ServePath Blog

Did that get your attention? I hope so. Here are the high-level steps:

1. Sign up for an UpStream Networks (USN) plan
2. Download Windows Media Encoder 9 (WME9) from Microsoft and connect a Digital Video Camera, WebCam or similar device
3. Enter in your USN account information into WME9 and start streaming live (or pre-recorded content)

That’s it!

Here are the details of each step, for those of you who are extremely detail-oriented or want a guide on how to do this.

Step One – Signing up for UpStream Networks

1. Visit the UpStream Networks site.
2. Decide on the type of live streaming service you want (Windows Media or Flash Video). USN also offers pre-recording streaming. For these instructions I’m following the Windows Live Media streaming path.
3. Use the “Easy set-up wizard” to determine the proper plan for you.
   
   
4. After selecting your plan, click ORDER and fill out the initial “Personal Information” page (after selecting the plan)
   
5. Fill out the “Billing Information”
   
6. Review your order summary on the “Order Overview” page.
   
7. Receiver your “Order Confirmation”
   
8. Once you get your order confirmation via email (a few days later), you simply log into your account with your credentials.
   
9. Your Active Media Files shows you your account information.
   
10. Once you do some streaming, you can also view statistics for that stream.
    

Now that you have a USN account, you need to configure your device and computer for streaming.

Step Two- Setting up your computer

1. First, ensure that you have the following:
   • Computer with a Windows Operating System
   • A video camera that is compatible with your computer and Windows Media Encoder
   • An Internet connection that is 20% greater than the quality of video in kbps
   • Your Upstream Networks account
   • Windows Media Encoder 9 (see below)
2. Get the Windows Media Encoder9 (WME9) from Microsoft (sorry, Windows only instructions here). There are a few versions. Make your selection here.
3. Install WME9 and ensure that your video device works with it

Step Three – Set your USN account up within WME9

1. Launch Windows Media Encoder 9
2. New Session wizard

From the New Session Wizard, click “Broadcast a live event”.

Click the “OK” Button.


3. Device Options

To stream Video and/or Audio, check the appropriate boxes and select the relevant source device(s). In the example below, a “Creative Live! Cam IM Pro” device is used.

Then click the “Next” button.


4. Broadcast Method

Select “Push to a Windows Media Server (the connection is initiated by the encoder)”.

Then click the “Next” button.


5. Server and Publishing Point

Enter the information received from UpStream Networks.

Server name: live.upstreamnetworks.com
Publishing point: #####-#####

Then click the “Next” button.


6. Encoding Options

Select the Video, Audio and Bit rate options for the Live stream.

Recommendation: Bit rate should be less than your upstream Internet connection.

Then click the “Next” button.


7. Archive File (Optional)

If you want to save a copy of the outbound stream for later use, click the appropriate checkbox and provide a location to store the output.

Then click the “Next” button.


8. Include Video Files (Optional)

If you want to include other pre-recorded videos for inclusion within the stream click “Yes” and follow the instructions. Otherwise, select “No”.

Then click the “Next” button.


9. Display Information (Optional)

Enter (optionally) any information that you want to have displayed during the Live event.

Then click the “Next” button.


10. Settings Review

Review the settings that you have entered. If the items look incorrect, use the “Back” button to go to the settings that need to be corrected.

Then click the “Finish” button.


11. Broadcast Password

When prompted, enter the Broadcast Password for your UpStream Networks account.

User name: [provided by UpStream Networks]
Password: [provided by UpStream Networks]

Then click the “OK” button.


12. Start Encoding

Once your stream has connected to UpStream Networks, click the “Start Encoding” button to enable the Live Stream.

Yes, that is a live stream (snapshot) from my cube!

You are now broadcasting LIVE on the Internet. I realize that this was not exactly 3 steps, but the process can take just a few minutes once you have your USN account. If anyone has a “best practices” for doing this on a Mac (not using Windows through VMware or Parallels), leave a comment!

Yesterday ServePath released a new feature for the Grid Series product called “Snapshot & Restore.” More information can be found on the feature page. If you are familiar with other Virtualization technologies (e.g., Parallels or VMWare), you will know that one of the important features is the ability to take a snapshot of your current environment or server in order to be able to “roll back” or restore from that image should you need to. This ability is now available as a paid feature for our Grid Series product.

