This week Microsoft released a patch for their hardware virtualisation platform, Hyper-V, that was highly recommended. It was the first patch of its kind in the 2 years that this technology has been publicly available. It was important enough for us to bypass our normal patch change control process – we take matters of security and stability very seriously. read more
C Infinity Sponsors the Microsoft Technology User Groups
This week saw the launch of the new website www.mtug.ie for the Microsoft Technology User Groups (MTUG) in Ireland.
This is a collection of non-profit groups that teach their members about and how to best use Microsoft technologies. For example, there is a Windows User Group focusing on Windows technologies in the business. The Dublin Area group (DAMTUG) focuses on the developer community. There are SQL and Sharepoint user groups. And there are regional user groups in the North, Cork, Galway, Cork, etc. read more
Part 2: The C Infinity Private Cloud VS the Rest
In the first post in this article we looked at how you could get high levels of hardware fault tolerance with a “statefull” application such as a database and how it was very expensive. In this post we will look at how the C Infinity private cloud can get the same results at a fraction of the cost and with greater functionality.
Managed Server Hosting Availability Reports
We’ve been talking a lot about SLA’s (Service Level Agreements) in the hosting industry at work lately. As a hosting company, like any other company, you’re dependant on many things:
- Power and Cooling: Our data centre provides and lives up to their 100% SLA with a dedicated substation and dual diesel generators. No outages since 2001 is a nice way to live up to a promise!
- Internet connectivity: Again, we’re looking at a 100% SLA from our suppliers. That’s an enviable position; something you don’t get with a DSL or ordinary leased line. We monitor that closely and there’s been no outages yet.
- Server Uptime: This one completely depends on manufacturer reliability, clustering, etc.
Microsoft Completes New Windows Versions
Recently we got the long awaited Release to Manufacturing (RTM) announcement from Microsoft for:
- Windows 7: The replacement for Windows Vista
- Hyper-V Server 2008 R2: The second release of Microsoft’s free virtualisation solution for small implementations
- Windows Server 2008 R2: A whole new version of Windows Server with a new kernel. read more
Interview With C Infinity’s Systems And Infrastructure Manager
Our Systems and Infrastructure Manager, Aidan Finn, was recently interviewed by Dave Northey from Microsoft. Aidan discusses about us and why our hosting infrastructure was built using Microsoft Hyper-V and System Centre.
The Future Of Windows Server
The next release of Windows Server will be in 2010 or thereabouts. This will probably be soon after the release of Windows 7, the successor to Windows Vista. This new server product will be called Windows Server 2008 R2.
SAP Supports Hyper-V
SAP announced that their product range will now support being installed onto a Hyper-V virtualised platform. This support is available from version 6.40 and higher. This opens up the virtualised platform to another enterprise platform – and it opens up being hosted in an economic and managed online environment such as C Infinity’s virtual server solution.
Microsoft Launches New Virtualisation Strategy
Microsoft launched their new virtualisation strategy on Monday, 8th of September, featuring Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008. We often think of virtualisation of just being a collection of virtual machines running on a server. Microsoft, and C Infinity, sees it as being much more. Microsoft has several layers of virtualisation:
New Managed Virtual Hosting Infrastructure Launched
C Infinity has announced the launch of their new managed virtual server hosting infrastructure based on Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and System Centre Virtual Machine Manager 2008.
Microsoft recently released their new machine virtualisation solution, Hyper-V. Based on Windows Server 2008, allows machine virtualisation using a hypervisor. This provides greater performance and flexibility.
