Welcome to the High Availability Hosting Blog

(it’s now even colder in here!)

Wednesday 28th March 2012 saw the go-live of our 2nd Evaporative Cooler at the Sheffield Data Centre.  In-place ready for the next 8 racks due to be installed soon, as well as redundancy and additional capacity for the existing cooler.

Before “tweaking” of the system started, temperatures of 14C were recorded in the computer room.  Adjustments over the next few days will see the new cooler work with the existing air handling to give an overall average temperature of 18-20C.

It’s been a while since we put some pics on here so here’s a few of the new cooler install:

We’ve got lots going on right now at the Sheffield Data Centre, and HA Hosting in general, updates to each will follow as required but a short list of projects starting soon/now are:

• Access Control upgrades
• 2nd Evaporative Cooler install
• Rack 10 power upgrades
• Additional racks
• New website
• SharePoint 2010
• BT Fibre install update

+ more that we’ve not finalised dates for yet!

Access Control upgrades

We’ll be upgrading and expanding the Paxton Access Control system used at the data centre starting this week, a short project but we need to move cables and controllers in preperation for…

2nd Evaporative Cooler install

In order to provide cooling for the extra 8 racks due to be installed later this year, we need another Evaporative Cooler situated in the void above the front half of the data hall.  There will be some ducting and prep work for the extraction too, although this will go in later.

Rack 10 power upgrade

We’ll be installing a dedicated 16A UPS into Rack 10 (one of the shared racks) this weekend (17th / 18th March).  A small number of customers (4 actually) will have to shut their server down so we can plug them into the new supply.  We’ve contacted them individually in advance to plan this.

Additional Racks

There is space in the existing data hall for another 8 racks, prep works have begun for these to be installed, ready for their actual installation in late Q2 this year.  These racks will be cabled differently to the existing racks, as a “proof of concept” for Data Centre 1.5.  More information to follow nearer the time, but changes include top-level cable trays,  fully enclosed racks (all sides) and (TBC) extra spce within racks.

New Website

We’ve started talking to Sheffield based website developers about a new HA Hosting website.  More information to follow soon.

SharePoint 2010

A long time coming, but development plans for SharePoint 2010 are now being drafted.  The existing SharePoint 3.0 sites will be migrated when the new servers are live.

BT Fibre install update

We announced last month we’ve ordered a second fibre from BT.  We’ve had surveys done and are waiting for the final schedule.  Updates to follow when known!!

…And finally

We have a huge piece of news to announce later this week  :-)

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.

High Availability Hosting, working alongside another Sheffield based IT company have implemented a Private Cloud and virtualisation stack for a well known pharmacy chain who’s head office is based in Doncaster.

The work involved building a new Windows Server Hyper-V cluster and management workstation, shared iSCSI storage with replication to a duplicate device, and building several new VM’s to replace existing servers.  The work finally involved some training for the IT Administrators on site.

The first application to be fully virtualised away from physical servers was Exchange 2007, with users migrated to the VM without loss of service.

With the other IT supplier providing the hardware, and HA building the servers, a future-proof solution has been implemented good for a number of years!

If you’re planning a Private Cloud migration, or simply wanting to virtualise in-house servers, or even move to a managed service in the Sheffield Data Centre – get in touch:  sales(at)hahosting.com or call us on 0114 2280022.

We’ve started carrying out power audit work at the Sheffield Data Centre, accurately documenting what each customer & device is allocated, and what it’s using.

All co-lo customers will be contacted over the weekend with regards to what they’re allowed, and if they’re using any excess, but for the sake of completeness here are the allowances (unless  by prior arrangement):

—

Single Server

• 1 x power socket
• 1A power

Quarter Rack

• 4 x power sockets
• 2A power

Half Rack

• 6 x power sockets
• 5A power

Full Rack

• 12 x power sockets
• 10A power

Additional Resources

• Additional power @ £22 per month per Ampre
• Additional sockets @ £2.50 per month

—

All prices exclude VAT.

Customers are not permitted to plug devices direct into the UPS, only into PDU’s provided by us.

Customers may provide their own additional PDU’s, but they should plug into our PDU.  We use our PDU as the measuring point for power consumed.

—

Our wholesale energy prices have increased this year, we’ve decided not to pass on this cost to customers at this time, however we will be invoicing customers more activly with regards to their actual power and socket usage.

This morning between 05:30 and 06:40 we completed power work on the colo switch stack at the Sheffield Data Centre.

The work allows the feed from 2 x UPS’s to power the switches and routers, with auto-failover and manual bypass for planned maintenance.  During the work we paused some VM’s incase of cluster errors (but there were none), with everything being brought back online cleanly.

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.

For the first time we can say our standby diesel generator was used in anger over the weekend.

A 50 minute power cut in Holbrook caused the standby generator at the Sheffield Data Centre to fully take the load during the blackout.  Redundant power and other emergency systems ensured colocation racks stayed on, and no colo customers suffered any downtime.

The generator Automatic Transfer Switch and failover systems worked perfectly!

There was an issue with one UPS which tripped (the UPS pending new batteries, a victim of bad timing – now fixed, see other blog posts), which caused a VMware node and 3 switches to reboot.  We attended site, restarted the affected node and rebalanced the cluster manually. Some other Virtual Private Servers were restarted as a precaution due to network inter-dependancies.

Health Checks were done on all VMware and Hyper-V nodes, as well as visual inspections of each rack.

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!