According to Jeremy Adams, myhosting.com’s Product Manager, “Windows VDS and virtual server hosting services are designed to meet the demands of businesses that need servers to operate in the new cloud environments with minimal downtime.” Partnering with Microsoft, myhosting.com has now released an optimally-designed Hyper-V VDS cluster, designed to give businesses the best of scalable, flexible VDS.

myhosting.com was able to develop a solution, in part using Microsoft’s Dynamic Data Center Toolkit, which allows workloads to be seamlessly moved to another server during scheduled maintenance with as little as one ping of downtime, helping to reduce time lost due to maintenance and other scheduled processes by up to 50%. In addition, the new Hyper-V VDS architecture developed by myhosting.com is scalable and agile, allowing businesses of any size to make the move to a virtual dedicated server.

The company has also been able to enhance their Hyper-V based private clouds, and in partnership with strong market players like NetApp, has been able to improve their VPS hosting as well. Netapp’s storage services have given the company the ability to provide High Availability Virtual Private Servers that can synchronize backup files, secondary storage systems and snapshot vaults, all while handling all levels of disk I/O to improve performance.

The use of Hyper-V VDS, the Microsoft Dynamic Data Center Toolkit, as well as technology from leaders like Cisco and Netapp, has allowed myhosting.com to improve the VPS, VDS, and private cloud experience for customers of all sizes. With an increase in speed, stability, and with reduced downtime, the company is able to offer small and medium-sized businesses a viable path to the cloud, and offer businesses of any size a suite of comprehensive Web hosting services.

According to Steve Jobs, “if the hardware is the brain and sinew of our [Apple] products, the software is their soul”. As of July 2011, the soul of the Mac OS will be upgraded in the form of a new OS called “Lion”. But while this new OS comes with a number of shiny new features, what does it mean for server admins that are more concerned with their server than their desktop?

First up, it looks like the non-server version of Lion is going to allow users to run native, virtualized versions of Mac OS X Lion. This matters because in the past, Apple has limited this ability to run VPS servers to only those who bought the server version of their OS, and would require each user to buy a license for every single copy they wanted to be virtualized.

For $30, a user can upgrade from Snow Leopard to Lion, and the “server app” addition is only $50 more, meaning that the new Mac OS X comes in as one of the most cost-effective virtual server tools on the market – something many IT admins and cost-watching execs will be happy about.

It seems that Apple is doing its best to infiltrate the server virtualization market by making it virtualization platform both affordable and simple to use. Though there are more powerful server tools on the market, Apple is well-known for their easy-to-use GUIs, and many IT users may decide to make the move to Lion for the simple fact that they will be able to easily deal with most events that occur within their data center.

Though Apple is playing catch-up in the virtualization market, Mac OS X Lion looks to have great potential.

Recently, news about a build of Windows 8 was leaked – number 7989. This version of the soon-to-be-released product showed Hyper-V 3.0 in the Features section of the product, and stirs up even more excitement about type-1 client hypervisors and how they might change the future of the cloud.

Perhaps the most significant change that will come with Windows 8 will be a new technology called “MinWin”. While this was introduced with Windows Vista, it is now intended to fully replace the parent partition approach that is used by the server side of Hyper-V. The idea is that MinWin will operate as an extremely thin layer of software, smaller than Windows Core and that will be installed on bare metal. When installed this way, MinWin will be able to free itself of the Windows Shell and its need to hog resources, leaving MinWin with just enough juice to run a hypervisor.

Using MinWin will provide a number of benefits aside from the smaller footprint, among them a smaller attack surface for the hypervisor, making it almost BIOS-like. In addition, having a client-side hypervisor should, in theory, reduce deployment times, repair times, and the amount of troubleshooting needed.

But perhaps the greatest advantage that Windows 8, Hyper-V 3.0 and MinWin will offer consumers is the ability to host multiple VMs all on the same client device. This means that a single device could have a Windows 7, 8, Vista, XP, or even Mobile VM on them, and all concurrently.

The hope here for Microsoft is to increase the overall value of Hyper-V and tie it to the release of Windows 8. If the company can convince consumers to use their client-side hypervisor, they can make serious inroads towards competitors like VMware.

As companies make the move from the local to the virtual and the virtual to the cloud, a number of problems inevitably arise. While cloud technology and server virtualization techniques continue to evolve, however, the technology needed to make storage competitive appears to be lagging behind.

