Many hosts try cheap hardware and facilities, whereas we take a stand – premium only!
If it’s not industry-leading, then it’s not for us. This goes for our compute infrastructure through to the data centres where our equipment resides. You entrust us with your online assets, and that means we have a lot to deliver on. If we’re not investing in premium suppliers and vendors then how can we call ourselves customer-first? We’re here for you, and that means investing in tomorrow.
No to Supermicro, yes to Dell EMC. No to Equinix, yes to NEXTDC. No to consumer SSDs, yes to Intel DC!
While it’s common to use “white box” servers, they may offer a cost-effective solution in the short-term though in the long run they tend to cause problems. Our team is focused on the long-term and that means investing in companies who will be just as reputable in 3, 5, etc years time. Dell EMC have been passionate since the beginning, and they continue to provide stand-out compute solutions that we depend on.
Our server infrastructure is 100% Dell EMC, backed by Intel Xeon CPUs and enterprise-grade ECC RAM (this means there’s extra fault tolerance, reducing the likelihood of exceptions/faults causing system crashes). As for storage, short of our backup platform we’re 100% SSD-powered – not just any SSDs like many other hosts, we remain dedicated to Intel Data Centre SSDs as they offer blistering speeds and reliability, backed by solid warranties and support teams.
As for our infrastructure’s “housing” around Australia, previously we were using Equinix SY4 in Alexandria. They had a serious security breach, gave us numerous causes for concern (in-person security, etc), and overall provided a poor customer experience. The crew at NEXTDC, founded by Bevan Slattery, have always been nothing short of exemplary in how they’ve worked to look after our requirements – security-first, they’re passionate and remain an Australian public company. Interested customers can book tours of S2 via Sales.
Virtualisation and (not) over-selling – both are important considerations. How’s it tackled?
VMware used to under-pin our VPS and Hosting platforms, and for years was a reliable solution. The software is restrictive from the ground up however, and while there are some proprietary tools that make some of that work simpler, for the most part it’s still too limiting. Their support is very good once you reach the right people, however there’s a road from “G’day” to effective help that wasn’t nice to navigate.
We made the move to KVM-based virtualisation. This opens up options as our customers are able to run their own kernels rather than sharing a host kernel. Not only does this expand options with regard to custom systems (BSD, *nix and otherwise), it’s important from a security perspective too. Keeping our hypervisors operating smoothly is a relatively simple balance, under-pinned by refusing to over-sell.
Questions? We’d love to answer them – feel free to get in touch with our crew for more information!
