Today at the 37th Annual Siggraph International Conference, we announced the availability of the first ever GPU Cloud powered by NVIDIA® Tesla™ graphic processor units. This new service offers large-scale computing on demand for applications such as graphics rendering, complex quantitative processing, video compression, and large-model 3D web services. We’re also offering RealityServer® 3D web application software developed by Mental Images on the platform. RealityServer delivers interactive, photorealistic applications over the web using the iray® renderer, allowing animators, product designers, architects and consumers to easily visualize 3D scenes with remarkable realism. PEER 1 Hosting will install and support RealityServer for customers who wish to access the software on demand in our hosted GPU Cloud. For a limited time only, we are offering new customers free trials and proof-of-concepts.

Read GPU Cloud Press Release

Read more GPU Cloud coverage on GigaOm

OpenStack™ is a new open-source cloud platform that was officially launched earlier today by Rackspace, with the support of many industry players including Dell, Citrix, and ourselves at PEER 1 Hosting / ServerBeach. The company has donated the code that powers its cloud computing and cloud storage to the OpenStack project. It will also incorporate technology that powers the NASA Nebula Cloud Platform.

Last week, we attended the design summit in Austin, TX along with 25 other companies – including many of our peers – in a show of support, and to help validate the code and ratify the project roadmap. The goal of OpenStack is to help drive industry standards and prevent vendor lock-in, which in turn should speed up the pace of cloud innovation. This innovation is key to PEER 1 Hosting’s support. We believe an open-source cloud platform has the potential to help us serve our customers with better technology sooner, and the ability to improve upon it faster. You can get involved as well. To download or contribute code, visit OpenStack.org. Follow the conversation on Twitter @OpenStack.

A difficult economy is impacting IT investments, but advanced communications infrastructures bring opportunities for innovation and cost savings.

IT leaders understand the need to drive business value by leveraging voice, data and network infrastructures. They know that advanced communications services are the backbone of effective customer experiences, providing businesses with quick, efficient and cost-effective ways to reach out and respond to clients and prospects. In that and many other respects, these services contribute to exactly what the business wants in these challenging economic times—lower operating costs, higher revenue, and effective and rapid delivery of new offerings to the market.

Faced with declining funds to invest in these services in a down economy, CIOs must provide their C-level peers with compelling arguments to build new “infrastructures for innovation.” Companies that are still investing see enabling convergence, increasing scalability, and expanding application and information access as efforts that are both vital to opening new frontiers for the business and doing away with the unnecessary costs of legacy environments.
Where Opportunity Lies
Fortunately, both business and IT executives acknowledge that more sophisticated infrastructures bring opportunities for innovation, cost savings and productivity improvements. In a recent survey conducted by IDG Research Services and Fortune Custom Publishing, nearly nine out of ten senior IT and business executives say that data, voice and network services can be leveraged to drive innovation, and they cite facilitating remote access to critical applications and speeding up customer service among the top advances these services enable. Both sets of respondents believe that companies that continue to invest in data, voice and network services during slow economic times will gain important benefits, such as improved efficiencies and reduced costs, and better collaboration.

At PEER 1 Hosting, we’re here to help. We cut through the frustration of under-performing technology and poor service, delivering the power of the internet to any organization that needs it. Interested in learning more about how we can help your business today? Give us a call at 1..866.579.9690.

Infrastructures for Innovation white paper.

Here at PEER 1 Hosting we’re always looking for ways to improve our health. As the title says, June is Wellness month and all of our offices and data centers around the Globe are taking an active role in getting fit, eating healthier, and going greener.

We’ve taken a few pictures and videos to share that you can view here:

Flickr

YouTube

Do you have a fitness regimen you’d like to share or some tips on how you’re keeping fit or going greener? We’d love to hear from you in the comments!

By Rob Station, Solutions Engineer

The growth of social networking since its start in the late 90s has been exponential. Beginning as a way to find and keep contacts, the social network site has grown into a method for people to express themselves, through blogs, pictures, videos and music. The modern social network is a bandwidth and computing heavy site.

