Ultraspeed and Hostroute merge to offer premium and shared managed hosting under one roof

2007-10-24 10:28:57.0 at 2007-10-24 10:28:57.0

London 23 October 2007 – Dedicated hosting solutions provider Ultraspeed UK Ltd (Ultraspeed) today announced the completion of its merger with Hostroute.com Ltd (Hostroute), the UK based provider of shared hosting solutions to the small business and consumer market. The share swap deal sees the combined company hosting in excess of 50,000 websites across Europe and North America. Jordan Gross, formerly commercial director at Ultraspeed UK Ltd takes on the role of Managing Director of the new Ultraspeed Group with Gordon Hudson, formerly Managing Director at Hostroute also joining the new board and taking on executive responsibility as Marketing Director. Both the Ultraspeed and Hostroute brands will be retained going forward.

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Ultraspeed finalist in 2007 BCS IT Industry Awards..

2007-10-06 21:36:38.0 at 2007-10-06 21:36:38.0

Ultraspeed are finalists for two awards in the Project Excellence categories, in the Business-to-Business Project Award, as well as the BT Flagship Award for Innovation.

More info on the awards by clicking the link below:

http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=conWebDoc4338

Ultraspeed are driven by the desire to innovate for our customers in the main, however recognition by the very respected BCS is always a good bonus. Wish us luck!

Ultraspeed launches next generation hosting service that cuts energy consumption by 40%

2007-08-02 15:27:00.0 at 2007-08-02 15:27:00.0

DC power, diskless servers and low-voltage chips deliver enhanced performance and environmental benefits in one of the ‘greenest’ data centres in the world

 

2nd August 2007 – UK managed hosting provider Ultraspeed has today announced the roll out of a unique combination of technology designed to deliver a next generation hosting service with dramatically enhanced reliability and a reduction in power consumption estimated at 40%. To achieve this, the company is using an innovative blend of measures which includes the adoption of DC power, a ‘diskless’ server environment and the latest Intel Xeon 5300 low-voltage quad core processors.

Ultraspeed’s initiative is designed to increase the features and reliability of its service whilst massively reducing the power required to run its data centre. The company is already one of the ‘greenest’ within the technology sector and was the first in the world to use a ‘diskless’ servers environment – in which operating systems and data are contained within a storage area network and hard disks are eliminated from individual servers. Launched in May 2007, this has already had a large positive impact on reliability and functionality, and reduced power consumption by 10%.

The switch to DC power adds significant additional power efficiencies. Currently, most AC power supplies operate at just 75% efficiency – 25% is wasted and converted to heat. DC power operates at approximately 93% efficiency and much of the excess thermal load can be shifted outside of the server so doesn’t need to be actively cooled. The cooling element is particularly important since it is estimated that for every 100 watts used to power a server, typically an additional 60-70 watts is needed to cool it. In total DC power can save around 30% of a data centre’s entire energy consumption.

The third element of Ultraspeed’s offering involves the use of Intel Xeon 5300 low-voltage processors. Using the 5300’s quad core technology maximises performance on a physically smaller chip and produces more computing power per watt of electricity used, negating the need for a larger number of processors generating greater heat volumes.

Jordan Gross, Commercial Director at Ultraspeed comments: “It’s time for the IT industry to recognise that additional features and functionality in a managed hosting environment can be achieved in parallel with a substantial reduction in the associated carbon footprint. The inherent stability and efficiency of DC power has been known for years yet very few companies operating large server farms actually use it. With a potential reduction in overall carbon emissions from that initiative alone of around 30%, this is inexcusable.”

Gross also explains the crucial commercial drivers placed on large IT energy users: “Modern servers are smaller but draw three times more power than their 1990s equivalents. Data centres were simply not designed to handle that sort of consumption and many now need a separate substation to be built (which is often not possible) in order to increase server space. This naturally pushes the price up for businesses. Switching to lower energy technology is therefore an imperative not just for the environment but is also needed for UK businesses to remain competitive.”

 

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Ultraspeed first in the world to deliver ‘Diskless’ server technology

2007-05-08 14:04:21.0 at 2007-05-08 14:04:21.0

Managed hosting provider consigns hard disk based servers to the scrap heap to eliminate customer downtime - ViewLondon and Primrose Mortgage Processing first customers.