Some of the feature highlights:

• “Snapshot” or image of the server’s logical disk
• Remote storage of the image included with price (up to 2 images)
• Ability to restore from an image or snapshot upon request
• Unlimited snapshot and restore requests per month

What are the costs? This feature is a $19.99/month charge and includes storage of up to 2 snapshots. For additional snapshots, there is a monthly charge of $9.99 for each image.

When might you use this feature?

• If you regularly do hard-core development work where you might run the risk of corrupting or mis-configuring your server or environment
• If you server become compromised or hacked in some way
• If you want to test different server configurations
• If you want to protect core data or a particular instance of your environment

Some important notes. A server reboot is required in order to perform a backup. Reboots can typically take up to 5 minutes.

How do I order and use? Follow these easy steps:

1. Contact your Sales representative at: 1-866-321-PATH (1-866-321-7284) and ask for the monthly feature to be added to your Grid Series account.
2. Once enabled, you can request snapshots through your Grid Series portal (https://gridseries.servepath.com) by opening a Case.
3. Snapshot is taken by Support Engineers within 24 hours of the request. Upon completion, you are notified.

You can make unlimited requests for snapshots and restores once you have signed up for the service. Note, ServePath only stores 2 snapshots (unless you pay for more). On your 3rd snapshot, the 1st one will be deleted.

Go ahead, break your server! If you have a snapshot to restore to, we got you covered!

Microsoft Windows 2008 Server is scheduled to be launched on February 27, 2008 and most hosting providers will not have it available to offer to their customers until some time in April 2008.

However, using the special “GoLive License” that Microsoft has created for hosting providers, ServePath can offer Windows 2008 Server NOW as a hosting solution.

ServePath, a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner and among the first hosting providers to provide Windows 2008 Hosted Servers, currently offers Windows 2008 Web and Standard editions. Pricing varies based on the number of processors, amount of RAM and the features required.

• Windows 2008 Web Edition is configured with IIS 7.0 and SMTP.
• Windows 2008 Standard Edition comes with Terminal Services Gateway, RDC, Application Server, Active Directory Domain Services, DHCP Server, DNS Server Windows Clustering and SMTP.

More information on ServePath’s Windows Server 2008 hosting can be found here. Be sure that you use promo code “ServePathWS08” (while available) to receive a Free Setup for your new Windows 2008 Server account. You can save between $250 to $1000 on the setup costs. Also be sure that you tell your sales representative that you heard about this offer from the blog! Call Sales at 1-866-321-PATH (1-866-321-7284).

Touted to be a revolutionary upgrade, Windows 2008 Server includes:

• Web
  • Internet Information Service 7.0 (IIS 7.0)
  • Hosting of Applications and Services
  • Management and Lower Infrastructure Costs
• Virtualization
  • Hyper-V Server Virtualization (not available at launch)
  • Terminal Services Presentation Virtualization
• Security
  • Network Access Protection
  • Read-Only Domain Controller
  • Active Directory Rights Management Services
• Solid Foundation for Business Workloads
  • Management
    • ServerManager
    • Windows PowerShell
    • Power Management
    • High Performance Computing
  • Reliability
    • ServerCore Installation Option
    • Next-Generation Networking
    • Failover Clustering
    • Dynamic Hardware Partitioning

Learn more about Windows 2008 Server at the Microsoft Windows 2008 Server Launch Site. Order your Windows 2008 Server Hosting Package from ServePath by calling 1-866-321-PATH (1-866-321-7284).

Alright, so, you need something done. Maybe you need a file edited, or webpages served. Maybe you need something typeset. Or you want to track numerical data and then graph it. If you’re a sysadmin, you’re probably not going to roll your own solution; at the very least you’ll pick an OS, or a webserver, or a text editor, or a graphing application.But which ones? Windows, IIS, Notepad and Excel? Or Debian, apache, vim and gnuplot? Or FreeBSD, lighttpd, emacs and robot?

I know which ones I’d prefer to use (hint: not the first set). But you need to know which ones you should use. And while, ultimately, the mantra “the right tool for the right job” should always be the loudest argument, so that if you need to host .asp pages you aren’t trying to get them to play nice with Apache, there are some characteristics that Right Tools tend to have.

Flexible

A good tool is flexible. Despite the fanaticism of those who love it, Notepad is not a flexible editor. Notepad can open and close text files, and sometimes it can’t even do that (though this error is actually in Windows itself).

