Our Platforms

We use a whole range of technologies in our platforms. The list below is in alphabetical order.

Data Centres

We take co-lo space in four different data centres across the UK and Ireland, using them as a basis for delivering our Managed Services and POPs for our network. The reason we have four is to make sure we can ‘reach into’ markets in terms of peering and connectivity. Everything we do is geared up to getting our customers’ users to their content; and our customers content down to their audience, as quickly and smoothly as possible.

We choose our co-lo providers very carefully, based on their security accreditations, their financial stability and selection of carriers. We use Data Electronics and InterXion in Dublin, BT in Belfast and Telehouse North in London. We’ll be expanding into Telehouse West soon and are planning both a Manchester presence and a Scotland presence.

Further afield we have current in-country hosting capability in the USA (Houston), Australia (Perth) and Finland (Helsinki). We plan in-country delivery capability for South America and Far East (KL) in 2012.

High demand / high availability

The demands on modern websites have grown inexorably, with massive growth in the past 2-3 years especially. Coping with dramatic peaks in traffic whilst not wasting capital on platforms that idle at only 5% of capacity for 360 days of the year... that’s a stiff challenge.

We’ve built up many years of real-world experience in how to engineer these platforms to meet the largest, most stressful peaks in user numbers. Be it sporting events, large government publications, big news days (both good and bad)...we’ve engineered platforms to cope with literally some of the largest web traffic demands in the UK and Ireland.

We use combinations of HA-Cluster, DRDB, DNS-level traffic balancing, appliance-based Content Switching (e.g. Cisco 11500), CDN hand-offs, server-side accelerators (e.g. APC, NGin-x, Varnish, Tornado etc), VMware and even pure server horsepower. What we use depends on all sorts of factors but obviously the application and end audiences dictate what we’ve got available to us.

In all cases we work discreetly, with our clients’ core host and / or development teams to build a solution that we know works, and that we can stand over.

Kentico

We are proud to be a certified partner and provide a whole range of Kentico based hosting solutions. Kentico runs best on a Virtual Server or a Dedicated Managed platform and we’d be more than happy to advise you of the requirements for your site. Whether developed by us, developed in-house or done by a third party development company, we have a hosting solution that can help you. Please talk to one of our Kentico specialists.

LAMP

We started life as a LINUX BSD house way back when. We switched to Debian (sarge) for new deployments in 2004 and have been through all the iterations of that up to Squeeze-Sid. We’ve also got deployments of SUSE and RedHAT in our clients’ systems that we support. For new deployments we’ve opted for Ubuntu and have been impressed at its performance in demanding production environments. The Ubuntu community is very active too.

We typically deploy Apache 2 (though some clients resolutely remain on Apache 1!) and understand how Apache works in large scale requirements. We manage MySQL 4 and MySQL 5 for our clients, in on-board database, attached discreet database servers and failover / clustered formats.

We’re very active in PHP community, contributing to the Zend conferences every year, and holding the highest classification of PHP accreditation available. We also support Python.

Other platform technologies we know and will support

VMware

From being vaguely sceptical about ‘virtualisation’ a few years ago (our experiences in trying to make OpenVZ do stuff it wasn’t old enough to do left us bruised), we’re now enthusiastic evangelists for the power of this technology. We use the full suite of Vsphere, ranging from ESXi through to the operational modules, Cloud Director and the rest. It’s the core platform underpinning our Private and Public cloud offerings and runs a bunch of our internal systems too. We’re proud to be VMware partners.

Windows

We have an extensive Microsoft-based estate and support Windows Server and MS-SQL systems for our clients. We patch through WSUS, normally on an agreed basis for each client. We understand the nuances of IIS, .Net and ASP and are more than comfortable talking with client development teams, and even 3^rd party application developers on our clients behalf. We provide a pro-active, fully managed service for the platforms we host, allowing our clients to focus on their core IT challenges or development cycles knowing their delivery platforms are being professionally managed for them.

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