FlexiScale Blog

Well there’s been a lot happening in Camp FlexiScale since Tony’s last post.

The developers have worked hard to bring more choice in OS image and we now have the following:

Windows Server (32 and 64-bit)

CentOS 5 (32 and 64-bit)

Debian (32 and 64-bit)

Ubuntu 6.06LTS (8.04LTS to follow soon)

Most of these images have been available because you guys have asked for them. We’ve always been and always plan to be customer led when it comes to development. We feel it’s important that you guys have your say which is one of the reasons that Jonathan has created the “wish list” thread on the FlexiScale forum. Of course, we won’t be able to cater for every request but where there’s clear demand we’ll certainly do our best to give you guys what you want so by all means go on and have your say.

FlexiScale is now growing at the phenomenal rate of 1% a DAY!

So how come that we’re getting this growth yet my phone’s gone quiet?

Online signups!

Since the online signups went live around 90% of people are signing up themselves online. This is great as it really shows how easy and intuitive the whole process is from signing up to provisioning and utilising your servers. Exciting times!

Please remember though that there are still some real live human beings at XCalibre that are happy to talk to you and help you with anything you need or any questions that you’d like answered. Besides, you’ve usually got some really interesting projects on that we miss hearing about.

We still want to make sure that our new online signups are getting on ok so what we’ll be doing is calling you. You don’t need to panic and hide from your phone, all we’ll be after is a friendly chat to make sure that you’re getting on alright and have everything that you need. So we hope you won’t mind.

We’ll be updating the blog on a more regular basis to keep everyone posted on where we are and what we’re up to so watch this space.

John

This post was meant to be just about all the places we will be appearing/visiting in the next few months and then I though it would be worth mentioning the geographic spread of our customer base already. (We were primarily just targetting Europe to begin with), so far we have customers in: The UK (obviously), Spain, Germany, Norway, Sweden, India, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, Hungary, Iceland, Brazil, Australia, Canada, Slovenia, Denmark etc (I got halfway down the list of customers at this point). You’ll notice the USA is missing, that’s because I thought just putting ‘USA’ understated it a bit, so, some (but probably not all), of the states we have customers in: California, Minnesota, Missouri, Texas, Washington, Massachusetts, South Carolina, Conneticut, Iowa.

Now much as I would love a travel budget to visit each of the places I mentioned, I can’t see that ever happening, but we will be doing a number of trips this year to places where we do have large customer bases.

• London: We’ll be in London every few weeks, meeting clients, talks, etc
• Cologne: Philipp Huber our COO will be at WebHostingDay March 12-13th March.
• San Francisco: Tony Lucas CEO (Me!) will be at the Web 2 Expo, and in an around SF from the 18th to 29th of April
• Newcastle (UK): March 11th, (Me again!) at the AWS User Group talking about cloud/utility computing.

That’s the confirmed trips at the moment, no doubt we will be adding more later as time goes on.

Tony

Ok, well maybe that’s a bit overstating the power that FlexiScale has, but you get the idea, (and I’m a sucker for Animated Films)

We’ve been working flat out here over the past few months continuing adding new features to FlexiScale, and they will start to be rolled out in the next few weeks. We’re still keeping quiet about what some of them will be, until we roll them out, but let’s just say, we are all *really* excited about them.

Watch this space for more news in the next month as we roll them out.

Apart from that great news, a quick update on how FlexiScale is going, well, brilliant actually, usage has increased 100% in the last ~45 days, and we’re expecting it to keep speeding up from there. We’ve seen the first results of customers using the FlexiScale API thanks to our friends at Cognifide. More and more people are switching to it every week, infact in February we setup more new FlexiScale customers, than we did setup dedicated servers (for our existing business), and that’s pretty amazing!

We are going to start featuring some success stories on the blog soon, so if theres any customers reading this who would like a mention, just drop us an e-mail.

Until next time!

Tony.

Well here we are, the last couple of months have flown past so apologies for the lack of update, and all of a sudden it’s 2008!

Progress on FlexiScale is continuing very nicely, with more and more people using it every day. We intend to bring out the managed version of FlexiScale at some point in February, and we expect that to be a fairly big success.

We have a lot of plans for further development of FlexiScale over the coming year, and are going to be steadily recruiting staff to help get us there, (we’re currently planning to add up to another 10 people), so if you are interested in working for us, reinventing the entire computing market one step at a time then get in touch!

Tony.

The last couple of weeks have certainly been a bit of a rollercoaster ride here, although it’s finally ending on a very positive note.

For several weeks now we’ve had a significant problem when we were restarting physical servers, in terms of how long it was taking them to come back online, due to the initialisation they needed to do. This was managable when we only needed to restart one server, but if we needed to restart multiple servers it became rather frustrating.