The flexibility of a program is generally what it can be made to do. But more than that, it’s what it can be made to do while already being set up to do something else. If your webserver can’t add a virtual host because it’s already set up serving CGI in some special way, then it isn’t very flexible, and sooner or later you will need it to do something that it can’t do.

Now it’s important to understand that sometimes flexibility is not built into software by default. Microsoft software is generally not flexible, and not just in the way Notepad is flexible (i.e., not featureless). Microsoft’s software, and in general other GUI software (whether it be web apps, or IDEs, or whatever) tend to be designed for a specific task, and once you get the software set up and handling that task, you don’t touch it anymore. Microsoft software (especially good software, like SQL Server) is great at this, and, except for patches and with a good firewall, once you set it up you can go basically forever without touching it.

But in general I find that I can’t get anything useful done with that level of rigidity, so I need tools that can do many different kinds of tasks in their domain.

What kinds of tools have this quality?

Well, they tend to be without ornaments. Generally they’re CLI only, or their main interface is the command line. This is because the pretty GUI lights will actually inhibit your interaction with them, and quickly make their use frustrating. If they need a different checkbox or window for every option or domain of options, they will quickly become either unusably complex, or they will sacrifice complexity for flexibility and become useless.

The downside to this is that having flexibility right there where you can use it is that the learning curve gets a whole lot steeper. A lot of people are put off by this, because they don’t want to tackle a huge learning curve when they just need something done. But you have to be very careful here: it’s not that the slope is easy, sometimes the peak just isn’t high at all, and then you can’t get anything done. Besides, when the slope is hard, you get to the top faster.

Would you rather have your staff moderately productive on day 1, and also on day 100 and 1000 and …, or would you rather have them still befuddled on day 5 and moderate on day 50 and wizards on day 150?

Customizable

When I type and I make a mistake, I hit Ctrl-W. It’s built into me. In pretty much every editing environment I use, it deletes whatever word I was just trying to type. If I need to delete 10 words, I can hit Ctrl-W ten times. Or I can sometimes hit C-u 10 C-w. This is really nice. With this and other shortcuts, I can type really fast.

Not in Windows though. (Not to pick on MS so much, but it’s just so easy to find things you hate.) Or, not easily. (And even then C-w is still broken, since Emacs uses it for something else. Luckily the real Emacs is customizable.) In Windows C-w means “close the current window” and often it means “close the current window without asking me”. I bet you can guess how fun that is. At other times it just doesn’t mean anything.

Customizability (augh, what a hideous nonword) is basically flexibility for the user interface. I can get my job done with a tool that can’t be customized, but I can get it done a whole lot faster and with a much higher probability of having done it right with a tool that I can shape to fit my needs.

This is similar but not quite the same as a tool’s being

Extensible

With a customizable interface I can make doing small chores easy (you don’t think I typed all those URLs in the first paragraph, do you?), and get them done faster. With an extensible interface I can automate them entirely.

Very few tools are actually easily extensible, and even in this case “easily” is relative. Emacs is probably the most easily extensible, since you never even have to restart it, but you still need to know emacs lisp. Outlook is technically extensible (for example) but it’s a lot more difficult. I bet QuarkXpress is good at typesetting, but when you really need heavy lifting done, do you want a bunch of nerds in horn-rims tooling around on their Macs, or do you turn to TeX? Yes, again, the learning curves are a lot more vertical, but the sheer amount of work you can do isn’t measured by how fast you can run down that curve, but on your altitude.

Ultimately you should use the tool that best complements the task you need done. If your users need to do a small subset of complicated tasks, sure, use a control panel (but make sure you understand it!). I think there’s a tendency for people to use the simplest tool, however. If you don’t use good tools and take time to learn them, you may end up regretting it.

(speaking of bad tools, the editor that comes with Word Press ate all my links. I suppose you can guess at what’s behind them, because it’s not accepting new ones.)

I upgraded from 5.4 to 6.1 the other day, mostly just to play around with pf‘s new features.

The new feature I’m excited about is overload (you’ll have to search that page for it). pf lets you specify connection options, such as the maximum number of connections an IP can create, the maximum number of total connections, or the maximum connection rate for an IP. With overload, you can have IPs that overload these rules added to a table, and then block them completely, either from that service or from reaching you at all.

(And as a sidenote, I’m disappointed I’ve never caught anyone using OpenBSD at ServePath. I hope this is because people who use OpenBSD are generally good enough that they don’t need support, and not because nobody uses it.)

