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Carpathia Hosting – Combined Enterprise and Federal Focus
Tue, 02/23/2010 – 10:50am — Paul Burns
Carpathia Hosting just announced it has teamed up with Citrix® Systems, Inc. to launch the second generation of its enterprise cloud offering, Carpathia InstantOn™. The announcement looks exciting for at least a couple reasons. First, Carpathia is communicating a focus on Citrix XenServer™ rather than VMware or other hypervisors. Of course Carpathia will remain hypervisor agnostic to some degree, allowing customers freedom of choice. Still, this is a big win for Citrix. The second big news is the launch of the second generation InstantOn cloud computing solution from Carpathia. With this release, the company is continuing to focus on “enterprise managed hosting services for government agencies and businesses.” Let’s take a look at this second item.
The federal government is on track to be a major consumer of cloud computing services. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra has made numerous statements of support for the use of cloud computing provided by public companies. However, as many know, it can be challenging to actually get a federal government agency to purchase and use publicly provided products or services. Carpathia has removed a number of barriers by meeting security and compliance requirements and by supporting government standards like FISMA and DIACAP. With its continuing focus on meeting the needs of federal agencies, Carpathia Hosting is distinguishing not only its capabilities but its strategy. Some of the related capabilities include:
- XenServer+ security extensions (inter vm firewall + IDS)
- Encrypted storage
- RSA token support (portal, vm auth, vm console)
- SSL VPN (RSA integration + bastion host function)
- Reserved servers + DoD disk scrub on de-provision
Those who are interested can of course learn more about other federal capabilities by contacting Carpathia Hosting. Simply put, the company is aligning its strategy with its unique capabilities in an attempt to best serve a specific customer segment. As suggested in earlier blog posts, the cloud computing market appears to be specializing more than it appears to be commoditizing. Neovise expects this trend to continue.
Carpathia Hosting shares a similar focus on enterprise customers with a number of other cloud computing providers. However, the company does have a compelling set of enterprise capabilities that can be found on its website and other locations. Of interest for this discussion is that Carpathia’s enterprise and federal focus fit nicely together. To some degree, enterprise requirements are a subset of federal requirements. By meeting the compliance and security needs of federal customers, the company is better positioned to meet the needs of the enterprise as well. This approach appears to be self-reinforcing with enterprise customers getting the benefit of additional compliance and security measures and federal customers getting the benefits of additional capabilities around storage, network, orchestration and others.
While the partnership with Citrix was only touched on lightly here, it will be interesting to see what these companies do together next.
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