Problems with Social Networking

Popularity and scalability
The popularity of your site can bring with it a lot of benefits, but also a lot of issues. Site growth is a real concern, as social networking trends can grow your site overnight. Between its inception and 2006, MySpace alone grew from a handful of members to more than 47.3 million. Can yours stay reliable at a large multiple of your userbase? Do you have a plan for growth?

Bandwidth strain
A social networking sites value lies in what it allows you to do. Many sites offer at least picture hosting, with many new social networking projects allowing bands to upload mp3s, and users to make and serve videos right of their personal site page. The problem is not adding these new ways to communicate, but to actually serve them, and to make sure these media files get out fast and without errors.

Making the most of your resources
Most problems you have with a website can be solved by provisioning more servers and bandwith. Slow site? More servers and colo. Flash Video project? Lets order some more boxes. While this may be the easiest way to get around your issues, is it the smartest? How does your site innovate to stay cost efficient?

The PEER 1 CDN Relieves Stresses of Social Networking

The PEER 1 Content Delivery Network is an easy to configure, fast and low maintenance way to offload the heavy bandwidth of your site. We can handle your static movie, image, music and html files with no extra servers to upload to, and no complicated markup language.

Scale from small to big
Always fast, the PEER 1 CDN uses geolocation technology to serve your content to your users from a server near to them. With over 17 nodes in North America and Europe, PEER 1 is situated to deliver content faster and more reliably than any hosted situation. Feel the freedom of knowing that whenever and wherever your site grows, PEER 1’s CDN is there to serve all of your users.

Bandwidth delivery is our specialty
Flash Video, mp3s and jpgs can choke your upstream, and a slow upstream means a slow site, no matter how many computers you are hosted on. As you allow your users to become more feature rich, the features they use must be backed by quality, scalable bandwidth. Imagine the features you could add to your site backed by the growth potential. No longer will you have to say “No, our servers can’t handle that.”, PEER 1’s CDN can make bandwidth worries a thing of the past.

Use PEER 1’s resources
PEER 1’s network spans North America and Europe, our CDN servers are state of the art, and our peering is second to none. Why build a distribution network for your site when we have done the work for you? Your expertise if your site and its code, feel free to develop and serve it while our CDN does all of your heavy lifting. Turn the servers you had doing “dumb” data transfer and use those cpu cycles for something more important!

For more information on the PEER 1 CDN, please visit http://www.peer1.com or call toll free 1.866.683.7747

We’ll be heading to San Francisco to take part in Structure 2010. Structure is back for its third year, and as the industry has grown, so has this amazing conference. This year, Structure 2010 introduces a two-day format to accommodate demand for more content and networking time.

The Service Provider industry has some of the most mammoth and demanding requirements for provisioning cloud-based storage. Current innovations and practices will become the common place practices for tomorrow’s F500 corporation and their data storage solutions.

This year, PEER 1 Hosting will be taking part in the following workshops:

Day 1 – 3:15pm Wednesday, June 23

Peer 1 Hosting Workshop – Room 1

Location Matters: How Geography Impacts Your Cloud Infrastructure

Robert Miggins, SVP Business Development PEER 1 Hosting will discuss how it is becoming clear to early cloud pioneers that where you store your data and where your compute is vastly affects your performance. With data approaching the Petabyte scale the costs of in network and out of network transfers can end up creating cost shock when the bill arrives. In this panel of customers, practitioners and technologists we delve into the issues facing wide area deployments and the strategies they are using to defeat limitations and cost.

Day 2 – 12:20pm Thursday, June 24

Tim Varma, VP of Product Management at PEER 1 Hosting will involved in the EMC Workshop (Room 1) discussing Super-massive Storage: Cutting Edge Practices from the Service Provider industry.