But the best new (userland) feature of 6.1 has got to be portsnap. This is a very simple tool for keeping the FreeBSD ports tree current. In the past a tool called cvsup was used to keep the ports tree up to date, and it’s pretty serviceable (it’s still used for other aspects of the FreeBSD CVS repository, such as src and doc), but portsnap just flies.

Every now and then I’ll come across programs like this that just work right. portsnap for the ports tree, lftp for FTP, screen for, well, everything.

I’ve been thinking for a long time now how important good tools are. People care deeply about their tools. Have you ever read people arguing about vi v. emacs and wondered, “What is wrong with these people?” The answer is simple: these are people who care very deeply about the tools they use. And it’s not limited to linux dweebs. Some of the people who designed the very protocols of the Internet feel this way. The book “TCP/IP Illustrated” has the following passage:

The keepalive timer is a controversial feature. Many feel that this polling of the other end has no place in TCP and should be done by the application, if desired. This is one of the religious issues, because of the fervor expressed by some on the topic.

Now why would very many very (supposedly) intelligent people care so much about, for example, a text editor? Yes, good tools are nice, but can’t you accomplish just as much in Notepad? The answer is, no, you can’t. Good tools are not different from bad tools in that they have nifty features, or that they help you out, good tools are different because they get out of your way. This is what lets you do real work; you can only do it everything irrelevant is out of mind.

This is why, I bet, you hear (for example) horror stories about management making bogus IT choices. What management wants is to focus on, well, I don’t pretend to know what management focuses on, but it isn’t servers and firewalls. They want not to be thinking about servers and firewalls. So they are going to like the idea of servers and firewalls that “just work”.

Whereas IT really wants to be thinking about servers and firewalls. They want to make their servers and firewalls as good as possible. So the solutions they will be looking for are the most configurable, open, tweakable servers and firewalls they can find, and everything that gets between a sysadmin and his ability to tweak servers and firewalls is bad. So they demand text editors like vim or emacs, and in general prefer open source and free software to Microsoft.

Meanwhile, HR just wants to be able to print files.

I forget where I was going with this. Oh yeah. So everyone needs different tools to be productive, and you have no hope of ever satisfying anyone.

Wait that wasn’t it.

Oh yeah. So everyone needs good tools to be productive, and if you aren’t using good tools, then you’re wasting time and energy wrestling with what should be non-issues. Me, I use FreeBSD and pf, your mileage may vary. But don’t settle with something because you’ve been sold on it, or because you have it and it works. Notepad works, but you can’t do much with it.

Next week sometime I’ll come up with some criteria for what makes a tool good (specifically sysadmin tools).

So I’ve been thinking lately about the title “System Administrator.” This is our official job title (it says Systems Administrator on our business cards–I guess the extra s is a nod to the fact that we have some 2500 systems in the data center). This is a slightly misleading title, however. I’m not really a system administrator as much as I am a system medic. I only see servers when they’re sick, I do whatever it takes to fix them as fast as possible, and I (hopefully) never see them again.

From what I’ve seen (working for ServePath, but actually far more often on IRC), people tend to think this is what a system administrator does.

It isn’t.

Just because a server is online doesn’t mean it is properly administered. This is akin to saying that if you’re alive, you must be healthy.

There are two very broad areas a server needs to be tuned for after its services have been set up, security and performance.

If you’re a sysadmin for, say, a FreeBSD server, some questions I might have regarding security are

• Do you know what version of SSL/SSH you have installed? Do you know whether you need to upgrade? Do you know how to upgrade these without breaking anything?
• Do you know what ipfw is, and how to use it?
• Do you know what pf is, and how to use it?
• Do you know what termlog is, and do you use it? Why?
• What logs do you keep, and where do you keep them?
• Do you know what a jail is, and should you be using them?

For performance,

• Which processes take up most of your resources, and which resources (disk I/O, network, CPU, etc)?
• At what point is a process taking too many resources?
• Do you know what inodes are? Do you have enough? How would you get more? (I had a client run out of inodes on two different file systems.)
• Do you know why /usr, /, /tmp, and /var are all on separate slices by default? When might you want to change this?
• What would you do if directories are taking a long time to list their contents?
• What network services do you run, and what kind of network performance do you get? How could you adjust your network buffers to get better performance? What about your firewall rules?
• Do you know what RFC1323 is, and when you’d need what it specifies?

