It’s HostingCon time, and we’re proud this year to be partnering with Calxeda to demo a 24-node InterWorx Cluster running on one of Calxeda’s ARM servers! If you’re in the exhibit hall, make sure to stop by booth 905 to say hi, check it out, and pick up a brand new InterWorx t-shirt!

However, if you’re not in Austin this year, you can still take part in our demonstration of the InterWorx cluster load-balancing requests to all the nodes. We setup a little twitter app that, when tweeted at (@InterWorxARM), will reply with the node that handled the request. The node will also add a little message of its own, but watch out: rumor is that ARM nodes can be a little sassy

ARM servers offer a lot of potential benefits to hosting companies and data centers, in particular low power usage, high node/rack density and high power/watt ration. InterWorx is the first control panel to tackle ARM compatibility, and after HostingCon we plan to continue working with Calxeda to build a solid platform for ARM in the hosting industry. Interested in keeping up with our progress? Sign up for the ARM mailing list!

Photo Credit: John Mallon

Now that school is ending for the year, we have your summer reading list compiled and ready. We’ve gathered the best System Administration, Hosting, Security, and Enterprise IT content from May in one convenient place.  Enjoy and let us know what you think in the comment section below.

System Administration

Best Linux Tools for Enterprise Developers and Systems Administrators – It’s a testament to Linux’s ubiquity and versatility today that so many “best of” lists are published focusing on the free and open source operating system.

Software Defined Data Center Analytics - Moving the configuration of the environment from the hardware that supports the environment to a layer of software which can collectively manage all of the storage, networking, compute, and memory resources of the environment is one of the main points of the SDDC.

7 Big Data Trends That Will Impact Your Business - The topic of big data continues to pulsate with vigor in the market, as demonstrated by the wide variety of data innovations emerging daily and the talented professionals successfully pursuing the creation and use of big data solutions.

What does BYOD Mean to Your Datacenter Strategy? - When the first iPhones came to market back in the summer of 2007, they changed the way people think about phones. That was the beginning of the smartphone, and today, almost six years later, smartphones are outselling non-feature phones and have become the device of choice. Smartphones have transformed the way people communicate, shop, and work.

Understanding the Potential of Software-Defined Networking - In the past two decades, enormous innovation has taken place on top of the Internet architecture. Email, e-commerce, search, social networks, cloud computing, and the web as we know it are all good examples. With the evolution of cloud computing and virtualization, IT managers have had to change in recent years the way we interact with technology.

Hadoop: What It Is And How It Works - You can’t have a conversation about Big Data for very long without running into the elephant in the room: Hadoop. This open source software platform managed by the Apache Software Foundation has proven to be very helpful in storing and managing vast amounts of data cheaply and efficiently.

Enterprise IT

How Linux Found its Home in the Enterprise - When I first started using Linux, I was certain my platform of choice was going to take every aspect of computing by storm — and do so fairly quickly. And with good reason. It didn’t suffer from the same show-stopping flaws that plagued the Windows platform, it was cost effective, it was reliable… and it was secure.

Big Data Hype vs. Solutions : Why the Gap? How to Fix It? - Over 85 percent of both business and IT respondents agree that Big Data offers substantial value in its ability to foster a data-driven culture and make intelligent business decisions. Despite the perceived business benefits, more than half of respondents rate Big Data project success so far as lukewarm (somewhat successful), and only 23 percent of them perceive Big Data projects to be a success.

Big Data — For Better or Worse - A full 90% of all the data in the world has been generated over the last two years. The internet companies are awash with data that can be grouped and utilised. Is this a good thing?

Cisco Buying Energy Software Maker JouleX - Cisco Systems is bulking up its capabilities around data networks and the Internet of Things with the acquisition of JouleX, whose technology enables businesses to better monitor and manage the energy usage of devices connected to the network.

Rethinking Enterprise Networks: Transformative Approach to Fuel the Cloud - It’s clear that cloud computing has transformed the enterprise IT landscape, from the computing infrastructure layer up through enterprise software, as companies move to leverage more efficient and cost-effective service-delivery models and bring new cloud-based products and services to the market.

Enterprise Encryption Technologies – Part 1 - Lately I have been working more and more in the cloud as a security architect, and my current focus has been on encryption and key management technologies. What is interesting is that there isn’t a lot of difference between the encryption technologies we use in the cloud and the encryption technologies we use in an enterprise.

Consumerization of IT: Mobile Data Management – Gartner has predicted that in “2013 mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide” and that “by 2015 media tablet shipments will reach around 50 percent of laptop shipments.” The prevalence of ‘work anywhere’ devices heralds a time of unprecedented change that is partly being driven by mobile and cloud computing.

