ST. LOUIS–(BUSINESS WIRE)–

Contegix, the cloud computing, managed hosting and colocation company known for its Go Beyond philosophy, today announced it is awarding $5,000 in MiraCloud hosting service credits to each of the 15 winners of the inaugural 2012 Arch Grants Business Plan Competition.

Contegix’s awards for the Arch Grants winners are the latest in a string of efforts that demonstrate the company’s passion for entrepreneurship and its knowledge of the unique challenges in starting a business.

Arch Grants seeks to create a more robust startup culture in St. Louis, offering funding and support to startups remaining or transitioning to downtown St. Louis. Through the Business Plan Competition, Arch Grants selects promising startups to receive monetary support and provides access to networking, mentoring and other various business services. This year’s winners include Companion Pharma Inc., Food Essentials, Graematter Inc., IDC projects, Iveria, Laborvoices, Material Mix, Med Preps, Observable Networks, Obsorb, Pharos Scientific, Saturnis, simMachines, tech.li, and Rocket Rack.

Contegix is proud to be a supporting partner of this competition and is offering each winner $5,000 in service credits on its state-of-the-art, MiraCloud cloud computing platform. With MiraCloud, these bright startups can focus more on their day-to-day operations while saving significantly on IT costs.

“We are committed to investing not only in the St. Louis community, but also in cultivating the entrepreneurial spirit,” said Matthew Porter, Contegix co-founder and CEO, who also served as a finalist judge in the competition. “These young companies show tremendous promise and we are pleased to offer them access to MiraCloud, the industry’s most customizable cloud computing platform.”

The Arch Grants awards will introduce local companies to Contegix’s cloud computing platform MiraCloud, launched in October 2011. MiraCloud offers customers a cloud computing platform that includes a Convenience Class, Business Class and Enterprise Class. It delivers the promise of a truly multi-tiered cloud with options that range from self-managed cloud computing to a private enterprise cloud with the ability to choose elements from each class to suit various mission critical needs. For example, startups can choose different MiraCloud classes for various applications, multiple hypervisor support, and mixed needs within the Contegix public cloud and their own private cloud. Contegix is the first cloud company to offer such a customizable cloud platform.

For more information about MiraCloud, including full product details, go tohttp://www.contegix.com/cloud.

About Contegix

Contegix provides custom and strategic cloud, colocation and managed hosting solutions for enterprise applications and infrastructure. Our revolutionary MiraCloud hosting solution, with its three service classes, leads the industry in flexibility. The company delivers proactive, passionate support that is unparalleled in the industry. All Contegix solutions encompass supporting dedicated hardware and operating system management, deploying and configuring software, and offering complete licensing management. Contegix’s award-winning service is delivered by a staff of Tier-3 engineers from its global headquarters in St. Louis, MO. Current clients and partners include Nestle Purina, eBay, Electronic Arts, United Airlines, Flite.com, VMware and Atlassian. For additional information, visit www.contegix.com or call 1 (877) 426-6834.

Tom Prindiville has joined Contegix as our Director of Marketing.

Tom Prindiville, Director of Marketing

Dominic Lozano has joined Contegix as our Director of Project Management and Innovation.

Dominic Lozano, Director of Project Management and Innovation

We are excited to have both Tom and Dominic join the Contegix team!

While the web portal is much improved, it’s not the only way to use and interact with the cloud.  Miracloud also has a robust, REST-like API.  Any account, whether you’re the domain admin for your company, or a typical user has access to view, add, change, or remove the cloud services you would normally have access to, but directly from the API.  You can find the entire API specification on the documentation wiki.

Using the API is straightforward, but to those unfamiliar, getting things up and going quickly could seem a bit daunting.  To help ease it’s use, our DevOps engineers have released a simple helper utility.  Originally developed for use internally by engineering for automation, testing, and QA, we’ve decided to release it for public use with MiraCloud.  A command line groovy script, it can be used as-is, or as an example for your own custom integration with on premise internal systems.

Since the API supports both XML and JSON response types and the helper script is agnostic, it’s easy to define your response format:

While we are committed to releasing new enhancements and features to the MiraCloud frontend web interface, currently, a superset of functionality exists in the API that isn’t yet exposed in the web portal.  The command list is long, but please refer to the API specification for details on the functionality available.

One particularly interesting feature exposed in the API is the userdata field that can be associated with individual VMs.  This is particularly useful for setting arbitrary key-value pairs specific to an individual virtual machine.  This feature can be surprisingly powerful when combined with a small bit of template logic to make use of it.  For example, configuration management systems can retrieve preliminary data at first boot, seeding required information for higher level automation to occur.

In the example below, I’ll first set the user data field of my VM to export some shell variables:

Now, I can retrieve and source these shell variables directly from my virtual machine’s private virtual router:

Cheers,

Contegix DevOps

When we were evaluating technology to build and deploy MiraCloud, our public and private cloud service, there were numerous choices, especially given some of our long term vendor relationships. We had significant requirements that made a single vendor choice for the entire stack both ideal and, yet, nearly impossible. A single large vendor would help ensure the foundation of MiraCloud’s technology would remain resilient and viable long-term. However, it would have been difficult to embrace the multi-hypervisor approach. Enter CloudStack.

After significant analysis, we decided upon Cloud.com (now part of Citrix) CloudStack as the foundation of MiraCloud. It was the DNA of the product and its development that made the difference and helped ensure the longterm viability of the technology. This is critical for the protection of our customers. CloudStack’s distributed, resilient architecture made it suitable for our large customer base – from start up to enterprise. It had the demonstrated stability of being in hundreds of private and public production clouds. Due to the hypervisor-agnostic approach, we were able to embrace our view of the modern infrastructure where hypervisors are mixed and matched based upon the financial and technical workload requirements.

For our enterprise customer needs, we were able to harness of the power of enterprise grade hardware and the battle tested VMware hypervisor. This built the foundation of MiraCloud’s enterprise class. For those with lower requirements, MiraCloud is able to provide KVM and Xen to build the respective convenience and business classes. With CloudStack’s architecture as the foundation, MiraCloud is able to deliver the mixture in a secure public environment with single API and web interfaces.

CloudStack’s core has always been open source. This was an important aspect as it helped minimize the risk of vendor lock-in, deliver compatibility with industry standards, and honored our commitment to open source.

We are ecstatic to see the CloudStack product become part of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). ASF is known for being the home of the numerous software projects that are critical to the modern Internet infrastructure. This includes Apache HTTP Server, Tomcat, Maven, and Hadoop. CloudStack joining ASF represents a production-ready enterprise cloud platform fully embracing the power of open source through a deep commitment. This will ensure that CloudStack is developed in a truly open manner that remains focused on customer needs – beyond what a single entity can do. This will help accelerate the adoption of all cloud technologies, including Apache CloudStack, and build upon the amazing base to empower even more ideas.

Congrats, CloudStack, Citrix, and the overall cloud community!

Sign up for MiraCloud now at http://cloud.contegix.com.