vince DiMemmo, general manager of global cloud and IT services at Equinix. “We are thrilled to help a company like Reality Check Network, along with our other partners in the cloud and hosting space, achieve success in delivering performance-optimized solutions.”

Reality Check Network, a managed hosting provider, announced today its installation of Internap’s Performance IP™ service. "With our customers’ demand for faster performance and their sensitivity to even small latency fluctuations for their streaming media services, Internap and its route-optimized global IP network was a great fit," said Ben Uretsky, CEO at Reality Check Network.

Internap’s Performance IP service optimizes Internet traffic by leveraging the company’s patented Managed Internet Route Optimizer™ (MIRO) technology – which dynamically determines the best path for traffic across multiple Internet backbones based on network performance characteristics. Performance IP is backed by a 100% uptime service level agreement (SLA.)

An additional 10Gigabit uplink utilizing Internap's Performance IP was installed at Reality Check Network's North Bergen facility to increase network capacity and redundancy. The upgrade allows Reality Check Network to provide a higher quality of service for customers with sensitive applications such as video, streaming, and voice over IP.

"To our customers, having a performance-optimized network that runs on 10GigE links means stability and scalability for future growth," said Ben Uretsky. "Reality Check Network is committed to providing its customers the highest level of service, starting from the network layer, and extending to the OS and software management.”

It's close to the one year anniversary of OpenX publishing a whitepaper, which went on to detail the hidden costs of hosting an OpenX server yourself, compared to using their enterprise service.

A year on we decided to inquire with OpenX enterprise about their updated pricing model and compare it to our managed OpenX hosting solution.

According to their white paper they calculate that the cost of running an OpenX server is $300/mo., for an 8 core machine with 16GB of RAM. For our largest OpenX cluster we actually use 8 core, 8GB machines. Adding to this our fully managed support which covers everything from installation, to configuration, and optimization, the total comes to $425/mo including backups.

OpenX claims 1 server can only serve 25,000,000 monthly ad impressions

After some quick math, that equates to 9.64 requests per second. That will hardly peg the resources on a dual Quad Core server.

We serve 1,310,000,000 monthly ad impressions on 1 server

That's 52x higher. Running lighttpd for our high performance OpenX clusters allows us to service 400-700 requests per second.

Our cost for 1,310,000,000 impressions: $425/mo.

OpenX Enterprise cost: $11,000/mo.

Thats 25x sur-charge.

Our managed OpenX hosting solution also includes backups, unlimited technical support, installation, configuration, and optimization.

Even the low estimate that OpenX themselves quoted, which is 25M monthly ad impressions per server could be run from a single machine for $425/mo., or for $1,500/mo through OpenX Enterprise.

This should come as no surprise to anyone, as an Open Source solution is always far more cost effective than anything with "Enterprise" in the title.

With increased demand for our European Managed Hosting we are excited to announce continued expansion of our presence at our premier Telecity facility in Amsterdam. In addition to the new racks that we are setting up we are also taking this opportunity to deploy a new networking fabric with 10G connectivity at the Core and extending to our top of the rack switches.

Utilizing 10G connectivity from the Core to the top of rack switches allows customers to spike their bandwidth utilization without hitting network bottlenecks. Through incremental roll-outs our schedule looks to have the 10G network fully deployed by late August.

Why Choose Managed Hosting?

When seeking server hosting plans for business or personal use, it is important to consider several factors. In addition to choosing a type of server (Shared, Dedicated, Virtual, or Cloud Server), purchasers must decide between Managed and Unmanaged hosting. Although both support the actual server hardware, managed hosting services take on the responsibility for all server maintenance. This is especially useful for consumers who do not want to focus their resources on technical and server administrative tasks.

Managed Technical Support

Instead of dedicating themselves to server maintenance, customers of managed hosting receive full 24x7 technical support. This extends further than simply the consistent availability of live support to address server issues (via phone, email, and instant messaging clients); it includes other benefits, such as operating system and full application management. Managed servers are always kept up to date with the latest OS updates and security patches; all business applications running on the servers are supported, managed, and optimized to run quickly without downtime.

Proactive Monitoring

A managed hosting company monitors all aspects of server activity to make sure that valuable content stays online. Whether investigating a traffic spike from a marketing campaign or an unauthorized hot link to a client’s site, a managed hosting company is aware of unusual activity and can appropriate steps to ensure the website or application is always available. Server management includes URL content monitoring, which checks that the site is not only online but that the web pages load correctly, an essential function for keeping the content of websites with complex applications and critical pages consistently available to visitors. Outsourcing the task of managing a server provides the client with security that, at every point in time, technical support staff is ready to address any technical issues to ensure that the customer's information is online and accessible.

Network Security

Maintaining a server’s security is essential. On managed servers, the hosting company takes over the laborious task of protecting it from trojans, hackers, and spammers. The stored information is protected with Firewall services and regular server vulnerability scans. Employing hardened Linux server configurations, the hosting company creates a secure environment protecting the customer’s data with VPN connectivity, secure SSH connections, and additional multi-factored authentication.

Server Optimization

Not all server issues arise from a malicious source like viruses or targeted attacks by hackers. There are many reasons why dedicated servers may not be running at peak capacity, and a key benefit of managed hosting is optimizing server performance. Using SNMP to collect performance metrics in real time regarding CPU utilization, load averages, RAM utilization, and hard drive usage, a managed hosting company provides the right service configuration for each customer’s traffic levels. Optimization also includes troubleshooting application performance and OS level issues to ensure reliable service availability.