Hosting

How Small Web Hosts Can Differentiate from the Big Guys - Without the same resources that hosting giants like AWS and Rackspace have at their disposal, small hosting and cloud providers have to be creative in order to win and keep customers. For managed hosting and cloud services provider Opus Interactive, differentiating from large providers takes a variety of tactics and tools.

What to Do When Good Hosts Go Bad - Like any business, a once-popular Web hosting provider can go downhill over time. If you watch for the signs of deterioration, you can take steps to prevent this situation from harming your business. Most providers don’t turn bad overnight, so there’s time to find a solution before your website or email accounts disappear.

Security

Cyber-Security is Everyone’s Gig – Most of us have an idea of what cyber-security is, but our definitions probably vary quite a lot. So before we can begin to take steps to protect ourselves and our systems, we have to decide first, exactly what we’re trying to protect ourselves from. Let’s take a look at some of the different perspectives.

Online Gaming Company Recounts Fighting for Survival vs. DDoS Attacks – Fighting denial-of-service attacks has become a matter of survival for some businesses that find their websites getting smashed and network flooded by attackers. Online gaming company SG Interactive says it’s under constant attack and the only way to keep going is to set up an anti-DDoS defense.

Attack Hitting Apache Sites Goes Mainstream, Hacks nginx, Lighttpd, too – Security researchers have uncovered an ongoing and widespread attack that causes sites running three of the Internet’s most popular Web servers to push potent malware exploits on visitors.

Twitter Now Offers Two-Factor Authentication – The recent hack of The Associated Press’ Twitter account showed the true power and impact the social media platform can have. After hackers took over the news organization’s account and reported that President Barack Obama was seriously injured, the S&P 500 briefly took a significant dip.

Large Attacks Hide More Subtle Threats In DDoS Data – The massive avalanche of data in March that crashed down on Spamhaus, the maintainer of a number of spam blacklists, made headlines as the largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack witnessed to date.

We’ll leave you this month with a time lapse video that shows you what Curiosity has been up to on Mars for the last nine months.

Photo Credits: Raspberrypi.org

On paper, the specs don’t appear to be anything special: two USB ports, an ethernet port, HDMI out, 512MB RAM, powered via micro-USB and the only storage to speak of is an SD card (not included). For a very large proportion of project ideas, however, that’s more than enough. From media servers, gaming platforms, web servers all the way to robotics, this tiny Linux machine has proven incredibly versatile. So, when the InterWorx development team received a pair of Raspberry Pis to play with, it was only natural to speculate that our clustering control panel could potentially run on them. Why on earth would anyone want to attempt this? To quote George Mallory (of Mt. Everest fame), “Because it’s there”.

How

One glaring obstacle stood in our way, however. InterWorx is built to run in a stable Red Hat-like environment, preferably CentOS 5 or 6. Unfortunately, Red Hat has yet to release a similar distribution for the ARM architecture and we were forced to choose between porting our software to Debian (which presents a whole host of other issues unrelated to this article) or find a workable alternative.

That alternative came in the form of RedSleeve, a Red Hat-derived distribution for the ARM architecture with a reputation for compatibility with the initial run of Raspberry Pi boards. One hiccup was that the provided RedSleeve SD card images was incompatible with our newer Model B Pi, but we were able to complete a manual install without much difficulty.

The vast majority of the effort came in the form of rebuilding all of our software packages for the ARM architecture which, while by no means an easy task, was more time-consuming than it was difficult. However, once this was done and a few tweaks were made to our install script, we were ready to attempt an install.

Results

After a bit of tweaking and streamlining of the install process — it worked! The install completed without any hiccups and we could successfully activate with our licensing server. We even managed to cluster both of the Pis without any modification to the software! Given the hardware limitations, things weren’t exactly blazing fast, but as a proof-of-concept of InterWorx on ARM servers we’re more than excited about the results.

As such, we are proud to unveil pi.interworx.com, a neat little page running on top of WordPress, InterWorx and, most importantly, a pair of credit-card sized computers nestled safely in our server room. Here you’ll find the wisdom we encountered over the course of this project, a place to voice your interest in future InterWorx ARM development, as well as the resources to do all of this yourself.

Enjoy!

World IPv6 launch day was exactly one year ago, and IPv6 is gaining momentum in a big way. Global use has more than doubled since then, which is a good thing because it’s estimated that by 2016 there will be 20 billion devices online, roughly five times the number of total IPv4 addresses.

The tipping point for IPv6 has already happened in certain parts of the world, and the rest will be there shortly. Recognizing this, we have dedicated much of the past year to incorporating IPv6 into InterWorx. The fruits of that effort are now available in our InterWorx 5.0 beta, which any InterWorx customer can try by switching to the beta release channel. You can also check it out in our online demo.

