Welcome to the High Availability Hosting Blog

We’ve today ordered 4 x Intel i7 servers to host Virtual Private Servers at the Sheffield Data Centre.

These servers will suppliment our existing AMD Phenom II server cluster, giving customers either AMD or Intel options.  We’ll be doing some testing this week before bringing the servers into live service next week.

Prices to customers won’t change, and we may run a special offer in February for Intel based VPS’s.

HA Hosting provide Virtual Private Servers from just £10 per month, with a choice of Windows or Linux Operating Systems.  See http://www.sheffielddatacentre.com/servers/default.aspx for full details.

We’d like to wish all our customers, partners and friends a very Merry Christmas.  Whatever you’re doing this holiday period we hope you have a good time.

Warmest Regards,
High Availability Hosting Limited.

We’ve scheduled maintenance on our colocation network stack this Monday morning (19/09/2011) between 05:30 and 06:30.

The work is to provide power-redundancy and updated Spanning Tree settings to our colocation switch stack and core routers at the Sheffield Data Centre.

ALL SERVICES WILL BE DISRUPTED for around 3 minutes whilst the edge routers reload.

We are also disabling Fast Link on colo switches, meaning each colo switch port will reset for around 30 seconds after the change has been made.  Customers with dual/multiple links shouldn’t see a problem.

This is the work which was postponed from Friday 9th September.

iSCSI / SAN customers are NOT AFFECTED because those switches are already connected to newly configured switches.

As usual, if you would like to discuss this maintenance with us, give us a call on 0114 228022 or email “support @ hahosting.com” (without the spaces).

UPDATE 19/09/2011 @ 07:00 – All work completed between 05:30 and 06:40.

We’re starting to trial a new hosted remote backup service here at the Sheffield Data Centre.

Scheduled to replace Amanda before the end of the year, the new platform runs Vembu StoreGrid and can backup Windows, Linux, Unix and Mac clients.

The starting package includes 10GB of disk space and a licence for one OS.  Additional disk space, additional clients (servers), and options such as SQL Server are available.

If you would like a free 30 day trial of our service contact sales@hahosting.com

Full pricing details, plus website content will appear soon.

During our weekly UPS testing, we’ve found a potentially duff cell in the UPS protecting the network switches.

We’ve raised a change and plan to swap the batteries Monday morning @ 06:00 (25/07/2011).
All customers have been informed, and updates post-change will be posted here on our blog.

It’s important to stress the cell is only potentially faulty – but we’re not taking any chances so are swapping them out.  UPS battery replacement is usually a hot-swap procedure, but just in case we have a Service Protection Plan in place which includes:

• Manually re-connecting dual-PSU devices elsewhere.
• Before/during/after Health Checks.
• Pausing of non-customer & non-critical VM’s incase of emergency failover.

It’s also important to note that lots of customer backups and batch jobs run over the weekend, so to prevent potentially interrupting them we’ve scheduled the work for Monday morning.

As usual, we’re on call over the weekend and monitoring the infrastructure.

Yesteday (Friday 15th Juy) we completed the ducting and hot aisle rebuilds for the new hot air extraction system.

The system was made live Thursday evening and completed Friday afternoon.  All the hot air ejected from servers at the Sheffield Data Centre is now being expelled directly outside through custom made ductwork.

The project came in on budget, on schedule and without any dowtime to customers or anything having to be turned off, our thanks go to everyone involved:

• P&G Fabrications
• Dyson CNC
• Audio Visual Digital
• TS Joinery
• SMS Electrical Contracting

Three clients have already been to see us since the refit started and have commented how much cooler and quieter the data centre is, and we’ve had a visit today from a Nottingham based hosting provider who were impressed with the quality of the works (and so are we!).

The 5 extractor ducts above the office

The plenum boxes above the racks, much neater than the previous extractors

New extractor ducting in the hot aisles

There’s still a few remedial works to complete (new lighting in the hot aisles for example) as well as the complete removal of the previous extractors (now defunct) which will be completed before the end of July.

If you’d like to come and see us and take a look, get in touch!

We are planning an upgrade to the Hot Air Extraction system at the Sheffield Data Centre between the 7th and 15th of July.  The upgraded extraction will be able to extract more hot air from each of the contained hot aisles within the Sheffield Data Centre.

This work will benefit all customers, and no downtime is being announced during the works.

The work will involve replacing the ducting taking away hot air from the hot aisles, and replacing it with much larger ducting and extractor fans in the rear wall of the building.  We will of course take photos of the work as it progresses over the 8 days planned.

When complete the new extraction will be able to remove 13,500 cubic meters of hot air per hour, more than 3 times the current system.

Some management tasks may be accomplished off-site due to reduced office space during the works.

Change 2011-06_09 to bring our new DNS & NTP servers into live service, and retire the old legacy DNS servers has been completed.

If anyone still has issues resolving internet names, a clear of the ARP cache should work.

The new servers (.241 and .242) are DNS and NTP servers, meaning you can resolve internet addresses as well as set y0ur devices’ clock against them.

** These servers are only used by internal customers of the Sheffield Data Centre, and do not impact any DNS servers for hosting web domains. **

We’re installing new cooling ducting next week in the Sheffield Data Centre.

The new ducts will tap into our existing Evaporative Cooling system and feed directly into the computer room to a low level, providing more cleaned, cool air to the racks.  The new ducts are to suppliment the existing air intakes.

The cooling system will remain switched on throughout the installation, no servers will need to be shut down beforehand.

Engineers will be on site monitoring all systems during the install.

We’ve penciled in Monday 13th June for the work.

UPDATE:

We got this work completed Wednesday 15th June, and we’ve already had positive feedback from a customer who tells us their servers are already cooler by as much as 10 degrees!  If anyone else out there has an update to server temperature, let us know!

The first customers are now using our new Hosting Control Panel, based on WebsitePanel.

The new control panel will replace several web interfaces to our services, including DotNetPanel (for web hosting & DNS), WebsitePanel (old – for Hyper-V), and MPS (Exchange 2007).  Enabling us to have a single point of control for all services hosted at the Sheffield Data Centre.

The new control panel also takes us further towards Exchange 2010, through which mailboxes will be provisioned via WebsitePanel.

Customers who have a service on any of the original control panels will see their services migrated over the coming weeks.  Login details, and a link will be sent to each customer individually.