There is occasional complaint that we spend too much time focused on VoIP and not enough on hosting - perhaps this is justified, VoIP is 60% of our business now.

Howevever, we did start with hosting and what was one server called ‘ice’ which cost GBP1000 a year to colo, is now £250,000 worth of kit, costing £7000/month to colo.

Some of that kit has been running since 2002/2003, with a handful of bits since 1999, and so we have been aware of the need to replace it, and also to develop the hosting product, but we had not really found the mix of technology and finance that would allow us to do what we wanted.

The good news, however, is that in 2007, banks work on saturdays and bank managers have blackberries, and I have just had an email to confirm that they will support our plans to

(1) refresh the hosting kit we have,
(2) build out more capacity into a second london data centre
(3) and replicate our database servers, email systems and voip platform into an Edinburgh data centre.

This equates to a program of kit migration in 4 tranches over the next 12-18 months, each tranche being about 50ks worth of HP DL380 servers.

(We are also using Infortrend iSCSI disk arrays now, but those, and additional file servers to support them, are installed already (but not yet fully configured), and we’ve found that Redhat’s GFS will give us a more reliable shared file system infrastructure.

The first kit to be replaced is our DNS servers, News Servers, Ochre (mailing lists, log processing), Newred, 8 of our spam/virus scanning servers, and our internal database servers (mauve, indigo, sienna).

We will also be adding a MySQL cluster arrangement to run our core real-time database orientated systems, e.g. customer credit status, VoIP call handling, greylisting, etc.

The edinburgh phase will replicate our SIP servers, internal database servers, customer database servers, spam/virus scanning and backup file servers.

The base spec for these machines is HP DL380s with quad core 1.86Gighz processors, 3×146 gig SAS disks and 2 gig of RAM. Disk + RAM then varies according to need.

We are also looking at reworking our web hosting platform onto the Centos Linux environment, and updating that to bring it uptodate. Once we’ve got a working software image, we can then procure the kit and roll it out.

Finally, if you are interested in VoIP, we also signed the deal last week to put a second BT interconnected telecoms switch into Leeds.

cheers
peter

p.s. on Tuesday 4th Sept, 25 HP DL380s arrived… the delivery note said 970 kilos! Kudos to everyone for carrying them upstairs!