A number of companies are now working on this problem, including storage provider Sanbolic. Their CEO, Momchil Michailov, is of the opinion that IT as a whole needs a better approach to storage, one that breaks free from the ties to a single storage or server system.

Michailov sees the storage industry as being largely stagnant since the 1980s, with the only improvements being to create faster disks and increase storage capacity. Without true innovation on the way storage is done, many companies are not seeing as much benefit from virtualization as they could.

Often, it takes only a matter of minutes to portion out a VM for a client, but it can take up to a month and a half for storage and its associated networking to catch up. With most storage still attached to a single physical server or location, it simply cannot provide the same benefits as other virtualized technologies, leaving companies waiting for their storage to make the move along with their applications.

Now, companies like Sanbolic are trying to help companies make the most of their storage with options like their Meilo 3.5 application, which provides updates to the management environment including granular control over I/O priority for applications as well as additional platform support.

While there has not been a virtual storage breakthrough to solve all potential data issues, companies like Sanbolic do their best to help streamline the current storage environment for companies that are looking to go virtual.

Recently, a new study by MeriTalk shows that many federal data center managers are unaware of the type of savings they could be realizing thanks to data center consolidation.

The study, underwritten by NetApp, took aim at the ability of managers to track cost savings at the data center level, and examined how this lack of information has led to an inability to quantify savings and reinvest them in further technology upgrades.

This data is especially pertinent after the recent push to consolidate government-owned data centers, led by former CIO Vivek Kundra. Kundra’s plan was to shut down over 800 data centers by 2015 and to greatly improve the efficiencies of the remaining data centers, in hopes of bringing the government in line with many private businesses that have made the move to VPS or cloud providers.

When the study was released in April, it was determined that the government could save up to $18 billion through server virtualization, and 41 percent of the data managers surveyed claimed that they had an idea of the costs they would face with data center consolidation.

Information released in the study indicated that only 31 percent of respondents who worked for federal agencies knew the average load their data centers are under, while 94 percent of those from the private sector knew what their load looked like.

Of those asked in the federal IT survey, 67 percent did not know the average kilowatts per hour each rack of their storage used, and nearly 25 percent didn’t know what their levels of data efficiency were.

Private industry often has a greater need to examine such data to provide maximum profit margins, but it appears that federal government could find savings there as well.

Chris Swan, who is the security CTO for UBS bank, says that businesses will “clearly not” be able to use the public clouds for everything their enterprises need.

At the 451 Group’s Hosting and Cloud Transformation Summit, Swan argued that “there is a level of assurance that I don’t think the public cloud can at the moment provide”, a sentiment echoed by VMware president Tod Nielsen, who stated that while some enterprise workloads will end up in the public cloud, the bulk of such workloads will remain private.

There are a number of concerns that come with moving data to a public cloud, the most important of which being how much a company wants to risk its data being truly “public”. While the security of public clouds is improving, they are still seen to be not at the same level as VPS options or private clouds, and many IT departments fear that what they put on the public cloud will become public knowledge.

If a company has a public-facing Web site or data that they share publicly on a regular basis, then a move of that data to a public cloud makes sense. The next, more private layer of data requires more serious thought.

Currently, data breaches in public clouds are centered around applications, and according to Swan, it is there that dollars need to be spent. Once application security issues are addressed, he predicts that multiple, industry specific clouds will develop hybrid models that will provide companies with both security and functionality.

While the public cloud offers a broader access to many companies in terms of data availability, moving all information, applications and mission-critical data to the public cloud is something that most businesses will not do.

According to Taichiro Hashizawa, the senior general manager and vice president of NEC, “CIOs are looking to virtualization and cloud strategies to deliver business applications, which may include ERP, CRM and even unified communications, as a service in a very streamlined, efficient manner — all on fewer physical servers than was ever possible before.” Now, the company is making their UNIVERGE Sphericall software appliance available to help businesses implement communications-as-a-service delivery models quickly and easily.

The new software-based solution is meant to work with VMware, which NEC says will offer clients the greatest versatility when it comes to creating cost effective, agile and flexible networks. New virtualized voice and data infrastructure are being rapidly deployed to the market, and companies need to keep up with changing communications trends in order to be able to keep their edge.

Using appliances based on VMware’s vSphere, companies can enjoy benefits such as pooling infrastructure, effective disaster recovery of services and data, and elasticity capacity which can help businesses meet booming demand.

Along with these benefits, companies will now also be able to deploy Unified communications functions along with other virtualized business applications in a software-based or hybrid cloud.

