Spouting Shite

Bootstrap and Transition

I really believe in the idea of using cloud computing to bootstrap and transition your business. This is the process where you use the extremely low costs of cloud computing to boot strap your business into ‘month-on-month’ profitability by building cash flow on services that are built and supplied using the various cloud computing providers such as AWS and Flexiscale.

scan array in Databanx

We have being really busy over the past 12 months and we have built some really solid sales revenues in the UK and Irish markets. I started looking around last month with a view to putting some of our revenues towards buying some equipment and I was very happy to see how far your money goes these days!

In October we bought all of the European infrastructure of two US companies who are lowering their growth prospects. To wrap off the month we also bought 19 servers of a council in the North East of England. In the various transactions we took control of over $1.5m in servers, switches and load balancers.

While we sold some the equipment as it was far too much for us to use, we are left with the following:
50 servers (4Gb or RAM + 500Mb of disk space each)
1 Foundary switch
2 Citrix NetScaler load balancers
A van load of switches, routers, firewalls, UPS units, PUD’s and racking equipment.

We are using all this new kit to build a new administration system (arachne) in the Databanx facility and three new scan arrays for the emailcloud system (one in Databanx and two in a new facility in Liverpool).

Arachne being built.

Arachne is the name we have given to the new emailcloud administration system. It is a rebuild of our administration system that already manages the network. It uses clustering and some nice network tricks to manipulate our various scan arrays. We scan the email using scan arrays. Each array contains nine servers in a fault tolerant setup. Each array is built so that it can scan over 1m emails a day at around 20% utilisation.

I have around two more weeks of work to do to get all the equipment provisioned…I have already used over 200 cable ties since I started!