Often I am asked what type of systems we use internally, and my response is: exactly what we provide to our clients. A major part of our core infrastructure is the IBM Servers and Storage, running Citrix XenServer virtualised operating systems.
For a good start at understanding virtualisation have a look at Wikipedia.org
We were an early adopter of Xen (since brought out by Citrix) and started virtualising machines early last year. The early benefit of our virtualisation implementations was that of resource use – we were able to run many “machines” on one physical server – a great saving when it came to capital expenditure.
Internally we run Windows Server 2003, and Linux (Debian and Ubuntu) server operating systems. We have both production and development machines - virtualisation has been fantastic for creating test environments.
Virtulising individual machines is great, but we wanted to go to the next step – virtualisation of both servers and storage to give us more flexibility and resilience.
One of our current projects is moving to a new IBM Blade S chassis along with DS3300 iSCSI storage for our production based systems. Blade Systems come in all sizes have a look at this.
Other benefits we are planning on achieving through these system changes are less power consumption – through less heat output that needs to be cooled and more energy efficient operation of our servers. We can also deploy some better tools to manage and report on how efficient we are.
New phone system
The high availability that the systems described above have, is particularly important as we move to a new Voice over IP phone system, based on Asterisk (using: trixbox).
Greig McGill has led the effort to deploy the new phone system (and done a fantastic job) – major capex savings over deploying alternate systems, and ongoing savings in terms of access and toll costs – more about this soon!
We are using phones from both Polycomm and Linksys in our internal deployment.
Being a big phone use one of the features I am really enjoying is having Outlook dial the phone numbers – a saving of only a few seconds and one more opportunity to fit more into the day – like viewing one of my favourite all time adverts from Apple: click here to go to you tube
New Premises – same location!
We are expanding – not only have we added staff, but our premises are about to double in size, more room for the engineers, a demo room and a purpose built server room are included in stage 1.