Some other interesting tidbits about IPv6:

• A short description of how IPv6 Pools and Subpools work in InterWorx 5.
• Detailed metrics about IPv6 adoption.
• A brief overview of IPv6 from the Internet Society, the organizers of World IPv6 Launch Day.

And lastly, an awesome infographic that should be shared far and wide

Photo Credits: Danny Oosterveer

Over the past month, Rack911 has been conducting a security audit of web hosting control panels, and they recently published their results on Web Hosting Talk. It was a very thorough analysis, and they found A LOT of room for improvement:

“It has been approximately thirty days since we started making a concentrated effort in finding security flaws in software being used by web hosting companies, and to say that we are shocked at what we found would be a huge understatement…To give everyone an idea of the numbers, we’re talking 43 security flaws in total with 25 different vendors of all commonly used web hosting software.”

These weren’t small bugs, either:

“Of the 43 security flaws that we discovered, 23 of them were root level flaws meaning that we were able to obtain the highest level of access possible.”

During this whole process, the Rack911 team got in touch with us when they found something in InterWorx, and we promptly fixed the issue and put out a release. They were very courteous and professional, and we can’t thank them enough for all the time and effort they put into their analysis and for their efforts to make the web hosting community safe. However, their reception from other control panel makers was apparently not as forthcoming:

“Unfortunately, not every company was as receptive as InterWorx. Their biggest competitor, cPanel, decided to take a more relaxed approach when it came to the same security flaw, and to this date still have not released a solution to address it. To add insult to injury, cPanel issued a statement to WHIR that frankly libeled us by stating that we stopped communicating with them regarding that flaw which is 100% false.”

At InterWorx, there is no such thing as a low-priority security bug. If you ever find a security flaw, file a support ticket and we’ll take a look ASAP.

We have a pretty good idea of how we stack up against cPanel and Plesk outside of this, but what do you think?  Have you been surprised by a customer care experience with other control panels that’s like/unlike Rack911′s?

InterWorx users were asked which features of the control panel are their favorite. Among the features highlighted as exceptional were InterWorx’s ability to manage multi-server clusters, its outstanding levels of reliability when compared to competing control panels like Plesk and cPanel, and the excellent support provided by the InterWorx team. Users also positively commented on the InterWorx user interface and its ease of use.

The Net Promoter Score is an industry-standard measurement of customer loyalty determined by a comprehensive survey of existing product users. Participants are asked how likely they are, on a scale of 0 to 10, to recommend the company’s products to friends and colleagues. Depending on the score they give, customers are ranked as Promoters, Passives, or Detractors.

In the survey conducted by InterWorx, 76% of participants were ranked as Promoters, 16% as Passive, and just 4% as Detractors. The final result is calculated by subtracting detractors from promoters, leading to a Net Promoter Score of 72. The scale runs from -100 for complete disapproval to 100 for total approval. A score above 50 is considered excellent.

“We’re extremely happy that our users rate us so highly and are willing to recommend us to their friends and colleagues,” said Paul Oehler, CTO of InterWorx,”Their approval is a testament to the InterWorx team’s commitment to creating the most scalable, reliable and user friendly web control panel available today. We take user feedback seriously, and we’ll be using it to shape the future development of the InterWorx Control Panel.”

The Net Promoter Score is considered a key indicator of future business growth, which depends on having strong products that elicit high levels of customer loyalty and positive recommendations. InterWorx has shown steady growth over recent years, and the results of this survey indicate that the trend will continue into the future.

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About InterWorx:

InterWorx is an innovative web hosting control panel that’s scalable, reliable, high-performing, and secure. With industry-leading features such as multi-server clustering and powerful Web, CLI, and API based interfaces, it’s no wonder that InterWorx maintains one of the most passionate cult followings in the web hosting industry. For more information, or to request a free demo for yourself, visit http://www.interworx.com.

Photo Credits: Nemo

For many years, MySQL was the leader of the pack when it came to open source relational databases. In recent years, however, the MySQL fork, MariaDB, has been making significant headway and some big sites – including Wikipedia – have made or are in the process of making the switch.

MySQL was created by the Finnish developer Michael “Monty” Widenius and David Axmark and released under the GPL and various commercial licenses. The database was originally developed under the auspices of MySQL, AB but in 2008 that company was sold to Sun Microsystems, which was itself acquired by Oracle Corporation, the developers of a popular and closed source competitor to MySQL.

MySQL is by far the most popular open source relational database platform. After being dissatisfied with the way development was heading under Sun, however, Widenius forked MySQL and created MariaDB. The purchase by Oracle further cemented the impression that MySQL was not in safe hands because of a perceived conflict of interest between MySQL and Oracle’s commercial database products.

