Why Pangea Foundation Hosting Flexibility

Pangea Foundation’s primary hosting provider is Rackspace®. As the world’s leader in hosting and cloud computing, you can be confident knowing that your data will be safe and secure 24x7x365. Experts the world over consider Rackspace’s data centers to be the best around. Engineered for uptime, redundancy is built into all critical systems. Sooner or later devices will break. And when they do, Rackspace’s Managed Hosting team has them replaced before we (or you) know something’s wrong. More uptime and less downtime ensures the consistent availability of your software. Contrast that with the reality for many nonprofits today, where a hardware failure means you’re stuck until a technician finds the extra time to “look into” the problem. We help to ensure that you trade all the day to day responsibilities and the big headaches related to hardware, security, performance, maintenance, backups, and so on to experts who specialize in all that stuff.

If your solution needs to withstand unpredictable traffic spikes, Cloud Hosting is ideal. Pangea Foundation’s Cloud Hosting platform is The Rackspace Cloud. Cloud Hosting spreads your traffic across entire fleets of servers. You get the benefits of powerful load balancing, advanced clustering, and redundant storage—without any effort at all on your part. If a server fails, the other servers in the cluster can continue to respond, which means your users often never notice a problem. When a public-facing site or online community suddenly becomes popular, the traffic can easily overwhelm a single server. But the large server pools in The Rackspace Cloud can (and do) handle billions of requests for millions of visitors each day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. With The Rackspace Cloud, scaling happens automatically and when your application outgrows what’s included, you pay inexpensive utility pricing for only the computing resources you use, nothing more.

If you want to combine the most powerful benefits of the Cloud with the most powerful benefits of Managed Hosting, Pangea Foundation can offer you a Private Cloud configuration. A Private Cloud is a dedicated hardware environment with a virtualization layer running on top. It gives you the power of multiple virtual servers within a smaller set of physical servers. Since it is a physically separated environment of pooled resources, you and you only, are drawing computing power from it. What’s more, with Rackspace, support for your Private Cloud is handled like a traditional managed hosting environment. This means unmatched levels of service, security, and availability are all part of the value proposition. Plus, your software can scale to meet the demands of unpredictable traffic spikes. Last but not least, you get utility billing for your Virtual Machines—a benefit that makes public Cloud Hosting so attractive.

Underpinning our multi-regional failover and backup hosting environment is the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). SDSC is an international leader in data management, systems security, high-performance computing and networking. As a major partner in both the U.S. TeraGrid Initiative and the Cyberinfrastructure Partnership, SDSC supports cutting-edge research-oriented computational environments and aims to spur the expansion of strategic infrastructure activities throughout the world. Since 1985, SDSC has served more than 10,000 researchers at 300 academic, government, and industrial institutions in the United States and around the world. SDSC adheres to the most advanced security protocols, including 24-hour surveillance, picture identification for access, redundant electrical generators, redundant data center air conditioners, advanced fire suppression, and other backup equipment and devices designed to keep servers continually operating.