This has compounded the other problems we have had in the last couple of weeks, where on several occasions (for an upgrade, a power outage and then a switch replacement) the entire platform needed re-initialised (either bit by bit, which we can do without service interruption, or completely). Until yesterday this process could unfortunately take up to 7 hours or more to happen. I’m very pleased to thus let you know that this problem has now been completely fixed due to some innovative and rather clever work by our engineers, and the initialisation of a server now takes 30 seconds.
This should ensure if we do have any problems in the future (fingers crossed, but sod’s law is fairly hard to avoid!), that we can recover from them very quickly.

So, on to yesterday’s problem.

There was a very brief (a few seconds) power outage at the main datacentre we use for FlexiScale, caused by human error, which we have been reassured won’t happen again as the process that was happening is being modified to prevent this.

This caused a spike to hit some of our equipment, and although the vast majority (some 100 servers) all came back ok, we started to see some intermittent issues with our core FlexiScale switches.

I should point out at this time that the switches were in a redundant configuration, and we did have an arrangement to obtain additional switches should one fail within a matter of hours. We didn’t consider both failing at the same time a realistic risk, now we know better.

The switches were still functioning to a degree so we left them running whilst we got the two replacement switches delivered. (Which involved yours truly being the courier for them to speed up the process!). These then needed installed, configured and then patched into the network which duly happened, and then the platform was brought back online.

Needless to say we have learnt a lot from this last few days, here are a few of the things we have achieved or are going to be changing:

• We’ve upgrade the software running the system to a newer version, which has a lot of improvements in the stability of individual servers.

• We’ve fixed the problem with initialising servers, which will help enourmously in the long run.

• We will be investigating powering parts of our cage from different sides of the datacentre to ensure maximum redundancy (including the switches being on completely seperate feeds!)

• We will be working out a better plan for coverage of key equipment (even in cases where it is in a redundant configuration) to ensure multiple failure situation’s can be dealt with more effectively.

Overall I’d like to say thankyou for the support we’ve recieved from customers during this time, and we look forward to continue bringing you more innovative features, and a highly reliable service in the future. We have some very exciting features being released over the next few months, and look forward to showing you them.

Tony Lucas

Chief Executive Officer

I’ve been asked to speak about FlexiScale at the Finance and Investment Forum on ‘Investing in Data Centres’ at Cass Business School, London on 22 November. This one-day forum is for bankers, financiers, data centre operators, investors, analysts - in fact, just the sort of people we like to meet.

The topic I’ve been given is ‘Disruptive Players: Can new market entrants change the model again through cloud computing?’ Yes, we certainly can and I’m looking forward to seeing the audience reaction to this session.

For more information on the forum go here.

Tony

An update on how things are going here in Camp FlexiScale.

Since FoWA (and the coverage we’ve got since then on various blogs) has lead to an enormous amount of leads coming in, so much so we’ve filled our initial build out of servers (well of course, we haven’t actually filled it, but we have it at the capacity level we are happy with). We also still have a lot of people waiting to be added onto the platform.

Rest assured, a large order of new servers is being ordered and will be on it’s way shortly, we’re adding capacity for up to another 6000 instances in the next few months so that should satisfy most people

We’re also quite surprised (but pleased) at the number of current Amazon EC2 & S3 customers looking at either using our platform as well, or instead of Amazon’s. We’ll hopefully be publishing some case studies on some of these in the future.

Finally, we’ll be exhibiting at the Web 2 Expo in Berlin 6-8th November, and Philipp Huber our COO will be speaking on a panel regarding Web 2.0 Apps, and next generation data centres, so if you are attending please do pop by and say hello (we’re 4 down from Amazon’s stand *grin*).

Tony.

As anyone reading this blog will probably know we were exhibiting at Future of Web Apps (FoWA) this week. It was a massive effort to get ready for the event, and we were very hopeful for what we could achieve in terms of exposure and leads as a result of it. We couldn’t have dreamed of what we got though. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m currently sitting at our stand in FoWA, and we’re just finishing the setup of it, after Vodka came to our rescue (well we are Scottish after all). Read the rest of this entry »

The countdown to Future of Web Apps (FoWA) is well and truly underway.

The new website is done, the literature has been designed, the preparation for the talks has been, err, nevermind

We are all really looking forward to next week though, we finally get to show off what we’ve spent the last 3 years working on, and we also get to catch up with everyone else from the uk web scene as well (especially considering we’ve been invited to the BlogNation launch party the night before, free bar’s are always interesting…) .

Please do drop by and see us at our stand (we’re next to Microsoft!), or feel free to grab one of our lot as they are wandering around (they will all be wearing XCalibre t-shirts).

We will be showing off a demo of our service during the event, so come along and see what you think!

Tony.