MariaDB was intended as a drop-in, fully compatible replacement for MySQL, with each version of MariaDB implementing all of the features of its equivalent MySQL version. However, because patches and new features have been incorporated into MariaDB more quickly than MySQL, as things stand, MariaDB has made some significant performance and feature advances. In versions before the 10.x release, users could be certain that everything MySQL did, equivalent versions of MariaDB did too, but that reverse was not always true. In the future, MariaDB is likely to diverge more rapidly from MySQL.

Features that were implemented in MariaDB, but not MySQL, included:

• The Aria Storage engine, which enabled faster complex queries.

• Virtual columns, which allow for on-the-fly calculation and updating of columns.

• Table elimination for removing unnecessary table access for queries that reference a table but don’t require it to be accessed.

• Various other performance optimizations.

The other significant difference between the two is that MySQL is susceptible to the whims of Oracle, while MariaDB is a community-managed project overseen by Widenius.

A number of large sites have changed to MariaDB from MySQL or are in the process of doing so, including Wikipedia. Wikimedia Site Architect, Asher Feldman, said of the change:

“Taking the times of 100% of all queries over regular sample windows, the average query time across all enwiki slave queries is about 8% faster with MariaDB vs. our production build of 5.1-fb. Some queries types are 10-15% faster, some are 3% slower, and nothing looks aberrant beyond those bounds. Overall throughput as measured by qps queries per second has generally been improved by 2-10%. “

Of course, the performance increases depend heavily on how the database is used, so your mileage may vary considerably.

Ultimately, making the decision to switch should be based on whether the performance and feature enhancements are worth the effort of the change (which isn’t difficult to do), and whether the licensing issues are a problem. Users of Oracle’s support services have no choice, as Oracle doesn’t support MariaDB, but otherwise a simple cost / benefit analysis and consideration of the likely future development of the two platforms probably favors MariaDB.

Have you or are you thinking about making the switch? If so, why? Join the conversation in the comments below.

InterWorx Kitteh Dreaming Up Blog Content

Interested in writing a guest post for our blog? We’re always looking for insightful and interesting content, and we’d especially love to highlight the work that our customers are doing!

Take a look at our guest blogging guidelines for all the details! Also, if you have any suggestions for post topics, let us know in the comments below!

Photo Credits: Calxeda

British chip designer ARM has been going from strength to strength in recent years. Much of its success has been a result of the booming market in mobile devices. Most of Apple’s iOS devices contain a variant on ARM chip designs, as do many other popular smart phones and tablets.

Key to their dominance of the mobile market is ARM’s expertise in designing chips with extremely low power consumption. Battery technology has lagged when compared to the other components of mobile devices and the two most important factors in maintaining battery life are low-powered chips and power management.

Mobile is not the only domain in which power consumption is a concern. Internet giants like Facebook and Google, as well as smaller data center providers, face huge power bills, both to drive their server’s processors and to cool them.

ARM, its manufacturing partners, and companies like Facebook, have been working on solutions that would bring the power efficiency of ARM chips to the server.

One potential use of ARM SOCs (systems on a chip) would be in devices that are specially manufactured to optimize their performance for specific tasks. HP, Facebook, and ARM will soon be releasing a paper that discusses the potential for creating dedicated ARM devices for running memcached. Memcached is a popular key value cache that is crucial to enabling responsive data delivery for huge web services.

At the other end of the server scale, chip manufacturer Calxeda is building general purpose servers that utilize clusters of ARM’s Cortex-A9 SoCs inside a rack mounted chassis. Calxeda’s EnergyCards contain 4 quad-core Cortex A-9 SoCs on a board with 4 DIMMS.

For their Boston Viridis server, Calxeda mounted multiple EnergyCards within a server unit. As AnandTech points out, each unit is in fact a server cluster, made up of multiple SoCs each with its own memory and access to 4 SATA ports.

AnandTech tested a Boston Viridis with 6 EnergyCards. Their reviewer concluded that:

The real-world tests are stunning. Not only does Calxeda’s array of “wimpy” cores outperform Xeon processors in web server tests, it beats them in both raw performance and performance-per-watt. De Gelas writes that “the Calxeda’s ECX-1000 server node is revolutionary technology.

ARM in the data center is still in the early stages of development, but so far, with the potential introduction of ARM devices highly optimized for running common applications and the apparently excellent performance of Calxeda’s ARM SoC-based clusters, it might be time for Intel to start worrying.

It includes everything that goes along with InterWorx, listed out by release branch and distro. Have any questions about our current RPMs? Feel free to post in the forums!