A Cambridge start-up approached us with an interesting problem. In this age of virtualisation, they have a new and important service, but one which can’t be virtualised as it relies on trusted hardware. They know other companies will want to use their service from within their private networks within the big cloud providers, but they can’t co-locate their hardware within Amazon or Azure.

This picture is a slight over simplification of the process

The interesting thing here is that the solution is simple. It is possible to link directly into Amazon via Direct Connect and to Azure via Express Route. To use Direct Connect or Express Route within the UK you need to have a telco circuit terminating in a Telecity data centre, or to physically colocate your servers. As many of you will know, Mythic Beasts are physically present in three such data centres, the most important of which is Telecity Sovereign House, the main UK point of presence for both Amazon and Microsoft.

So our discussion here is nice and straightforward. Our future customer can co-locate their prototype service with Mythic Beasts in our Telecity site in Docklands. They can then connect to Express Route and Direct Connect over dedicated fibre within the datacentre when they’re ready to take on customers. Their customers then have to set up a VPC Peering connection and the service is ready to use. This is dedicated specialised hardware from the inside of ‘the cloud’, and it’s something we can offer to all manner of companies, start-up or not, from any dedicated or colocated service. You only need ask.

A customer of ours has been extending their private cloud. This adds another 160 cores, 160Gbps, 2TB of RAM and over half a petabyte of storage. On the left you can see the black mains cable, then the serial for out of bound configuration, then red cabling for 1Gbps each to our main network, then 20Gbps per server to the very secure private LAN on SFP+ direct attach.

The out of place yellow cable is network for the serial server above, and the out of place black one is serial to the 720Gbps switch which isn’t quite long enough to route neatly.

There’s a few more bits and pieces to add, but soon it will join their OpenStack cloud and substantially increase the rate at which their data gets crunched.

We’ve just launched a public beta test of a new service available on all of our virtual servers: snapshot backups.

Snapshot Backups make it trivial to set up backups of your virtual server. Simply select how many daily, weekly, and monthly backups you’d like to retain, and what time of day you want the backups taken, and we’ll do the rest.

Snapshots work by taking an instantaneous image of your virtual server’s disk, which is then placed into our storage cloud.

The service is priced based on the size of your server’s disk, and the number of backups you choose to retain. You can alter your backup retention policy at any time.

During the public beta, the service is being charged at half price. If you want to try it out, simply click on the “Backups” section of your virtual server’s control panel. If you have any feedback, please do let us know.

We had a plan to post this last year, but we forgot.

On August 13th 2004, ten eleven years ago, our first ever invoice for a virtual dedicated server was paid.

Mythic Beasts Ltd.                http://www.mythic-beasts.com/
103 Beche Road
Cambridge
CB5 8HX

To:



────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Invoice date                                        02-Jul‐2004
Invoice number                                                         
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Ref         Date            Description                 Amount
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 xxxx     2004‐07‐02  VDS256 virtual dedicated         £400.00
                      server server-name 2004‐07‐02 to
                      2005‐07‐01
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
                                      total            £400.00
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

This VM ran until 2009 at which point it upgraded to a much faster dedicated server. It’s still operational today.

Over the intervening years, our basic service has evolved through three different virtualisation technologies and the virtual machines are now thirty two times the size that they started.

• 256MB, User Mode Linux
• 1024MB, User Mode Linux
• 1024MB, Xen
• 4GB, KVM
• 8GB, KVM with SSD

As computers have become much larger and faster it’s increasingly hard to find a single application that can fill the capacity of a single machine, meanwhile service oriented architecture means that even simple applications are now built out of lots of lighty loaded servers, virtualisation is the magic that means that fifty applications built from tens of servers each can fit into a handful of physical servers. Whilst managing the hardware has become much simpler the number of instances to manage has exploded.

Increasingly these days not only are the servers virtual but the entire infrastructure, routers and all. We now have entirely virtual networks existing within our VM cloud using virtual routers to route traffic to virtual machines.

Sometimes disks get bigger and smaller at the same time

Disks just keep getting bigger. So, as the technology allows, we like to increase the disk space allocations of our hosting accounts too. We have just doubled the allocations of all our web hosting accounts. For the Super account, we’ve given it a 2.5x boost.

These are proper, full-fat GiB (2³⁰ bytes), not disk manufacturers’ GB (10⁹ bytes).

All of our web hosting accounts can host as many domains as you want (free, provided the domains are registered with us), with as many email addresses, mailboxes, and web pages as you want. You are limited only by the total disk space. And if that’s not enough, it’s easy to upgrade from size of account to the next.

Order hosting accounts here

Finally, please don’t be misled by the picture above. We no longer use floppy disks for storage. Instead, all our web hosting servers now use mirrored “enterprise grade” SSDs for the best possible performance.

We’re please to announced that we can now set DS records for any domains registered with us.  At present, only UK domains can be configured  through the control panel.  For any other domains, please email support and we’ll put the records in place for you.

Control panel integration and other DNSSEC improvements will be coming soon.

We’ve just rolled out a beta of our snapshot functionality for our virtual servers.  This allows you to take an instantaneous image of your servers disk space which can then be restored at a later date to either the same or a different server.  This can be used for cloning a virtual server, for backups, or just to take a copy of your server before making significant configuration changes such as an operating system upgrade.

Snapshots are stored in our distributed storage cloud, which replicates the image across three separate data centres.

The system is in beta testing at the moment, and during this beta we’re offering free storage for images.  Once the beta is complete, storage space will become chargeable, but we’ll contact all customers who’ve made use of the service prior to issuing any bills.

If you want to try it out, simply use the snapshot panel for your server in the customer control panel, or use the snapshot command on the admin console.  Hopefully it’s self-explanatory, if it’s not, tell us and we’ll make it better!

Jessie

The new stable version of Debian, named “Jessie” was released on Saturday.  The new version is now available for use on all of our Virtual Server hosts. Jessie is fully available at the Mythic Beasts mirror and we’re included in the default menu so you can easily install directly from our mirror.

Mythic Beasts make extensive use of Debian and would like to thank all the Debian developers by donating our usual firkin of beer from the every excellent Milton Brewery to the Summer Debian UK barbeque so everyone within the Debian community can have a pint on us. Possibly more than one.

Following on from recent upgrades to RAM and bandwidth for our Virtual Servers, we’re pleased to announce upgrades to Virtual Server storage options.

We’ve launched a new range of SSD Virtual Servers, offering the ultimate in I/O performance. The range starts with our VPS2 SSD which replaces the 40GB disk in our standard VPS 2 with a 10GB SSD drive.

Like our spinning rust-based Virtual Servers, our SSD storage is local to the host machine, and connected as RAID 1 mirrored pairs to a controller with a battery-backup unit.  This allows us to safely enable a large write cache, further boosting write performance.

We’ve also doubled the disk space available with all of our full HDD-based Virtual Servers, so our basic VPS2 now includes 40GB of disk, 2GB RAM and 1TB of monthly bandwidth.

Existing customers can upgrade to the new storage capacity by typing “upgrade” on the admin console, and then adding new partitions or resizing existing partitions to make use of the new capacity.

Taking a break from our usual articles about upgrades for VPS customers and mocking the hopelessly incompetent, we’d like to announce an upgrade for dedicated and colo customers in our Cambridge data centre. We’ve finally completed the upgrade of both of our links into Cambridge, so have increased bandwidth quotas, and reduced excess rates to just 7p/GB.

Details of the new specs can be found on our Dedicated Server, Colocation and Mac Mini Colo pages.