Ultimately a server needs rather a lot of attention to be performing well and be secure. If you just turn a server on and plop it online, you’re probably not getting out of it all that you could.

And you’re also probably hosting movies for kids on IRC, even if you don’t know it.

Before I worked here I wasn’t exactly sure what this kind of job consisted of. Of course this made for a very awkward résumé, since I had to get across that I knew a lot about computers without implying I was best suited for a completely different computer job, such as database management. But even for a while after I joined, there were moments when I was surprised, because what I had been expecting wasn’t anything like what actually happens. So I imagine there may be a lot of you who are speculative or curious about what kind of issues can happen in a data center.

All the issues that I have to deal with can be split into three categories, hardware, software and networking. Since we sell only unmanaged servers and colocation, ideally I’d only be responsible for hardware and networking (a fourth category, environment, is important but not in any way under my purview). However, operating systems being what they are, those things break all the time and of course I have to fix them.

Hardware

The hardware issues we see most often are bad RAM and bad hard drives. Very rarely we have bad RAID cards or NICs, and once I had to replace a CPU. These are always fairly easy fixes, once the problems have been identified. The only real issue is when a customer loses data due to a failed hard drive. RAID can sometimes (but not always) prevent that, which is one of a million reasons why backups are so necessary.

Under hardware I’m also going to throw all the scheduled upgrades we do. Fooling with hardware is the easiest part of this job, except for inventory management, which gets tres annoying, but even that isn’t so bad. This is the same monkey stuff you did for your family when you were 14.

Network

I don’t think I’ve seen the network actually break, but customers fall off it all the time. 95% of the time, this is because of Red Hat Linux. Oh man, do I hate Red Hat. Don’t take this personal, if you like, use, work for, or are Red Hat (well, take it personal if you are Red Hat), but the network configuration in this OS is such a mess. So if you use Red Hat, and you reboot, and suddenly you can’t get on the network, it’s because the network scripts, which used to work just fine, thank you, decided they didn’t like where the default gateway was defined, and now expect it to be defined in another of the 735 different network configuration files, which lives in another directory from the file previously used. Haha!

This is, of course, only my opinion.

Usually network upkeep involves protecting our network from customers. If customers get cracked, they tend to become members of zombie networks, and the UDP floods they send out can slow things down for other customers. We tend to head those off by limiting the compromised customer’s connection.

Less often, but not rarely, customers become victims of DoS or DDoS attacks. In fact, there’s one going on right now. If you happen to know 208.185.250.11, tell him I said to knock it off. There are nearly always handled automagically by our network infrastructure, but it’s good to keep an eye on it.

Software

Oh boy. Broken software. Where to start?

Well, there are the usual suspects. By default, Windows will only allow two active Terminal Services sessions at a time (Windows 2003 allows you to connect to the console remotely, which can count as a third session). If you run out of these, and Windows doesn’t reset them for some reason, We have to visit the box to reset them manually.

Control panels have been known to become unstable. This seems to happen when a user tends to be familiar enough with the command line to use that, but also has a control panel installed. The CP can become confused if a file is edited manually. This is why Ensim (for example) changes the motd to inform users that, if they edit files, they have voided their warranty.

Remotely upgrading OSs is also a tricky issue, for example kernel upgrades.

Then there are the day-to-day surprises, like that time up2date got confused and uninstalled OpenSSH.

So there are a myriad of different software issues that actually crop up, but the best way to classify them would be in two categories: those that break the OS and access to it, and those that break the services the server provides. We probably have an 90/10 split between them. Very rarely will we get involved in customer setups; our customers generally prefer to have their own IT staff take care of it.

In a way it’s almost disappointing that we don’t get to do the real Sysadmin work (that is, configure client servers with actual solutions to actual problems, instead of just making sure they’re online). But that would be impractical for the number of clients we have, and they’d basically be paying for our on-the-job training as we learned about their (unique, sometimes bizarre) setups. So probably it’s just as good we don’t.

Software as a Service is definitely here to stay. In November 2005 AMR Research released a survey that showed that more than 78% of the 500 respondents are currently using or are considering using software as a service. Only 18% of respondents said that they have no plans to consider this option.

In another survey, released in October 2005 by Cutter Consortium, 65% of respondents said they were currently using or considering software as a service, and 82% of the respondents considering it said they plan to do it in the next 6-12 months.

