News

Server/Network Upgrades

26 Aug 2009 by Geoff Allen
Over the last few months we have upgraded all the remaining servers to new Dell PowerEdge chassis hardware with oodles of RAM and 15k spin hard disks. Read for further info.

We are pleased to announce that all the remaining servers on our network have now successfully migrated to the new hardware we commissioned in the last quarter.

All our servers are now on Dell PowerEdge hardware with 15,000 rpm hard disks.  A "normal" server has 7,200 rpm drives, so you can see this instantly doubles the speed of the disks for your websites - which has massive increase on the speed of delivery to your site visitors.

Not only have the drives increased in speed, whereas in the past we had maybe 2 disks in the raid, the new hardware has at least 4 drives (6 in most servers) which are raided on a raid 10 controller.  This further ensures reliability for your sites.

RAM previously was maybe 2gig wheras now all servers have minimum 8gig.

These upgrades happened a month or so ago, and there was only minimal disruption to sites when we upgraded.

The new kit sets us well for many years trouble free hosting and replaces some of the early servers which, although were performing fine, were getting to the 5/6 year old stage and no doubt would have started having disk issues in the none too distant future.  By upgrading now we are ensuring trouble free (and somewhat improved) hosting for all clients for the foreseable future.

Also at the same time we have now taken our own subnet with the datacentre.  This means we have our own stock of IP addresses and no longer rely on the datacentre to issue these for us.  Not all servers are on the new IPs yet (we didn't want to disrupt things un-necessarily) however the latest server upgrades have all beeen allocated the new IPs from our subnet.  This means in the future as and when we upgrade again. we will be able to re-assign the IP to the new hardware to reduce hassle for clients.  Previously this was not possible and caused problems for clients who (for example) hosted dns external to our network.

The new monitoring systems introduced at the beginning of this year are running extremely well and we are very pleased with them.  They monitor inidividual services on the servers, rather than just pinging the servers as per the old monitors.  This alerts us instantly via email with any "major" outage such as a webserver going down.  We also recieve text messages.  The net result is the engineers are on the case of any outage and have it sorted very quickly.

We would like to thank all clients for continued support.