The Gradwell Blog

Gradwell’s 10th Birthday Lunch

Peter Gradwell — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 16:17:25 +0000

Time has flown by, but the original paperwork for creating Gradwell dot com Limited was filed at Companies House in December 1998, and, as they say, we’ve been online ever since!
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Nominated: Best Hosted Telephony

Peter Gradwell — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 12:13:18 +0000

The Comms Business Awards 2008 have published their short list and we’re pleased to be recognised in the short list for Hosted IP Telephony Supplier of the Year.

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Microsoft OCS Platform Integrated with Gradwell SIP Trunking

Peter Gradwell — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 12:59:01 +0000

Gradwell dot com announces breakthrough demo of a working Microsoft OCS platform integrated with Gradwell SIP Trunking and Hosted PBX products;

The roll-out by Microsoft of its Office Communication Server 2008 product has presented the IT reseller community with an enormous opportunity to enhance their customers’ communication capacity and facility.

OCS 2008 provides Unified Messaging, Voice Communications and tight integration of telephony with existing Exchange, Outlook and MS CRM environments, as a bolt-on product.

“However, OCS in my view is a cumbersome beast,” comments Peter Gradwell, MD. “Until now, it has not talked easily to a standard VoIP platform.”

Gradwell dot com is therefore pleased to offer demonstrations from 9 April 2008 of a working OCS platform integrated with the Gradwell SIP Trunking and Hosted PBX products.

The demonstrations are accompanied by Gradwell’s account of its research and experience of the system in 2008. Opportunities for OCS 2008 adoption are fully explored.

“Visitors to our London Olympia stand (9-10 April 2008, number 709) are welcome to assess the full functionality of this breakthrough,” added Peter.

Unlimited calls SIP and IAX Trunking service

Peter Gradwell — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 12:56:41 +0000

More than 10,000 Gradwell lines are used by SME customers with their own onsite PBXes. Calls are connected either to SIP-based phone systems (for example, 3cx on Windows) or Asterisk using the IAX protocol. (more…)

New Customer Support Portal

Peter Gradwell — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 16:52:35 +0000

We are pleased to announce that we are launcing our new customer support portal.
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Gradwell Offer 10% Off Of All Camrivox Flexor products

Peter Gradwell — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 16:44:16 +0000

To partner Gradwell becoming the premier distribution channel for Camrivox hardware products in the UK, we are pleased to announce a special offer to all our customers.

We are offering a 10% discount on all Camrivox products in the Flexor range, including the popular Flexor 151 VoIP adapter and the Flexor 500 VoIP Phone.

Simply add your Camrivox Flexor order to your basket in our store, proceed to the checkout and type the code ‘UC2008’ into the voucher field to receive your 10% discount.

Gradwell Announce Camrivox Distribution Agreement

Peter Gradwell — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 09:35:26 +0000

Gradwell are delighted to announce an agreement with Camrivox, a unified communications developer and producer, to become the premier distribution channel for Camrivox hardware products in the UK. (more…)

Broadband Service Launch & Flexor Price Reductions

Peter Gradwell — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 10:18:17 +0000

We are pleased to announce the launch of our broadband service and some further price reductions on the Flexor range of IP phones.

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Changes to Webmail/IMAP/POP3 Service

Peter Gradwell — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 08:19:55 +0000

We will be making some changes to our IMAP/POP3 servers starting at 12:00 noon on Tuesday 4th March, as part of our ongoing plan to increase capacity and reslience.

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Update on Infrastructure Implementation

Peter Gradwell — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 00:03:54 +0000

I thought it would be useful to update customers on the changes we’ve made to our infrastructure, following on from the announcements made back in December 2007, and close the loop.

Summary
At a high level, the following improvements have been made this new year:

We are rejecting nearly 5 million more spam emails per day than we were previously, since adopting the Spamhaus Zen block list
We have a live VMware based cluster, running a new POP3, IMAP and Outbound SMTP relay email cluster (see below)
We have added 7TB of storage to our backup servers, to keep better copies and backups.
We have implemented our Redhat GFS based clustered file system, and moved the majority of customer emails onto it, although we are still working to address some performance concerns we have with it.

Finally, we have nearly completed building our “newsip” platform on the VMware platform, which will form the basis of our next VoIP products, and we are also completing the implementation of a Zimbra service, which will provide push email on mobile devices and a richer webmail client.

Email Cluster Testing
We’ve have been re-working our pop3, imap, relay.g and other servers and the new service is now available for testing on the host read-mail.gradwell.net.

(This host will ultimately become pop3.gradwell.net / relay.gradwell.net)

read-mail.gradwell.net / 79.135.125.10 is a load balancer, which is providing the following services:

pop3 (110) and pop3 over SSL (995)
imap (143) and imap over SSL (993)
odmr (port 366)
smtp-auth relaying (ports 25, 225 and 587) and smtp-ssl (465)

Operating this cluster are

3 pop3 servers
5 imap servers
2 odmr servers
3 smtp relay servers

Additionally, these are virtual servers, so creating more capacity is just a case of using our automated server cloning tools, and adding more CPU power to our VMWare cluster.

Finally, you may wish to note that 79.135.125.0/25 255.255.255.128 is a new subnet/vlan for our email infrastructure. All this will be announced properly in due course - at the moment, it is only used for reading mail and sending mail, so should not affect customer firewalling.

Please let us know how you get on with the new server cluster - we appreciate feedback via the usual channels.