We have been hard at work this year to bring our customers a new level of high availability. Our order has placed with HP for a SAN and Blade setup, and should arrive in days.

What does this mean?

This means we will be able to provide a higher level of uptime on our entire product range. The new setup is designed with no single point of failure in mind across all aspects of the setup. This means if server goes offline or fails it will be automatically started on a new node with minimal downtime (seconds/minutes).  Unlike traditional SANs, the SAN we have selected (HP P4000 G2) allows for a single or multiple shelf failure without the SAN or volumes going down – this adds unprecedented reliability to the SAN.

Tech Specs:

For those of you are interested, these are the technical specifications of the setup:

We decided to go all out on this purchase, and only purchase the best of the best. We selected HP due to their excellent SAN option which truly removed any single of failure on the SAN, the excellent build quality of their hardware, and the support options provided.

Blades:

• Redundant HP C7000 Blade Chassis‘
• Redundant High Efficiency Power Supplies
• Redundant Fans and Management Module
• HP BL490C G7 Blades (2 x Xeon X5650, 144GB DDR3 RAM, SSD Drives, 2 x 10G FlexNICs)

SAN:

• HP P4000 G2 14.4TB iSCSI SAN (24 x 600GB 14k SAS, Dual Active-Active Controllers, 12GB Cache)
• 40GBit/s (4 x 10GbE) Active connectivity to the SAN, scalable up to 640GBit/s

Switching/Connectivity:

• Dual redundant Virtual Connect Flex10 10GbE blade chassis switching modules. This provides 2 x 10GbE connections to each blade.  Each 10GbE port on the blades can be split up to 4 isolated NICs operating at different speeds (for Public, Private, SAN, and Management traffic).
• Dual redundant 24 x 10GbE port HP 5820 switches for SAN switching.  These switches are low latency, and can support full line rate 10GbE across all ports.

How will this effect our plans?

This will not effect customers on our current plans, pricing will remain the same for customer remaining on our current plans. If customers wish to upgrade, there will be an upgrade path to the new plans. While our plans have not been finalised, we do have some rough plans in place.  We will be introducing new plans across our Business Hosting, Reseller Hosting, and VPS plans – due to the new structure of the plans some customers may find they will be paying less, other customers may be paying slightly more.

The new plans will provide customers more flexibility, and in general better value.

When will the new plans  be available?

We are aiming to have the new plans available at the end of Q1 2011, we have an extensive testing schedule that we will complete before the setup goes live.

More information and details (photos) will be available over the coming weeks/months.