Back from the United States
20/08/2009 16:53
This morning I returned home after spending just under two weeks in the United States.
The primary purpose of the trip was for HostingCon, "The World’s Largest Gathering of Hosted Services Professionals", which was very worthwhile. I have a lot of ideas, and made a lot of new connections which I'll be spending the coming weeks and months exploring.
I also took a few days of leave and spent some time doing the tourist thing.
More info to come in time.
The primary purpose of the trip was for HostingCon, "The World’s Largest Gathering of Hosted Services Professionals", which was very worthwhile. I have a lot of ideas, and made a lot of new connections which I'll be spending the coming weeks and months exploring.
I also took a few days of leave and spent some time doing the tourist thing.
More info to come in time.
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Australia's first IPv6 enabled VPSs are here
03/01/2009 17:24
When you typically think of Virtual Private Servers, you might think of a standard rack mount server running a hypervisor like Xen with 8-16GB of RAM and some large SATA drives.
While these solutions might sound fine, wait until there is a hardware failure of some description. When there is a hardware failure all of the virtual environments that exist on that server will be offline until the failure has been rectified.
This is why we have spent a significant amount of resources building a service offering where such a scenario is not possible.
The AussieHQ and Jumba virtual environments are built on a fully redundant IBM Blade Center cluster running VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3.
What this means is that you won’t be subject to lengthy downtime if a component fails. In the unlikely event that a blade completely fails, the only downtime you will experience is the length of time it takes for your environment to boot up on another blade.
In addition to this, VMware VI3 also has a feature known as “VMotion”. If we need to take a blade offline for maintenance, all the environments are seamlessly moved to another blade with no downtime.
The “VMotion” feature is also used in conjunction with another feature called “DRS”. In single box solutions, if a task needs more resources than are available to them at any given time then the task will not be successful. With our clustered environment, that customer can seamlessly and automatically be moved to another blade where those resources are available.
These are just some of the features that differentiate the Jumba product offering from others in the market, however I am pleased to announce one feature:
All environments have native IPv6 connectivity (/64 range) by default.
We’ve done our bit by providing IPv6 connectivity to dedicated environments at an unbeatable cost. While we continue working on rolling out IPv6 to our shared customer base, you can begin deploying IPv6 enabled content and services on your VPS today!
On a related note, as we continue our experimentation, here are some recent facts about www.se.id.au:
- First IPv6 enabled web site on the AussieHQ network
- First site running on our new VMware cluster
- First production site running off a Plesk 9 release server on our network.
AussieHQ IPv6 Update
30/09/2008 20:02
One of the projects I am running at AussieHQ is the deployment of IPv6 within our content network.
It has been a while since I have posted an update and I thought it would be a good idea to do so.
There are several services that are in the process of being IPv6 enabled, and their status is below:
All 3 nameservers for dedicated hosting will have AAAA glue records by the end of October 2008.
IPv6 resolvers are coming online by the end of October 2008 to allow dedicated server customers to resolve hostnames over IPv6.
Our NTP server is IPv6 enabled.
All mirrors (with the exception of kernel.org) are IPv6 enabled.
It has been a while since I have posted an update and I thought it would be a good idea to do so.
There are several services that are in the process of being IPv6 enabled, and their status is below:
Core Network
Completely IPv6 enabled since February 2008.AussieHQ Web Site
IPv6 enabled since March 2008.DNS Servers
All 3 nameservers for AussieHQ shared hosting have AAAA glue records since August 2008.All 3 nameservers for dedicated hosting will have AAAA glue records by the end of October 2008.
IPv6 resolvers are coming online by the end of October 2008 to allow dedicated server customers to resolve hostnames over IPv6.
Dedicated Servers
We are now able to provide IPv6 assignments to unmanaged dedicated server customers. Managed dedicated server customers are handled the same as shared hosting.Shared Hosting
Due to limitations within Plesk and cPanel, we are not yet able to provide IPv6 on shared hosting. As soon as IPv6 ready versions of Plesk and/or cPanel are released, we will begin testing in our labs.Other Services
AussieHQ and Jumba forums are IPv6 enabled.Our NTP server is IPv6 enabled.
All mirrors (with the exception of kernel.org) are IPv6 enabled.
CeBIT 2008 Over
22/05/2008 21:30
As some of you may know, I have spent the last week in Sydney at CeBIT, one of the world’s largest IT exhibitions.
CeBIT 2008 was the 7th CeBIT which marks the 7th time that I have attended and the 2nd time the AussieHQ (my employer) has exhibited.
I attended CeBIT this year from two perspectives - one as an exhibitor available for consultation as required by the staff on our stand, and another as a visitor as I had been for the past 7 years.
From our perspective as an exhibitor, this year’s CeBIT was great. We had a landmark stand with visitors actually using our stand as a reference point (“meet me at the AussieHQ stand”), and we were also able to collect a large number of extremely qualified leads.
Having said that, while this year had nearly 10,000 additional visitors compared to last, the number of qualified leads per visitor ratio is now worse than previously (there were many more people who were only there for “the free stuff” compared to previous years).
From a visitor’s perspective though, this year’s CeBIT was great and I found that exhibitors were generally willing to spend some time talking to a potential prospect about the products and services that they offer, which I suspect is related to my observations as an exhibitor.
When I wasn’t meeting with customers, I was usually walking around the show floor speaking with other exhibitors whose products were of interest including IntelliguardIT and Argent.
On a whole I think CeBIT was a worthwhile experience. I met with and spent some time with a number of great people (which I will be following up on over the coming few weeks) and look forward to next year.
CeBIT 2008 was the 7th CeBIT which marks the 7th time that I have attended and the 2nd time the AussieHQ (my employer) has exhibited.
I attended CeBIT this year from two perspectives - one as an exhibitor available for consultation as required by the staff on our stand, and another as a visitor as I had been for the past 7 years.
From our perspective as an exhibitor, this year’s CeBIT was great. We had a landmark stand with visitors actually using our stand as a reference point (“meet me at the AussieHQ stand”), and we were also able to collect a large number of extremely qualified leads.
Having said that, while this year had nearly 10,000 additional visitors compared to last, the number of qualified leads per visitor ratio is now worse than previously (there were many more people who were only there for “the free stuff” compared to previous years).
From a visitor’s perspective though, this year’s CeBIT was great and I found that exhibitors were generally willing to spend some time talking to a potential prospect about the products and services that they offer, which I suspect is related to my observations as an exhibitor.
When I wasn’t meeting with customers, I was usually walking around the show floor speaking with other exhibitors whose products were of interest including IntelliguardIT and Argent.
On a whole I think CeBIT was a worthwhile experience. I met with and spent some time with a number of great people (which I will be following up on over the coming few weeks) and look forward to next year.