December 10th, 2009
One of our customers has setup a handy DNS checking tool, which doesn’t require a subscription payment. It’s handy for diagnosing DNS issues, including Parent servers, SOA and NS records, and also MX and WWW.
You can find the tool at http://www.checkmydns.biz/
Daniel Keighron-Foster, Technical Director.
November 26th, 2009
We see data centres as pretty sterile places, with flashy lights and expensive IT equipment. It’s therefore quite important that the place is kept tidy and clean.
Yesterday we had our Reynolds House data centre facility professionally cleaned by CRM Services. This is obviously essential for any well-run data centre, as various visitors and contractors can leave an impressive trail of debris and dirt in their wake. During this professional clean all surfaces (outside the cabinets) were vacuumed and dusted, the floor was also ’stripped’ with a Numatic Rotary Floor Machine and finished with a coat of anti static (non-slip) polish. The sub-floor environment was also given a thoroughly good going over.
All this got me to thinking about how important cleanliness is in a wider sense, in terms of our ability to deliver reliable services to our customers. Cleanliness and tidiness is something that’s deeply ingrained into our modus operandi at Melbourne. This is particularly important when you’re looking after complex technical infrastructure.
In my ten years in the hosting industry, I’ve seen some pretty appalling data centres, where I’ve wondered how they manage to keep any services live at all! As a company, we’ve learnt techniques over the years to improve the layout of our cabinets, to ensure that cabling is kept neat, tidy and identifiable.
When we opened our new Turing House data centre facility earlier this year, we put in place all we’d learnt about how best to lay out the place, organise cabling, and keep the place generally neat, tidy, and safe to work in. After all, the last thing you want is an outage because someone tripped over a trailing patch cable. And we don’t just keep our data centres and cabinets tidy to avoid tripping hazards; poorly organised cabinets can also be a cause for overheating.
We run cables (both power and network) in a structured manner to allow all expelled hot air from servers an open path into the hot aisles. As a result, air-flow is improved and the air-conditioning units don’t have to work as hard to keep the data centre at a nice, cool temperature. This simple, yet cost effective practice contributes towards our constant aim to keep our prices very competitive!
For those of you who are interested (or have already made requests!), please see below for pictures of our newly cleaned data centre. We’ll take some pictures of our uber-tidy cabinets too and post them soon!
Daniel Keighron-Foster, Technical Director
November 26th, 2009
We’re looking for a new support technician to join our growing technical support and server management team in Manchester. The position is based from our Hulme, Manchester office and datacentres.
Please note:
For full details please visit http://www.melbourne.co.uk/jobs.htm. [Edit 09/12/09 - we have shortlisted for this position now, so any CVs sent in will be considered for future roles].
November 23rd, 2009
Our “Dual Core Xeon L3110, 3.00GHz, 6MB Cache System” comes with 1.0GB extra free while current stocks last.
You will need to contact our sales team to place an order as its not available directly on our online order form.
November 20th, 2009
Networking with Melbourne – a chance to tour our new Turing House data centre
One of my key tasks is making the business public aware of servers and their importance to enterprise.
On Thursday Melbourne had a fantastic opportunity to further that goal when it co-sponsored Simply Networking at Turing House– adjacent to our headquarters.
Our fellow sponsors were the ever-supportive Manchester Science Park.
Simply Networking is run by Mark Greenwood who has been organising and delivering incredibly popular networking events in Manchester for over five years.
The Turing House event gave Richard, a key member of Melbourne’s sales function, and myself a good opportunity to meet a wide range of businesses: many that might not have been aware of servers and their role in safeguarding business mission critical data.
Many attendees were from SMEs and might have thought servers “were not for them.”
Servers are tremendously powerful these days and a small business might use only a fraction of its capacity. With our virtualisation service Melbourne can ensure that one server can support securely the server requirements of a number of businesses. It also has the added benefit of conserving energy and so is a greener solution as well as more cost effective one.
The networking also allowed us to offer a tour of our new Turing House data centre as well as our well-established Reynold’s House facility, just across the road from our headquarters.
11 attendees took the opportunity to see over 2,000 servers in operation as the meeting closed. It also allowed us to show all the safety, security and energy saving features of our data centres.
Tours of the data centre are invariably met with impressed faces and quite a few questions – this time was no exception.
If we get a new sale from the tour: brilliant. But the key is that businesses are more aware of what data centres such as ours can offer and that message is pushed along by word of mouth.
If you couldn’t make it to Simply Networking and would like a tour please call me Steven Allan on 0161 232 0001 / steven.allan@melbourne.co.uk I am sure you will also be impressed.
Steven Allan account director Melbourne
November 12th, 2009
A serious vulnerability has been identified in the current SSL (Version 3) and TLS (Version 1) whereby an attacker is able to issue commands to the server that appear to be coming from a legitimate source, by exploiting a flaw in the SSL renegotiation method.
As an example, lets try the following HTTP request..;
GET /path/to/index.php HTTP/1.0 Dummy-Header: GET /index.php HTTP/1.0 Cookie: sessionCookie=Token
The good news is that although an attacker can execute the request and pass through arbitrary data, he will not be able to see the response. However, the originating client will see something different from what was initially requested.
We have done some testing with web firewalls such as modsecurity and have yet to find a way to block such requests. Looks like we will need to wait for upstream patches, particularly Apache, Microsoft and possibly a temporary release from modsecurity.
To track the exploit, see http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/120541
Rob Greenwood, Technical Lead
November 12th, 2009
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:
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.
November 4th, 2009
It seems to be de rigeur in the hosting industry to upsell one’s infrastrucutre, in the process potentially making slightly misleading claims about datacentre and/or network ownership.
Hopefully you wouldn’t expect this kind of behaviour from Melbourne, and rightly so. All the literature about our network and datacentre specifications is correct, accurate and factual.
Rest assured that:
When we’ve gone to so much effort and expense to get these things in place, it does occasionally annoy us when a competitor does the equivalent of sock stuffing, where they’ve not gone to the effort and expense of doing something but claim they do.
Of course you can always find this out for yourself by coming to visit us. If you can’t make it, why not have a quick look at our “ten reasons that melbourne is a better hosting provider” document, and come to your own conclusion.
Daniel Keighron-Foster, Technical Director.
October 29th, 2009
Now virtualisation has reached maturity, virtual servers are a real alternative to dedicated servers. However, they’re not ideal for all situations.
From our point-of-view we’re seeing virtual servers as a great alternative to our entry-level dedicated servers, and a great deal faster than older dedicated servers running on deprecated hardware.
That said, they’re not perfect for everything, and there are many applications where only dedicated will suffice.
The great thing about the way we can provision servers means that your virtual and dedicated servers can sit on your own private network (VLAN), and communicate with each other freely. This means that you have the flexibility to use the right mix of servers based on the individual requirements of each element of your hosting platform.
Our technical team, in conjunction with our account managers, can help to advise on what’s right for any given situation.
October 27th, 2009
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.