So what are some of the benefits of integrating a software as a service solution? For many companies it is a question of both time and money. Nobody is interested in investing in software that they might not end up using when it turns out that it isn’t right for their particular company. This is why companies are demanding flexible methods for consuming software, and they want to use software on a subscription license model, while having it managed and delivered as a completely hosted solution; a dedicated managed solution or even managed within their own data center.

Since October 2004 ServePath has been working with Jamcracker, Inc. to offer Software as a Service to ASPs and ISVs. This partnership combines ServePath’s dedicated server hosting platform with Jamcracker’s PivotPath software administration platform to enable ISV’s to rapidly and cost effectively offer a SaaS version of their applications.

ServePath’s SaaS package includes:
• On Demand Delivery Platform for Delivery, Administration, and Tracking of users and applications
• Hosting Services on robust dedicated server platform
• Network and Application Monitoring Services

You can read more about ServePath’s partnership with Jamcracker in an earlier blog entry, and learn more about ServePath’s Software as a Service solutions on our web site.

San Francisco, CA- April 21, 2005, — ServePath, the West Coast’s leading dedicated server hosting specialist and a Microsoft Certified Partner, is one of the first Internet Service Providers to offer hosted Microsoft SQL Server 2000, Workgroup Edition.

Microsoft has just released this new, lower-cost version of its flagship database, Microsoft SQL Server 2000, Workgroup Edition, and selected ServePath as a go to market partner. Workgroup Edition offers an affordable way for small and medium businesses to run their own copy of SQL Server for dynamic web sites, e-commerce, and other applications that require a high performance database.

Customers can now get SQL Server 2000, Workgroup Edition for as low as $75 per month in addition to the cost of a dedicated server web hosting plan. This new price point is a breakthrough for high traffic web sites that have previously had to either spend thousands of dollars to obtain SQL Server, or rely on the lower performance of free databases or web hosting that shared a single SQL Server copy among many web sites.

“Web sites that use MySQL or other free databases can perform properly,” said John Keagy, President of ServePath. “But for superior performance and reliability under heavy traffic or intensive usage, ServePath has always recommended a Windows Server 2003 dedicated server platform with Microsoft SQL Server. Now with Microsoft SQL Server Workgroup Edition, that solution is finally affordable to any small to medium sized business.”

ServePath’s dedicated hosting solutions for SQL Server and Windows Server 2003 are immediately available. For more information please view our SQL Server Overview, or call 1-866-321-7284.

San Francisco, CA- October 19, 2004, — ServePath, Silicon Valley’s #1 Dedicated Server Specialist, is now offering solutions to help ISV’s and other software developers deploy Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or On Demand solutions. ServePath has partnered with Jamcracker, Inc., the industry’s leading supplier of On Demand enablement solutions, to offer solution bundles that make it easier for companies to deploy SaaS or On Demand products. For as little as $3,000 a month, ServePath will deliver a complete solution including dedicated hosting, hardware, operating system, network connectivity and Jamcracker’s Pivot Path On Demand Delivery Platform.

In addition to a broad range of dedicated hosting options tuned for SaaS providers, ServePath will also be offering business consulting for ISV’s that are considering offering their software products as a service. The consulting is specifically designed to help companies model the effects of a subscription license model on their financials, and to accurately predict the costs associated with adding this delivery model to their product catalog. The services will be delivered in conjunction with ServePath’s partnership with Jamcracker.

“We have been a big believer in the SaaS model. The success of the second generation ASP’s like SalesForce.com has most software companies thinking hard about this model,” said John Keagy, President of ServePath.“We are excited to offer fantastic products for companies that have decided to deliver SaaS solutions and to offer a very effective set of tools for companies still evaluating the SaaS business model. Being located in Silicon Valley gives us the unique advantage of being a local partner to the thousands of software companies in the Bay Area.”

“We see ServePath as great partner for software companies wanting to deliver SaaS. Their strength in dedicated hosting aligns well with the demands of companies moving into this model,” said Todd Johnson, President of Jamcracker. “Hosting and infrastructure are key elements in the SaaS Reference Architecture. 80+% of the ISV’s we talk to about moving to SaaS will want to host with a hosting partner rather than hosting their solution themselves.”

ServePath’s bundled solutions for SaaS and consulting services for companies considering a move into the space are both immediately available. For more information contact ServePath at www.ServePath.com, or call 1-866-321-7284.