Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

As a small business based in Sheffield, South Yorkshire we take an active interest in what is happening in the region, especially when it comes to anything technology related.  When Digital Region was announced in 2009 we looked forward to seeing the whole of South Yorkshire provided with world-beating broadband speeds and thought what a great asset it would be for the region.  Unfortunately as things progressed slowly we began to realise that it wasn’t going to be all that we had hoped for, especially when we looked at the commercials from an ISP perspective.

Jumping forward a few years we recently tried to get ourselves connected to Digital Region as our current broadband provider (Be There) have had a number of issues over the last year and we’ve had enough and Origin Broadband were offering a “max” product that could see our very short line achieve speeds of >100Mbit/s down and >20Mbit/s up.  Unfortunately this just highlighted how wrong things are with Digital Region at the moment and we can no longer hold back our thoughts on the whole issue.  With this in mind, we have written an open letter to Digital Region which you can find below:

An Open Letter to Digital Region (pdf, ~310KB).

We really want to see Digital Region succeed and fulfil its initial promises, we hope that this will spark useful and interesting debate on the subject and lead to changes and improvements at all levels.

We’ve had a few people ask us exactly what we were doing in our recent scheduled downtime sessions during April, so here we are:

New Datacentre Facilities

The main bulk of the time has been spent moving the majority of our servers from our current point-of-presence (PoP) at Interxion in central London to our new PoP at London Hosting Centre in the Docklands area. There are a number of reasons for this move, which we weighed up very carefully with the inconvenience that would be caused to you:

• Inability to get extra power to our racks – we were running them half empty as we could not get extra power without moving our equipment to a different part of the building.
• A change in focus for Interxion – they are moving towards fewer, much larger corporate customers.
• Above market rate pricing – year on year we have absorbed price increases, unfortunately the latest price increase we would have had to have passed on and would have resulted in prices rises of between 15-25% for you, this is not something we would have been happy doing and something a number of you told us you wouldn’t want to pay.

When we weighed up these 3 main factors we took the decision to find alternative facilities to run our services from, we are confident we have made the correct choice of facilities. We have always set out to work with partners for the long term, working as we did with Interxion for over 7 years.

The eagle eyed among you will have noticed a plural in the above statements, that we have chosen facilities to work with, not just a facility. Our network and services are now present in 3 geographically diverse datacentres, along with London Hosting Centre we have setup PoPs in:

Manchester

We are now present in Manchester, with our first services planned to go live during May (more of which below). We take network connectivity in Manchester from two providers, as well as having a gigabit link between Manchester and London.

Woking

We also have a presence in the Sentrum IV facility in Woking. This is a highly secure, Tier III+ facility providing excellent options for customers who need to be outside of London, but not so far outside that it causes them major travel problems.

Network Upgrades

A major part of our work has been to upgrade our network so that it is now Juniper powered in the core and distribution layers. For LHC this means using the latest Juniper MX80 3D line of routers and EX4200 switches. For Manchester this means Juniper J-Series routers and EX4200 switches. Woking is currently connected via diverse Layer-2 services back to LHC for routing – as any network connectivity in to the building is predominantly back-hauled to London first anyway, so it would currently serve no purpose carrying out routing from there.

As time passes, the needs of the facilities change and traffic levels increase we will be reviewing the equipment used at each facility, with the plan being to bring them all in-line with each other utilising the Juniper MX 3D series of routers.

Gigabit for all

During the move to LHC we took the opportunity to replace the last of our 10/100 switches and replaced them all with new 48 port Gigabit capable switches – all existing customers will now find they are connected to our network with a Gigabit port if their equipment supports it – a free upgrade that many providers charge monthly for!

IPv6 Support

A major driver in replacing all of our routers has been IPv6, it is something that has been long overdue in its implementation on our network and will be formally rolled out in June. Unfortunately many software vendors still aren’t supporting IPv6, so this does mean that for some services we still won’t be able to support IPv6 – unfortunately one of those vendors is cPanel, so for the time being our shared business hosting still won’t support IPv6. This is something we are putting pressure (along with many other companies) on cPanel to implement as soon as possible.

Increased connectivity

We’ve increased our public Internet facing network connectivity by 100% in anticipation of take-up on our new services and also to match ever increasing broadband speeds.

The Future…

We’ve got a couple of new products on the way in May, as well as making some changes to the way we do certain things – but you’ll have to come back later to find out about those

On the evening of Saturday 16th April from 22:00 we will be performing essential network upgrades and maintenance. This is work that we hoped to have completed before we began moving any equipment from one facility to another, but unfortunately due to lengthy delays in the supply of some essential equipment this was not possible.

As part of this work we will be installing new Juniper Networks routers and switches to upgrade our routing capability. For the curious amongst you we will be using Juniper MX80 and EX4200 routers and switches.

The main bulk of the work that is service affecting will be migrating customer VLANs from the old routers they are terminated on, to the new equipment. The impact on service should be no more than 5 minutes per VLAN in two phases and we expect much less if everything goes to plan and as per our testing.

Please accept our apologies for the relatively short notice of these works, we would not be performing them at this time if it were not 100% necessary at this time. If you have any questions at all please do let us know.