StratoGen Hosting Advanced Resource Pool (SHARP™) saves customers up to 40 per cent with fixed-price pre-pay plan.

London, England -- (SBWIRE) -- 09/16/2010 -- A new hosting service fully utilising VMware's Resource Pool capabilities is enabling customers to save up to 40 per cent on their monthly hosting bills.

Managed hosting provider StratoGen believes SHARP™ is the UK's first truly fixed-price pre-pay cloud hosting model centred around VMWare's Resource Pool capabilities. SHARP™ guarantees no overspend, improved hosting performance and optimised hosting resource.

SHARP™ enables customers to manage their operational expenditure by hosting their resources on StratoGen's enterprise-grade VMWare cloud hosting infrastructure. Companies pay for a specified amount of processing power, memory and storage space upfront, on which they can deploy as many virtual machines (VMs) as they need. This gives users greater control over their hosting expenditure and the flexibility to configure their own servers.

SHARP™ vs Metered and per-VM plans
Per-VM hosting plans charge on the number of VMs used to create the customer's private cloud hosting environment. This is more expensive and offers customers less control of their budget than SHARP™. The metered nature of such hosting plans means customers often experience spikes in their bills. Such charges are measured on the amount of data transferred into and out of the service, or bandwidth used, disk IO (data written to and from), CPU cycles, RAM hours or proprietary 'compute units'.

Other models allow a pre-pay option with inclusive resources, but any resources used outside the agreement are billable, sometimes at a premium, unlike SHARP™.

SHARP™ Management
Should a SHARP™ customer approach their network's capacity, they are alerted automatically and can simply adjust their SHARP™ infrastructure usage by managing demand on the network; adding more processor speed, memory or storage space; or simply managing a period of sub-prime performance.

"SHARP™ users can prioritise resources to certain VMs within their cloud. VMs compete for the available resources, but reservations can be set for priority machines. So if a SHARP customer has a database server and a file server within their cloud, the user can prioritise the resources for the database server to maximise its performance," Said Karl Robinson, Managing Director at StratoGen

In a real world example, one StratoGen customer required nine VMs - two Database Servers, both with a 2.27GHz processor, 8GB memory and 250GB storage space, one Utility Server, with a 2.27GHz processor, 4GB memory and 250GB storage space, and six Web Servers, each with a 2.27GHz processor, 2GB memory and 100GB storage. On a per VM basis this would have cost more than £1,800 per month.

Switching to SHARP™ enabled the customer to configure 10 VMs within a resource pool of 12 GHz of processing power, 26GB of RAM and 500 GB storage space at a price of £1,100 per month. No performance was sacrificed and the customer saved more than 40 per cent per month.

Mr Robinson said: "Many customers don't like the surprise bills that come with metered hosting, and realise that they are not using all the resource that they are paying for on per-VM billing models. They want a fixed price plan that enables them to pay upfront for their usage. Just like people know how many minutes and texts they have on their mobile phone contract, now SHARP™ customers know how much processor power, memory and storage space their private cloud has available. Their operational cost is fixed. We sell clients a fixed amount of resource on our platform, just as if they were managing their own datacentre. They can then build their own VMs within the resource that we allocate, but will never be hit with any unexpected costs."

For further information please visit http://www.stratogen.net/

Notes to editor
For further information or to arrange interviews please contact stratogen@pwkpr.com or call +44 20 7609 1900 .

About StratoGen
StratoGen is a managed hosting company providing enterprise VMware hosting, managed server hosting, colocation and connectivity products all backed by a 100% uptime SLA.

StratoGen have invested significant capital into building out a true enterprise class infrastructure that offers clients real business benefits whilst reducing their costs. High uptime, high throughput websites and online applications require resilient & scalable hosting solutions and this is where StratoGen is a market leader.

For more StratoGen VMware hosting product information visit http://www.stratogen.net/products/vmware-hosting.html

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London, England -- (SBWIRE) -- 09/14/2010 -- Multi-level marketers have been NFIed – not flipping invited – to events held by NFI Networking. They join a growing list of professionals, including lawyers, life coaches, accountants, financial advisors, money lenders and 'entrepreneurs', who are no longer welcome at such events.

Multi-level marketers include sales representatives often from the cosmetic and home ware industries. They make sales via catalogues and 'parties' hosted at customer's houses and typically work as part of a large network. They receive commission for their sales and for the sales of other multi-level marketers they have recruited.

The decision to remove them from networking events was made after feedback from NFI Networking attendees showed they were being over-represented at events. This meant attendees were meeting too many candidates from the same industry and were unable to make the most of their networking. NFI feels that by barring members of this profession they will attract a greater variety of delegates to their events making the networking experience more valuable for those welcome. Similar justifications were made when NFI banned other leading professions from networking events in December 2009.

