Diadem Technologies launches India’s first, datacenter API driven, server management web portal

After months of development, stumbling blocks and functionality improvements, our server management portal is finally online for our Dedicated and VPS hosting clients. This application will allow our clients to monitor, manage and request support through a simple web based interface which has been specifically developed keeping in view the needs of organisations that outsource their server hosting requirements to private datacenter providers.

This is probably India’s first, API driven, fully automated, web based server management application and full credit goes to our developers and our Datacenter API services team in ensuring that the remote API services integrated seamlessly with our application and and all issues were resolved before we released the app online. Following are some of the key features of this server management application:

• 256-bit SSL encryption is being used rendering all communication between your browser and the server as fully secure.
• Sensitive data within the application is being encrypted and saved in the DB using a secret encryption key which can only be deciphered from within the application.
• Servers can be rebooted online. The login details for various applications deployed alongwith the server hardware details can also be viewed online.
• Post your support tickets online and each ticket will be archived for future reference.
• Monitor your server bandwidth usage on a real-time basis with MRTG graphs.

You can read more details on our server management portal  on our website and if you are an existing client, you can jump right in and login to your account. We intend to keep adding new features to this application on a sustained basis and make it an indispensable tool of choice for managing your online dedicated and virtual servers.

If you would like to use this utility for managing your hosted servers, drop us a line to discuss your requirements and recommend an appropriate solution.

What comes as a bigger surprise is that inspite Softlayer being smaller than ThePlanet in terms of the number of servers hosted and revenues generated, they are taking over ThePlanet as the VC firm GI Partners, which has had a controlling stake in both these companies prior to their merger, recognises the advanced networking, support and automation capabilities which has made Softlayer amongst the fastest growing datacenter providers globally.

Our association with Softlayer has been from the middle of 2006 from the time they had a single datacenter in Dallas, hosting about a  thousand servers on their network. Having being a client of  ThePlanet for a couple of years prior to working with SL, things started going downhill in terms of support and network outages after their COO, Lance Crosby pulled out and started Softlayer alongwith a bunch of colleagues from his previous organisation.  We had reviewed other providers including SoftLayer and I am glad we ultimately decided to go with Softlayer and have continued to use them as our exclusive provider of virtual datacenter services.

In my view, following are the key aspects which sets Softlayer apart from the rest of the crowd:

• Network Uptime: Inspite of them growing rapidly into multiple datacenters with growing complexity of managing a large interconnected network, they have being able to deliver top notch network performance and uptime. For a web hosting provider, this is a primary requirement.
• Proactive Support: Their support team has been consistent and extremely proactive in resolving issues, which most datacenter providers would shirk responsibility from. Needless to say, Softlayer continues to impress with their responsiveness and willingness to resolve support issues.
• Automation: Before Softlayer, most providers would take 24-48 hrs to make your server come online. They redefined the industry by delivering dedicated servers within 4 hours or less. This helped hosting providers in delivering servers on demand to their client without having to maintain any inventory at their end.
• Range of Services: In the last couple of years, the hosting industry has been overloaded with new technologies and innovations, which include Virtualisation, Cloud Hosting, CDN Services, Grid Computing, iSCSI Storage to name a few. Softlayer has been on top of most such innovations and has attempted to provide this as an on demand service to its clients with a low usage cost.

While Softlayer may have had been successful in the past, it does not in anyway guarantee its future success, especially after  its merger with ThePlanet. The Planet has a different approach to datacenter servces, was more focussed on providing collocation services and it might be difficult to make them follow the Softlayer way of doing things. Also, I am sure there would be some erosion of clients from the old Planet as Softlayer would not be offering colocation services and would prefer their model of virtual datacenter services which might not suit all clients of ThePlanet.

While it could be anybody’s guess in whether the merged entity can dominate the datacenter hosting industry or get overtaken by another ‘Softlayer’ in the making, I do hope that they are able to offer services which would make outsourced server hosting a no-brainer for SME’s in India, who prefer to host their web and application servers within their premises for reasons of ‘sharing their internet access cost’ and ‘physical access to their servers’ but incurring substantial infrastructure and maintenance costs in the process.
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Key Benefits of a Content Delivery Network:

A. High-Quality Content and Media Rich Web Sites:

CDN places content as close to the end-user as possible, making downloading, streaming, and web site load times faster and more consistent. This allows web sites to include richer, more creative content without sacrificing performance.

B. Broader Geographic Reach:

CDN pushes content to server nodes placed around the world, optimizing the speed and reliability of content delivery to end-users regardless of location. This is especially advantageous as Internet subscriber rates continue to increase globally.

C. Cost-Effective, Performance-Neutral Scalability:

CDN spreads its workload over multiple servers in diverse locations, so increases in content demand does not slow down or compromise delivery.

What are the advantages of using CDN over standard Internet content delivery?

CDN delivers content more efficiently than standard Internet content delivery, letting businesses meet the growing demand for rich, online media that require large bandwidths. Standard Internet delivery sends content data over general Internet routes from the host server’s location to the end-user’s location. This takes into account neither the host server’s proximity to the end-user, nor possible traffic jams between the two. CDN, however, moves the content from the host server to a node that is geographically closer to the end-user. This avoids potential network congestion and decreases latency, increasing delivery speed and providing consistent and reliable file transfer times. In addition, as a solution created specifically for content delivery, CDN includes tools that provide more content management and delivery control, helping with content monetization.

Who should be using a CDN?

CDN is ideal for any company or individual that wants to make content available on the Internet, particularly those with sites that utilize caching, streaming, and downloading services. This includes a wide variety of industries and applications, including:

• Social Networking
• Gaming
• E-commerce
• Entertainment
• Software Development
• Financial Services

Content Formats:

CDN supports multiple content formats for streaming media and progressive downloads.

Formats for Streaming Media

• Windows Media Player
• Flash Media

Formats for Progressive Downloads

• Windows Media Player
• Flash Media
• DivX
• H.264
• Move Media Player
• Microsoft Silverlight
• QuickTime
• MP3
• RealSystem G2
• RealPlayer
• Real Networks
• HTML
• TXT
• GIF
• JPG
• PDF

Supported Delivery Protocols

• HTTP
• RTMP
• MMS

Diadem Technologies in association with Softlayer Technologies Inc. is providing Content delivery services to its clients for their richmedia  and streaming media applications.