Elastic is our favorite word.

We packed even more wonderfully springy elastic capabilities into the Elastic Server platform with our new ElasticHosts partnership. Today we are proud to announce Elastic Servers can now be deployed to the ElasticHosts' UK-based cloud computing infrastructure. The new ElasticHosts deployment option is available on our Server Configuration page.

ElasticHosts is the second European cloud infrastructure provider and the world's first public cloud based upon KVM, the native Linux virtualization platform. The company provides flexible server capacity in the UK for scalable web hosting and on-demand burst computing such as batch processing, dev/test, disaster recovery and cloud bursting. ElasticHosts offers competitive pricing for both subscription and burst use, fast direct links to the UK/EU internet, data storage within EU jurisdiction and outstanding performance for any PC operating system with fully flexible sizing.

Get that Elastic Server up in the ElasticHosts Cloud!
To deploy your custom-assembled virtual server to the ElasticHosts cloud start the same way you would for any other Elastic Server build, choose your desired software components. You can do this easily by visiting from one of our popular Elastic Server Sites (e.g. Rails, Django, LAMP, etc.) or select from our Bundle Explorer and add them to your software component bundle cart (MySQL 5, Apache 2 and PHP 5).

When your custom stack is assembled just the way you want it, select the "ElasticHosts" radio button from the "Ready to Build" screen (seen here). Give your server an appropriately pliant name, choose whether to share your server and use a static password, and click the "Build Now" button. In a few minutes, you'll receive an email with a download link to your rubbery new server ready to be sent to ElasticHosts. Just forward your Build Confirmation Email to support@elastichosts.com and your Elastic Server will be uploaded your ElasticHosts account. Check out our Quick Tip video for more information. Don't have an ElasticHosts account? Signup is easy and they offer a free trial.

"Installing and configuring software components and operating systems on virtual servers from scratch in this multi-sourced world is extremely time consuming and expensive," said Richard Davies, Founder and CEO of ElasticHosts. "CohesiveFT's Elastic Server automates this process allowing our users to concentrate on the benefits of our highly scalable, flexible, and cost effective KVM-based UK cloud. The combination of ElasticHosts and Elastic Server is a fast track to realizing returns from cloud computing - ElasticHosts customers can immediately deploy well over five thousand custom-built server images"

Do you have more than a few servers to create? Contact our sales team to learn about our Enterprise-class offering for clusters of servers. You may also be interested in our cloud security offering, VPN-Cubed.

Don't take our word for it, see how stretchy an Elastic Server can be by deploying yours to the ElasticHosts cloud today!

Razuna Readies Itself for Mass Customization

Razuna, one of the most popular open source Digital Asset Management Systems, is now available on its own Elastic Server Site! Customize your Razuna Elastic Server with additional software components, choose your favorite operating system, then decide if you want to deploy you Elastic Server to your virtual infrastructure (VMwawre, Xen, VirtualIron, KVM, or Parallels) or the cloud (Amazon EC2 US or Europe).

Did we mention that this was user generated content? Nitai Aventaggiato an Elastic Server Personal Edition user, the CEO of SixSigns and the lead developer of Razuna, contacted marketing-at-cohesiveft.com looking to make his open source project available on Elastic Server. We worked with Nitai to upload the Razuna package, add in some supporting components, and design and publish the Elastic Server Site.

Interested in doing the same for your software component or project? All you need is an Elastic Server Personal Account and you will have all the tools necessary to provide your users with a quick and easy deployment solution - The Elastic Server Factory.

Note: Razuna is a Digital Asset Management System. Digital Assets take up space, most notably disk space. So remember, when you're building your Razuna Elastic Server to make sure your Elastic Server's Hard Drive is large enough to satisfy your media asset storage needs.

About Razuna
Razuna is a enterprise digital asset management/media asset management with an integrated web content management that delivers and makes management of your digital assets a simple task! By using Razuna you get the benefit of it being free and open source and supported by a professional company.

With Razuna, your information can be collected, consolidated, verified, filtered, mined and always be available and secure. Razuna does all this while requiring less hardware and fewer administrators, for the lowest overall cost of ownership. A powerful solution like Razuna will achieve significant efficiency gains as well as consistency throughout the organization.

Since Razuna is based on open standards (J2EE/CFML/SQL/XML) you can rest assured that Razuna can scale with your business. For international organizations that hold already thousands of assets, Razuna can take up on your existing assets with powerful import and export tools.

Build your Razuna Elastic Server Today!

More Amazon AWS Management Options

It seems like there is a little of that holiday spirit hovering around into this new year. It was nice to get the official notice this morning about the BETA launch of the new Amazon AWS Management Console.



That's two presents I received this week. They must have been stuffed way back under the branches of the XMAS tree unnoticed.

First, the Elastic Server team pushed out KVM support for our automated factory. This is key to helping private clouds using Red Hat and Fedora infrastructure in the upcoming year, as well as a key milestone to turbo charged Intel support (VT-d) as the new Linux kernel makes its way into the main distros.

And second, the AWS team getting the management console in our hands. Now - I do like my FireFox plugin and will probably use it for some things until I retrain my fingers. And when I am in Elastic Server I use our EC2 manager, but it has a much narrower scope.

What I really like about the new console is I am unbound from Firefox. I am a MacBook-based life form at most times and I do like Safari as well. So more browser options is a big plus. (Have I mentioned I don't like the command line?) And - as people in the office have shown me today - it looks and works pretty darn good on the iPhone as well.


Take the new UI for a spin or for a more in depth review, and also check out what Alan Williamson has to say.

So hats off and happy New Year to the AWS team for giving Elastic Server users and CohesiveFT customers more options in how they choose to manage their infrastructure in the Clouds!

3...2...1...Happy KVM!

What's new in 2009? Well, the addition of KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) format as a deployment option on the Elastic Server Platform of course! We had a Cohesive New Year's Eve party and decided the best way to ring in 2009 was with additional options for our users. KVM is available now on all Elastic Server Account Editions.

KVM is a virtualization solution that is part of the mainline Linux kernel (V2.6.20). It supports the virtualization of Linux guest operating systems and even Windows® with hardware that is virtualization-aware.

Building your KVM Elastic Server
Build your custom KVM Elastic Server the same way your would build any Elastic Server. Select the components you fancy from one of our popular Elastic Server Sites (e.g. Rails, Django, LAMP, etc.) or select from our Bundle Explorer and add them to your software component bundle cart (MySQL 5, Apache 2 and PHP 5).

Once your components are 'stacked' the way you want them, simply click "Build" making sure the "KVM" radio button from the "Ready to Build" screen is selected. Your custom KVM Elastic Server is built on-demand and ready for you to download in minutes. It couldn't be easier!

Do you have more than a few servers to create? Contact our sales team to learn about our Enterprise-class offering for clusters of servers. Concerned about security and integration within a cloud, across clouds, or between your private infrastructure and a cloud - you may also be interested in our cloud security offering, VPN-Cubed for "wrapping up" your KVM-based Elastic Servers.

European Templates for your Convenience

Amazon's recently announced the availability of EC2 Europe Region and we followed immediately announcing the integration of EC2-Europe as a deployment option of the Elastic Server Factory. This is big news for European AWS fans looking for a complement to S3-Europe and those not comfortable using compute capacity in the States.

Amazon has reworked their Public AMI Directory to include a separate category for EC2-Europe Specific AMIs. We have added some Public AMIs to the directory built for and stored in Europe for use in the new EC2 Region. Look for additions regularly as we are always trying to keep the Public AMI list fresh.