A spokesperson from NFI said, "Networking events can be overrun with certain groups of people making them of limited value for attendees. It's not because we don't like these people, and we'd rather they didn't take it too personally or seriously. It's just that they're so over represented at other networking meetings, that it's very difficult to meet other people"

NFI Networking events are designed to help professionals meet a diverse range of business people. To encourage this attendees must bring a representative from a non-NFI industry different to their own, to each event. NFI say their events are "about back-scratching, offering selfless advice and doing favours. It's about business karma."

For more information, details of upcoming events and to register for events visit http://www.nfinetworking.com. Those who do not respect the NFI list will be asked to leave.

Note to editors:

For further editorial information or to arrange an interview please contact the NFI Networking press office at
http://imhelpful@nfinetworking.com.

About NFI Networking
NFI Networking is a networking organisation for business people who want to selflessly help other business people, to buy services and recommend the services of other people. It's about being helpful, not the hard sell. It's about back-scratching, offering selfless advice and doing favours. It's about business karma.

It's not a place where you simply sell your services. It's about helping people.

http://www.nfinetworking.com

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Vangelis Moras' Downtime Pitched Against StratoGen's Virtual Machine Uptime

London, England -- (SBWIRE) -- 06/21/2010 -- The ongoing downtime of lanky, crocked Greek defender Vangelis Moras (VM) during the football World Cup is the inspiration behind business hosting company StratoGen's special summer offer. Every week that VM is out of action during the tournament StratoGen will give its customers a week of free VMware cloud hosting.

The towering 6ft 5in central defender missed his country's dire opening World Cup game through a groin injury, a massive balls up to the Greek nation`s hopes in the tournament.

Greece's depleted defences saw them lose 2-0 to the technically advanced South Koreans on Saturday. VM wasn't in Greece's game against Nigeria either. Unlike StratoGen's Cloud Hosting, VM is suffering from a lack of flexibility and availability.

Karl Robinson, Director of StratoGen, said: "The best defences in the world are big, strong and secure – three qualities that StratoGen has but the Greeks are desperately missing during VM's downtime. Judging by their less than Gladiatorial performance last weekend, VM`s lack of availability looks to have cost his team dear. In contrast, StratoGen's customers can rely on a rock solid defence when it comes to security. All purchases come with a 100 per cent uptime service level agreement, flexibility and seamless substitution of hosting of live cloud instances, guaranteeing users the very best business hosting infrastructure. For every week of VM's downtime during the world cup, we'll give our customers a week of free VMware hosting uptime. If he's out for the whole tournament, they'll get 20 per cent off their yearly contract."

StratoGen's VMware Cloud Hosting gives its customers the optimum flexibility for whatever tactics they want to deploy. High Availability (HA) is the magic sponge for Cloud Hosting products. HA closes down a failing program or system and restarts it again, ensuring hosting environments are always in play with ultimate uptime and will never let customers down in the event of minor injuries. Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS) optimises the cloud infrastructure, ensuring it plays to its strengths and saves energy, as well as being more reliable and cost effective for clients. The smooth passing vMotion facility substitutes live cloud instances from one physical server to another of the same performance and specification with no impact to end users.

StratoGen offers three leagues of VMware hosting – Cloud Instance, Shared Private Cloud and Dedicated Private Cloud.

Cloud Instance is a single virtual machine hosted on the StratoGen VMware vSphere 4.0 Cluster. A team of more than two virtual machines creates a Shared Private Cloud. The Dedicated Private Cloud is a custom built, fully managed VMware vSphere Cluster giving clients their own private cloud server dreamteam within StratoGen's world class data centre.

The lengthy downtime of Greek VM on the world stage this summer is an open goal to companies looking for a cloud hosting deal. They can gain weeks of free world class performance from StratoGen's VMware Cloud Hosting products the longer Vangelis Moras's injury persists.

To claim the offer go to http://www.stratogen.net/

Notes to editor
For further editorial information or to arrange interviews please contact stratogen@pwkpr.com or call +44 20 7609 1900

About Stratogen (http://www.stratogen.net)
StratoGen is a leading Internet company providing enterprise VMware hosting, PowerFlex dedicated servers, colocation and connectivity products all backed by a 100% uptime SLA. With a strong focus on innovation, their approach is revolutionising the hosting market with products that offer customers breakthrough features and unmatched flexibility. StratoGen is empowering the online business activities of companies of all sizes in many different industries offering the services businesses need for today and tomorrow. Product information for VMware hosting can be found at http://www.stratogen.net/products/vmware-hosting.html

For more information on this press release visit: http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/release-3.htm