Roundup: State of the Internet, Rackspace Cloud

Here’s a roundup of some of some of this week’s headlines from the data center and hosting industry:

• Akamai announces 3rd quarter State of the Internet report.On Wednesday Akamai (AKAM) releasedthe State of the Internet report for the 3rd quarter of 2009.  The report examines the Internet across key statistics such as origin of traffic, network outages, and broadband connectivity levels across the globe.  In this latest edition of the report the top 10 fastest cities per continent/region are examined and they examine incoming connections to Akamai identified as coming from networks associated with mobile providers. Akamai's impressive connectivity boasted more than 444 million unique IP addresses, from 226 countries - a 4.5 percent increase over the second quarter of 2009, and a 17 percent increase of the same quarter a year ago.  The report also measured global connection speeds, showing that a majority of countries within the top 10 saw average connection speeds increase on a quarter-over-quarter basis.  To view the report, or archives of past quarters, visit the Akamai site. Registration is required.
• Raritan adds integration to Power IQ software.  Raritan announced added system integration capabilities to its Power IQ data center energy management software and support for more data center equipment.  The Power IQ software allows tracking and analyzing of energy usage down to the individual IT device level and implements energy-saving actions from a central power console.  New API's in the Power IQ software enable customers to integrate with existing enterprise systems such as HP Asset Management, as well as build custom tools.  The new release of the software supports deployments up to 5,000 rack PDU's and has added the ability to collect data from ServerTech rack PDU probes and NetBotz.  Power IQ 1.5 is available now through Raritan's channel partners.
• Encoding.com live on the Rackspace Cloud. Video encoding service Encoding.com has joined the Rackspace Cloud, delivering faster video transcoding as a software as a service provider.  By integrating with both EC2 and the Rackspace Cloud Encoding.com minimizes the distance between source video and their cloud-based platform.  Encoding.com COO Jeff Malkin explains integration with Rackspace in this3 minute video.  Jeff explains that while EC2 and Rackspace Cloud intances are similarly priced, the Rackspace Cloud servers are almost twice as powerful.   The intensive CPU task to provide encoding/transcoding of video via software as a service is met with the instant and infinite scalability of the cloud service provisioning.  Encoding.com was recently highlighted on Mashable.com as a part of their Spark of Genius series.