Jason Brooks

PHP Fog is a platform-as-a-service offering that, as its name suggests, targets PHP-based applications. The PHP Fog service, alongside a handful of other new services, fills what has been a gap in the PaaS market, as the best-known PaaS offerings target other languages, chiefly Java, Ruby and Python. The service, which became publicly available in […]

PHP Clouds Each subscriber cloud gets its own of EC2 instances, with MySQL database service provided from scalable, multi-tenant MySQL instances. JumpStart The service includes a handful of “jumpstart” templates for getting up and running with popular applications and frameworks. Application Details Jumpstart templates require little configuration to get up and running. Mediawiki I tested […]

Smart Installer StackOps sports a free, Web-based smart installer application which stores cloud configurations. For single-node configurations, it isn’t necessary to create an account on the service. Deploy Time The Smart Installer Web app collects the configuration form responses to pass back to the relevant node when its time for deployment. Instance One After firing […]

OpenStack is out to be the Linux of the cloud infrastructure world-the project, founded by NASA and Rackspace, is aimed at rounding up the various compute, storage and networking components that make up a public or private cloud into an open-source cloud operating system. Just as most people who use and deploy Linux rely on […]

Last month’s cluster of “Mac Defender” malware flareups felt like a flashback to 2001, with the role of Microsoft being played by Apple. The malware, which took advantage of poisoned Google images search results to trick users into installing fake anti-virus software, first appeared in variants that required an administrator password for installation. Soon, though, […]

I ‘m taking OpenStack for a spin in our lab, with an eye toward kicking off some reviews coverage of the much-talked-about open source project, and, perhaps, to put the cloud operating system into service running eWEEK Labs’ test infrastructure. I started off my exploration by installing Ubuntu 10.04.2 on a six-core AMD 4000-series server […]

Disk encryption for client endpoint computers has long been recognized as an important safeguard against data exposure, particularly for notebook computers, which are easily lost or stolen. It’s trivial to bypass typical operating system protection measures by popping out a drive and accessing its data from a separate machine. Still, most mobile clients are deployed […]

Since its start in 2005, rPath has focused on bringing many of the details that define an enterprise software stack under tight, reliable management through the same version control facilities that developers use to keep their codebases in order. The company’s latest offering, rPath X6, expands its ambitions with powerful configuration management capabilities and a […]

Flash UI rPath X6 sports a Flash-based UI, which manages to pack a good deal of system administration detail into its series of tabs and collapsible menu lists. vSphere Target I connected rPath X6 to the vSphere installation in our lab, and found that I could launch new instances of pre-existing VM templates. Appliance Images […]

This week, Microsoft announced that it would support CentOS as a guest operating system on Hyper-V, citing CentOS support as the number one interoperability requirement among Web hosting providers weighting whether to consolidate their system virtualization on Microsoft’s hypervisor. When I read the news, my thoughts turned immediately to Red Hat and its Red Hat […]