Web Scalability

When a site or business begins to require stronger server infrastructure to keep up with its needs, managed hosting makes the transition from a single dedicated server to a multi-server cluster simple. The advantage of a technical support staff expanding the capacity of a dedicated server comes from its best practices approach to growing resources. They make sure that separate servers are optimized for specific tasks as database, web, or application processing servers. Once the content is migrated from one to many servers, the company can implement load balancing to maintain an efficient distribution of traffic across the servers. The technical staff performs all these motions, and the server’s user is never tasked with changing configurations or managing the technical aspect of their increased server capacity.

Managed Hosting Server Migrations

Managed hosting companies help the client by migrating their content, databases, and software configuration. When done correctly, it provides for zero-downtime migrations, where the customer can switch DNS after the technical staff has adapted the website's setup and performed a resource review, ensuring the new server will run based on the company’s best practices.

Automatic Server Backup

As information continues to grow keeping data secure in the case of hardware failure, accidental deletion, developer error, or attack intrusion is of the utmost importance. A managed server hosting company performs automated daily backups and saves the data separately, making the files and databases available for immediate retrieval in the case of disaster. In addition to all server files, databases are backed up via their native mechanisms to ensure data integrity. Backups are performed daily, storing incremental data and allowing quick and easy file recovery.

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

Managed server hosting may seem more expensive than having an unmanaged server, however, the costs are not directly comparable. Unless the client has a background of the proper technical knowledge, skills, and training, and the time to allocate to optimizing their applications, monitoring their server traffic, creating systematic backups, continually upgrading their OS, and ensuring their server remains secure against malicious entities, they would still have to hire IT personnel to manage the server. Managed server hosting provides lower total cost of ownership and enables the customer to achieve more than they would on their own. The customer has the security of a powerful and highly available server without the price tag attached to having an in-house team supporting it.

Contact us to discuss a fully managed hosting solution that will fit your specific needs.

We are happy to announce today that we have finished our deployment of Isilon scale-out storage as the primary storage resource for our managed hosting services. Using Isilon’s NL-Series, powered by the OneFS® operating system, allows us to provide our customers with on-demand storage resources and enable them to scale applications storage needs without limitations.

“Our customers expect their IT resources on-demand, meaning we can’t use traditional storage since it doesn’t scale quickly or cost-effectively,” said Ben Uretsky, CEO, Reality Check Network. “Isilon solves this problem because it actually is on-demand storage. Now, our customers can scale out applications in a single share without worrying about storage limitations, while management stays simple on our end.”

The announcement comes months after tests out our facilities in the NYC Metro Area and San Jose have shown Isilon to be a reliable, flexible, and most importantly scalable product that allowed our largest customers to continue growing their online assets without being forced to rewrite their applications.

“Reality Check Network is one of many hosting and cloud providers helping usher in an era of shared, on-demand IT, which will enable greater business efficiency, cost reduction and productivity,” said Sam Grocott, vice president of marketing, Isilon. “By using Isilon to simplify data management and eliminate storage restrictions for its customer base, Reality Check Network is positioned to be a leader in managed hosting services for years to come.”

What happens when you need to convert hundreds of virtual machines from VMware to Xen virtualization? This is the problem we faced when we decided to move away from VMware and standardize on Xen. There had to be a simple way to convert the VMware images to Xen images and avoid a lengthy migration process for our customers. Luckily for us, there was.

The two options available are:
1. Migrate from VMWare to a paravirtualized Xen domain.
2. Migrate from VMware to HVM Xen domain.

1. VMware virtual machine migration to paravirtualized Xen container

1. Install Xen kernel under VMware. For CentOS just run:
yum install kernel-xen

2. Edit the grub config files:
kernel /xen.gz-XEN_KERNEL_VERSION
module /vmlinuz-XEN_KERNEL_VERSION KERNEL_OPTIONS
module /initrd-XEN_KERNEL_VERSION.img
with:
kernel /vmlinuz-XEN_KERNEL_VERSION KERNEL_OPTIONS console=xvc0
initrd /initrd-XEN_KERNEL_VERSION.img
Make sure your 'default' boot option is also updated to the Xen kernel.

3. On CentOS regenerate initrd to force the inclusion of xen drivers:
rm /boot/initrd-XEN_KERNEL_VERSION.img
mkinitrd --omit-scsi-modules --with=xennet --with=xenblk --preload=xenblk /boot/initrd-XEN_KERNEL_VERSION.img XEN_KERNEL_VERSION

2. Disk image conversion

The next step is to convert the disk image from VMware to qemu format. Two utilities are required:

1. vmware-vdiskmanager shipped with VMware Workstation:
2. qemu-img.

Shutdown the guest under VMware and start the conversion:
vmware-vdiskmanager -r system_name/system_name.vmdk -t 0 temporary_image.vmdk
qemu-img convert -f vmdk temporary_image.vmdk -O raw system_name.xen.img
rm temporary_image.vmdk

If your VMware image is already in the raw format this conversion is unnecessary. To check:
# qemu-img info /-flat.vmdk | grep "^file format"
file format: raw

Now you are ready to boot the Xen image. The time for conversion depends on the size of the image, the larger the image, the longer the process will run. This allowed us to move all of our virtualized customers away from VMware onto Xen without the need to migrate customers and preserve data integrity.

We are thrilled to announce the expansion of our European Web Hosting division with the addition of space at Telecity's newest facility in Amsterdam. Reality Check Network has been providing European Web Hosting out of Amsterdam since June 2006 and we are excited to see the rapid growth of our customers' businesses in the European sector.

The additional space was rolled out with all of the same enterprise-infrastructure as our flagship facility in the NYC Metro Area. This includes Scale-Out On-Demand Storage through Isilon's platform as well as other managed service features including Load Balancing, Site-To-Site VPN, and Managed Backups.