Don’t get me wrong – Our business and infrastructure very rarely moves, However we have having a revolution.. Or maybe it’s an evolution.
Ausweb has very quietly (Apart from the occasional blog post) been preparing one of the most amazing platforms for the future growth of our business, and in preparation of the future growth of all of our customer’s (existing and future) businesses. We have designed and built an almost indestructible infrastructure based in Sydney, which is due to open to the public soon.
We have been testing and developing, and testing and developing some more, continuously for the past 6 months in preparation to launch this product and we are almost there. We’ve purchased a stack of equipment, and we are about to purchase the last piece in preparation for the announcement and launch.
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Rambles, Science & Tech, VMware
With this great little tool, now you can monitor your Linux based server easily on the go, right from your iPhone.
Bjango software’s iStat application provides a tool to monitor both your local iPhone performance stats, including the ability to free memory, as well as monitor your remote servers(Mac or Linux based) vital statistics. You can easily see memory usage, disk space, uptime & load averages and can also use the utility to ping servers and perform trace routes.
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Plugins, Science & Tech, Scripting & Coding, Software, cPanel, iPhone
Being in the hosting industry, one of the key elements of hosting is uptime and availability. Trust us when we say this is VERY important. We spend a lot of money on making sure that if problems occur, there is a fail over. If the fail over, fails over – There is a “Plan C”. In order for us to know the moment a server becomes unresponsive, or if part of the network is having issues – We use monitoring.
Having support staff available 24/7 is one thing – They can answer customers queries, keep the information flowing and resolve problems. However, Not always can support staff fix the problem sitting at their desk. Sometimes systems administrators and network engineers need to be dispatched to the data centre at 3am on a Sunday morning, And lets face it – we can’t all work 24 hours a day. So the best way for all of our staff to know when an issue arises is via Instant SMS alerts. To do this, we use a particular service called Pingdom.
Pingdom monitor our network/servers and their response times from multiple locations, and send us SMS alerts when something goes wrong. This allows all of our staff to be aware, the exact moment a server goes down, no matter where we are. Now, they have opened up a new type of account which allows you to monitor your website for free. Part of this package includes 20 Free SMS credits per month.
We recommend you give it a go, Especially if you want to sleep at night – knowing that someone is keeping an eye on your website.
Pingdom: www.pingdom.com
News, Science & Tech, Web Hosting News
Pingdom, Uptime, Website Monitoring
A fair few people know what DNS lookups are, Even without having to work in the IT industry. It basically converts the pretty, familliar and easy to understand (for us) “www.domain.com” into an IP Address, which computers can understand and direct traffic to.
The Image below is from Verisign, and to make the understanding a bit easier, it ignores the process of caching.
Image source: Verisign Domain Name Industry Brief, June 2007 (PDF), last page.
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Domains, PHP Applications, Science & Tech
DNS, Domain Name, Lookups
Recently we made a post about our new cloud computing infrastructure and the hardware we were using to build such a platform. Well, our servers have been delivered and we are in stage two of this set-up which is the install and configuration of the ‘cloud’.
As previously discussed, we have purchased a number of the new Dell PowerEdge R710 servers, and we have since configured these in the data centre and commenced the complex process of getting these servers working in unison. The reason why this stage is so important, is because this is the base building blocks of our cloud. These machines will be doing the hard work of computing the extreme amounts of data we intend on pushing through the cloud. They will also be configured so that in the case that one server (Server A) was to fail or go offline, there would be no downtime for the end user, The other servers (Server B, C & D) in the cloud would compensate and manage the tasks that server A was doing. The data would autonomously be mirrored across the active servers, in the case that another server was to fail. The way that the servers do this, is via a backbone gigabit network.
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News, Science & Tech, Web Hosting News
Ausweb, Cloud Computing, Dell
Well who would have thought? The humble old DVD seems to be getting a new kick of life due to some very clever thinking scientists at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. Could the rumours be true? over 2000 movies on one DVD? Well Samsung seem to think so… Read more…
News, Rambles, Science & Tech
The Wolfram Alpha team has revealed on their blog, some of the impressive hardware behind their super-duper new “Computational Search Engine”. If you haven’t heard about Wolfram Alpha yet, it’s a recently launched “computational knowledge engine” with an interface similar to a search engine. Wolfram Alpha promises to approach to our search engine needs from a different perspective, with the lofty long-term ambition of “making all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone”.
By entering your question or calculation, Wolfram|Alpha uses it’s built-in algorithms and ever-growing collection of data to compute your response. Be it the distance in cm to Pluto, or the age old mystery of ‘how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?’
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Off Topic, Science & Tech, Web Hosting News
Alpha, Search Engine, Wolfram
The Google network dropped off the radar for many Internet users last Thursday. Widespread outages were reported across several Google services including search, Google Docs, Gmail and YouTube, were the main services that left people scratching their heads and wondering what to do next – best catalogued here by the #GoogleFail Twitter stream.
Not all Internet users were affected, but those using larger American providers such as AT&T or Verizon, appeared to be disproportionately effected. A number of larger US based ISP’s “peer” with Google, or interconnect their networks with Google’s networks in order to improve speed and reduce bandwidth. Much like a large-scale highway accident shutting down a key section of road, the effects still ripple off and smaller ISP’s not interconnected with Google were able to route around the problem.
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Science & Tech, Web Hosting News
Google
So you probably think we’re all sitting back at our desks, day dreaming about the weekend or betting on this weekends football matches but that’s definitely NOT the case. (Go the Roosters!) We’ve been busy making purchases in preparation for our new cloud infrastructure! Gigabit switches, Brand new (and amazingly powerful) Dell Servers, brand new cabinets in the new area of Sydney’s Equinix Data centre, and it’s all coming together rather nicely.
We’ve been busy doing research and development so that we can hit the ground running and we may just be the first Australian host to provide cloud services to the public. And we’re VERY excited about it.
Here’s some specifications of the servers we have purchased, for you personalities out there that have geek or technology tendencies.
Dell PowerEdge R710 servers each with:
Dual Intel Xeon X5550 – 2.66Ghz, 8M Cache, 6.40 GT/s QPI, Turbo, HT (These are the new Intel CPUs with performance improvements which absolutely destroy any previous benchmarks)
72GB RAM – Check out the below photos to see how each set of DIMM slots are assigned to each CPU, which from what I’ve heard – doubles the speed.
6 x 300GB SAS (15,000 RPM) Drives in RAID0 configuration. – Due to the way our cloud infrastructure will work, storage will be raided on the cloud layer so we don’t need to worry about mirroring data at the hardware level.
4 x Gigabit Ethernet ports – At this stage we will be using 2 ports per server, but soon enough we will increasing this to 4 or maybe 6 ports per server for better throughput.
Dual PSU Units – These are awesome, allowing us to actually change power supplies whilst the server is running.
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Rambles, Science & Tech, Software, Web Hosting News
Ausweb, Cloud, Cloud Computing, Cloud Hosting, Dell, PowerEdge
If you don’t know who or what Google is, You’ve definitley been living under a rock for the past (almost) 10 years. So what i’ve discovered today, is a little site which is still in its prehistoric form.. Backrub.
Backrub was the initial name of Google, when it was a research project run out of Stanford University. Developed and designed by the now, two uncomprehensivley rich Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Since then it has come a long way, origionally running on a couple of machines on-site at Stanford, It now operates hundreds apon thousands of servers worldwide, constantly crawling the web and gathering and organising information ready for us to search.
I’ve found the origional backrub project page, which is still operational – Showing the old-school search pages, for the very young (at the time) search engine.
Check it out at: backrub.c63.be
Science & Tech
Backrub, Google
