DataGardens took home ‘People’s Choice’ honours for a cloud services demonstration it presented as part of the Cloud Challenge event during Summit 09. DataGardens, one of five participants in the Cloud Challenge, demonstrated the unique capability to migrate live virtual servers half way around the globe on a 10 Mbps link.

“The reason this demonstration has generated such excitement is that it helps usher in a new era of cloud computing, where IT services are completely abstracted from the physical infrastructure on which they reside,” said Geoff Hayward, President and CEO of DataGardens. “We can move servers half way around the world without users detecting a thing: they no longer need to care where their applications and services are actually running. More importantly, this solution allows cloud providers to choose where best to host IT services so as to minimize their overall costs, their carbon footprint, and their exposure to hardware or site failures without affecting the performance seen by their customers.”

The intent of the Cloud Challenge was to demonstrate the viability for on-demand cloud based end user services at several levels, demonstrating capability for load balancing and distribution using conventional computing tools as well as potentially new cloud concepts. The ‘People’s Choice’ winner was announced to nearly 450 national and international conference delegates on the final day of the week-long event. DataGardens President and CEO, Geoff Hayward, who participated as an invited speaker in two Summit 09 sessions earlier that week, accepted the prize on DataGardens’ behalf.