A blog about server hosting

Leading on from Daniels post regarding honesty. As technical architect for Melbourne I’m a massive fan of the datacentre tours we offer both our existing and prospective clients. I think it’s a great opportunity to create close-knit relationships allowing us to:

• Get a detailed understanding of how your business/application/website depends on its I.T.
• Create bespoke hosting solutions designed around your requirements.
• Give demonstrations of how a particular piece of technology will benefit you.
• Show exactly what we’re about, and what makes us different.

A lot of the time customers come to us with quotes from competing companies. Solutions that are either not achievable, not meeting requirements or are completely overkill. It’s becoming clearer that these solutions have never seen a technical person and are being glued together by sales staff.

These companies lack the ethics to have technical people design technical solutions. It’s becoming more about the glossy PDF’s, high price tags and marketing spiel than solutions which simply ‘do the job and do it well’.

Put simply, shop around. Never accept a solution without face-to-face discussions with a technical architect. Come in and see us. Discuss your requirements with our technical team. You can even try to beat us at pool.

Rob Greenwood, Technical Architect.

Come and say hello!

We’ll be at the two-day Business North West Exhibition (28th and 29th October) at Manchester Central. The event is free to attend (you can register for tickets here) and is designed for business owners, directors and entrepreneurs running small and medium-sized businesses.

You can see us either on the Manchester Science Park stand (123) or the Networking4Business.com stand (17).  If you’d like us to make a specific appointment to see you, please call our sales team on 0800 975 8771 or 0161 232 0001.

Melbourne is on the lookout for a New Business Sales Executive to join our growing team.  The role involves selling our range of managed dedicated servers, managed services and other products and solutions across market sectors.

The position is based from our Hulme, Manchester office.

Click here for details: New Business Sales Executive.

We have a limited amount of quarter, half and full cabinets available due to our new Turing House Datacentre facility opening in July.

Therefore until the end of November, we’re offering free setup on quarter, half and full cabinets in our Reynolds House facility.

Please contact our sales team for a quotation on rack space.

Virtual servers and cloud computing are changing the way we think about hosting high performance and high-availability applications.  The technology uses virtualisation techniques to abstract the underlying hardware from the end product, i.e. the server itself.

In theory this means:

• Higher availability as there is no single point of failure (SPF) associated with any particular hardware;
• Lower costs, as an entire physical node is not dedicated to one server task any more, i.e. multiple virtual servers can run concurrently on one physical node;
• Lower energy consumption per server, for the same reasons as above;
• Quicker lead times on server upgrades as “virtual hardware” can be scaled up or down instantly or near-instantly.

Like everything though, the devil is in the detail, and there’s plenty of scope for hosting service providers to get it wrong.

That’s why we’ve put together a white-paper “the five dangers of virtual servers”.  It highlights areas where providers can end up compromising the security or availability of your virtual server, by cutting corners, or badly thinking out the infrastructure when they put it together.

Click here for our exclusive white-paper, “the five dangers of virtual servers”.

And now a little about Melbourne…

Started in 2000, Melbourne now owns and runs three datacentres totalling approximately 6000 sq.ft. of datacentre space and over 2,000 servers. Our customers include The Chartered Institute of Tax, JJB Sports PLC, Travel Counsellors and Freedom Finance PLC.

Obviously web sites and ecommerce applications must be available 24×7x365 year on year so Melbourne provides redundancy on practically every part of the server, power supply and Internet access provision.

The data centres all operate with multiple internet connectivity providers to ensure Internet redundancy. All servers have dual power supplies and with the firm intention to stay in play even if
there’s a prolonged power outage, as Melbourne has a regularly tested UPS and generator set on standby that can power the entire facility for 7 days by itself.

Melbourne’s Virtual Dedicated Server offering, called UltraVM™, was launched in early 2009, providing robust reliability with an affordable price.

If you’ve any questions about this report or want to have a tour of our Manchester data centres please phone us on 0800 915 8771.

It’s been quite an exciting time for Melbourne recently. What with our award nominations – including a Green Chip award win at The Big Chips for our energy conservation initiatives – and the little matter of a new 3,000 server data centre opening up in July.  Planning and building a data centre is no easy task. There are always going to be setbacks, but it proved to be mercifully straightforward in the end.  But we now have the challenge of filling it within a three-year period.

So it was good to have a little boost with some notable coverage in the Manchester business media in the last couple of weeks.

Crain’s Manchester Business, a respected and well-liked business title, ran a piece on the shortage of good IT professionals. We need more skilled professionals to enable the digital and IT sectors to continue to note positive growth.

My opinion that there needs to be more encouragement of students to take IT courses so there is a bigger pool of talent was backed-up by many notable voices.

We also featured in that city stalwart and well-read title The Manchester Evening News on Thursday with a full-page piece.

The story was about encouraging graduates to consider starting their own businesses. If they have drive and a skill or idea that they can carry forward, why not see if you have the making of a business.

As you might know I started Melbourne while still at university. As my IT business progressed I realised that there was huge potential in server hosting and from that, with the help of my team, we have a very sound and exciting enterprise going forward.

I hope that I might have encouraged others to discover their business calling with one of the features as well as getting the Melbourne name out there.
Daniel Keighron-Foster, Technical Director.