London 08 May 2007 – Managed hosting solutions provider, Ultraspeed has today launched its Diskless Server System (DSS) – the world’s first hosted platform to remove hard disks, the primary cause of failure, from customer servers. Ultraspeed’s DSS platform uses a ‘storage area network’ (SAN) to provide the operating system, applications and data storage. Customers already using the DSS service include 2View Group, provider of the capital’s entertainment website ViewLondon.co.uk and online brokerage, Primrose Mortgage Processing.

DSS brings unparalleled levels of reliability to the hosting market by effectively eliminating the single biggest cause of individual server failure – a defective hard disk – and means that organisations can be confident that business-critical data will always be available.

Ultraspeed’s DSS servers ‘boot’ from the SAN via gigabit Ethernet connections. All data is continually replicated across the SAN, and should an individual SAN hard disk fail, it is swapped out and the replacement is automatically populated with data without the customer being affected. This approach is in stark contrast to traditional server environments in which hard disk failure can result in the server being ‘knocked out’ completely whilst the disk is replaced and re-populated with data from the last backup.

In addition to the DSS’s inherent backup and recovery systems, the platform provides significant additional benefits to an online community increasingly reliant on data integrity and speed of access. Customer servers are automatically “snapshotted” (a record is created of all data and configurations) on a daily basis by the DSS, to enabling a fast rollback to that particular time-point should the need arise.

The DSS platform can perform 100,000 disk operations per second, whilst the average fibre channel local disk based server manages up to 270, and though the DSS was primarily designed to remove failure points and to ensure the integrity and availability of customer data, an added advantage is a significant increase in response times reported by Ultraspeed’s customers. Furthermore storage upgrades are available simply by changing customer allocations within the SAN and the platform provides approximately 10% power savings over a traditional implementation.

Lloyd Nicholson-Taylor at 2View Group explains the drivers and benefits for selecting Ultraspeed’s new DSS service: “With a growing web farm serving 1.4 million Viewlondon.co.uk users every month we wanted a solution that delivers reliability, redundancy and speed of access. Ultraspeed’s DSS provides all three and allows us to scale the web farm very quickly to cope with increasing user numbers.”

Jonathan Midgley, CTO at Primrose Mortgage Processing added: “As an online brokerage, speed and reliability are critical and Ultraspeed’s DSS provides exactly that. The extremely quick processing speed of DSS means we can turn around quotes for customers quicker than our competitors and we are satisfied that Ultraspeed has implemented a technology step change in offering the most reliable hosted server package on the market today.”

Michael Shanks, Technical Director at Ultraspeed comments: “DSS was born out of personal frustration with hard disk failure and lengthy backup restoration procedures. It didn’t seem right that our clients, and their customers, should be at the mercy of one failed component that bring their business grinding to a halt. By removing the single biggest causes of failure in traditional server environments Ultraspeed is bringing new levels of reliability to the market.”

Jordan Gross, Commercial Director concludes: “As a company we feel customers are entitled to expect the very highest levels of reliability possible. DSS is a genuine ‘world first’ and will give our customers peace of mind that their data is in the safest hands possible.”

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About Ultraspeed

Ultraspeed is a dedicated hosting solutions provider based in Shoreditch, London. From its launch in 1998 Ultraspeed has grown organically, primarily through recommendation, to become one of the most established companies in the sector. Whilst Ultraspeed serves businesses and organisations of all sizes, the company is focussed on those customers for whom reliability and immediate recovery are vital. It runs several critical services for central and local Government departments as well as the core e-commerce applications for a wide range of retailers.

Contact:

David Bell
Tel:+44 (0)20 3214 6008
Email: david@babelpr.com

Ultraspeed launches Portal Beta

2007-05-04 14:34:09.0 at 2007-05-04 14:34:09.0

The Ultraspeed Portal provides direct web access to customers for: Service information, bandwidth graphing, billing, service status and much more.

Existing customers can access the Ultraspeed Portal by clicking here or typing
https://portal.ultraspeed.co.uk in your web browser.

Please contact us using the normal methods if you have any questions. Ultraspeed expect to go fully live and operational with Portal for 1st June 2007.