Our industry has some of the most mammoth and demanding requirements for provisioning cloud-based storage. The Service Provider Industry’s current innovations and practices will become the common place practices for tomorrow’s F500 corporation and their data storage solutions. In this workshop we examine how EMC’s innovative Atmos solution is being used by the biggest service providers to solve their extreme storage needs and how they cope with policy management, multi-tenancy, network intrusion prevention and data federation when serving global-sized cloud customers.

Join us June 23–24, 2010, in San Francisco, as we shape the future of the cloud industry.

Full schedule

Register now

The BCTIA’s Technology Impact Awards celebrate successes within the industry and the companies, people and innovation that continue to put British Columbia on the map and serve as role models for others in the province. This year, over 100 applications were received from technology companies of all sectors and sizes and from all corners of British Columbia.

“PEER 1 Hosting is a well-deserved recipient of this year’s Company of the Year award,” said Pascal Spothelfer, President and CEO of BCTIA. “Over the years, they have demonstrated excellence by delivering reliable, high-performance Web Hosting solutions for its customers.  We wish them much success and look forward to seeing continued growth and prosperity in the years to come.”

“PEER 1 is honoured to be recognized amongst fellow BC technology innovators at this year’s awards,” said Fabio Banducci, president and CEO, PEER 1 Hosting. “We know the important role the Internet plays for our customers and have worked very hard over the years to manage their online presence, so they can focus on growing their business.”

Press Release

BCTIA Awards

We are happy to announce the launch of CloudOne Storage at PEER 1 Hosting. Built on the best-of-breed EMC Atmos storage platform, CloudOne provides customers with flexible, pay-as-you-go online storage for data files and rich media from $0.15 per GB per month. Customers can upload, store and manage unlimited data through a control panel or via the standards compliant Application Programming Interface (API) – the web-based interface for file management and application deployment.

Existing PEER 1 Hosting customers adopting CloudOne will benefit from free bandwidth for data transfer to and from servers and storage through the globally load balanced, highly redundant SuperNetwork(TM) 10GB backbone, plus FirstCall Support(TM) providing a unified cloud solution with one support team.

Benefits:

• Pay As You Grow
• Free Bandwidth On Our SuperNetwork™
• Unlimited Free Customer Support
• Control Your Data And Storage Costs
• Store Data Copies In Multiple Data Centers
• Best-in-breed Partner EMC Atmos
• Large Existing Atmos Ecosystem And API
• Scalable, Reliable And Easy To Administer

Learn More

Press Release

PEER 1 Hosting Channel Partner Program Video Interview with Program Manager, Lee Hadsock from Charnell Lucich on Vimeo.

We’re happy to announce a new resource to deliver a comprehensive set of sales tools to existing partners. Our Channel Partner Portal helps simplify our existing program to better serve and support our partners. The new portal gives channel partners access to sales and marketing collateral, deal registration and additional resources to ensure they are equipped with the latest information and tools to sell PEER 1 Hosting services.

The PEER 1 Hosting Channel Partner Program focuses on simplicity, making it easy for partners to understand and enroll. The new Partner Portal continues to deliver on this model by providing additional resources to the channel with a focus on improving mutual profitability, growth and operational efficiencies between PEER 1 Hosting and its partners.

“Our partners are instrumental in our success,” says Lee Hadsock, Worldwide Channel Program Manager, PEER 1 Hosting. “The new Partner Portal is part of our ongoing commitment to make it easy to deal with us, keep partners informed, and help them better service their customers.”

The Partner Portal includes:

- a Partner Relations Management (PRM) tool to help expedite and
automate business processes
- sales and marketing collateral to ensure partners have timely access
to information to share with current and potential customers
- a partner directory to allow customers to easily seek out a partner
based on geographical location and expertise

PEER 1 Hosting chose TreeHouse Interactive’s Reseller PRM solution to supports its Partner Portal. This solution allows the portal to integrate with Salesforce.com and enables automated contract management. The technology also includes partner locator, lead distribution, and deal registration capabilities, which allow PEER 1 Hosting to more efficiently interact with partners, building a stronger foundation for the company’s overall partner program.

Full press release.