Gary Green of VMware says that “VMware and NEC share a common vision for delivering cloud computing solutions to customers”, and that in combination with NEC’s new communication-as-service options, VMware will be able to help clients virtualize more resources to develop more effective hybrid clouds and make the move away from VPS systems.

All-in-one clouds are an essential part of the new virtual landscape, and communications is quickly becoming a fertile ground for cloud development. Along with VMware, NEC is doing their best to offer viable enterprise cloud options for companies looking to improve their network outlook.

Recently, Nand Mulchandani, co-founder of ScaleXtreme and its CEO, remarked that “we believe there’s a large enough number of people out there that are comfortable with SaaS.”

With that thought firmly in mind, Nand went on to say that “I’ll probably eat my words, but we have no intention of ever offering an on-premise version.”

But while many companies like ScaleXtreme hold a similar attitude – why deal with compatibility and resource issues on-premise when SaaS options are available – enterprises are increasingly demanding software that is compatible at a local level. Opscode, a ScaleXtreme competitor, recently launched an on-premise companion piece of software to its Hosted Chef choice, because of demands from enterprise customers.

While SaaS offers a number of immediate and oblivious benefits over simple VPS options, it is still facing problems in the IT market. The first comes from IT techs themselves, who are increasingly finding their jobs in jeopardy as SaaS and other hosted solutions make their way into the mainstream. This, in combination with the fact that problems now have to be dealt with through email and messages to the host provider, makes many companies nervous about the speed of response they will receive.

Other concerns revolve around the possibility that an Internet outage will render a SaaS option useless, and leave a company with no way to do business. Internet connections themselves are not the province of hosting providers, and if the Internet fails at a crucial time, there is little a SaaS provider can do about it.

Though SaaS is making a breakthrough in many areas, enterprise users are some of the toughest nuts to crack, and providers are still finding that dual hosted and on-premise solutions tend to provide the best utility.

A recent survey done by Symantec has shown that IT and executives are often looking at the potential benefits of cloud computing in very different ways – slowing overall adoption.

According to John Magee, VP of virtualization and cloud solutions at Symantec, “moving to the cloud is a complex evolution for many companies and it’s essential that IT and executives are aligned on initiatives”. Magee further states that a seamless move to a new cloud environment from a VPS or hybrid option is absolutely critical in getting the best that these new technological environments have to offer.

But while strategies to move can be defined, and proper procedure can be followed, it is the expectation of what new virtualized technology will do that can provide the biggest stumbling block for non-IT execs. Without the perspective to fairly evaluate new IT options, these execs often show a far greater gap in their expectations than do their IT counterparts, and almost half of CFOs surveyed say they are less than “somewhat open” to moving any critical infrastructure to cloud environments.

The survey showed that only a four percent gap existed between the expectations of IT execs and the delivered reality when it came to private or hybrid cloud developments, and while storage, desktop and application deployments showed a larger gap in expectation and reality (33 and 26 percent, respectively), much of this can be attributed to a lack of familiarity on the part of IT to new technology, along with the need for more mature solutions.

Symantec’s survey indicates that while the benefits of virtualization are rapidly increasing, IT and non-IT execs need to forge a better understanding in order to allocate sufficient resources for maximum cost savings.

According to VMware’s CEO, Paul Maritz, one of the key principles behind their newest offering, Cloud Foundry, is to give developer “the moral, if not technical equivalent of Linux for the cloud”. Their hope is to use an open-source, PaaS framework to give developers the control the need in what Maritz sees as a changing market.

While the CEO is well aware of the challenges that are presented by others that are currently in the same business as VMware – IBM, Oracle, Dell and Microsoft, to name a few – his focus is split to include those competitors that aren’t yet big players. Maritz sees the current way of operating in the cloud as something that is on the way out, as many enterprises are running older code that is getting in their way of moving from VPS or hybrid cloud to a public cloud option.

Maritz sees the current landscape as bringing about a “developer-led revolt against complexity”. VMware sees developers that are frustrated with trying to force middleware and infrastructure together, and have created Cloud Foundry to address the problem.

Cloud Foundry is design to provide greater functionality than current PaaS options on the market, which Maritz sees as being hampered by a limited amount of framework support. The Cloud Foundry model is one that is meant to be used by the industry, rather than just by VMware, giving enterprises and developers the ability to make it work as they want it to, not as VMware tells them they should.

The service is currently running a pilot project and is scheduled for launch in 2012. While recruiting developers made pose some challenges, Maritz feels the risk is a calculated one that must be undertaken.