The Fubra Blog
Generator tested for real – money well spent.
About two years ago Brendan decided that it would be a good idea to build our own data centre. It was of course me who ended up with the task of coordinating things and making sure that all the nitty gritty little problems were ironed out. I cannot of course take all the credit, many of the staff have been involved in the design and implementation and further enhancements are still in the pipeline.
Shiny, new - and it works too
It has been an interesting project and I have certainly learnt a lot along the way. At the start I had absolutely no idea about anything to do with data centres, power supplies, air conditioning, security cameras, or generators. I have followed a steep learning curve but we now have a fully functioning data centre at Fubra HQ.
All the design features we had put in to make sure it worked 100% of the time and which cost so much, were tested for real this afternoon when Aldershot suffered a large power cut. Within seconds our large and expensive generator cut in, the UPS feed to our servers hardly noticed the change from mains to generator, the air con continued to whirr reassuringly, and all our users were unaware of anything amiss at all.
The journey to get to this point has presented many problems along the way, but I think this is an ideal opportunity to say a big -Thank You- to everyone who has contributed to the design and build of our data centre .
Because we did it right, we had nothing to do this afternoon but check how things had worked and have a little debrief to see if there was anything we could learn from the incident. If the lights hadn’t gone out in our office we might not even have noticed! Well done one and all.
Political Idea: Tracks back to work
There were two major news articles released on the BBC today. First came the bad news – there are now 3.3 million households in the UK that have no work, that’s 1 in 6. Then an hour so later, we got some good news – the country is to gain a new high speed rail link between London and Glasgow, that will reduce journey times to just 2 hours. The only problem is that it won’t be ready until 2030.
Surely it must be possible for us, as a nation, to give these people jobs building a high speed rail network with the aim of getting it done in 5 years? This would simultaneously reduce unemployment, carbon emissions, congestion, and travel times. And while we’re at it, why can’t they be upgrading our communications and energy infrastructure by laying fibre optic cable, and increasing our renewable energy generation capacity.
What are your views on this? Could it work? How would it be paid for? Are our current politicians ambitious enough?
Multi-site CMS using Wordpress-MU
At Fubra Limited, we have many content-rich websites. In the past we had simply designed each website from the ground up, however this became hard to manage and edit. The ideal solution, we decided, was to bring them into a content management system (CMS), removing the repetitiveness of adding new websites, instead simply designing a template and adding the content.
We initially moved these sites to an inbuilt CMS, but decided that Wordpress would be more suited, as it has many plugins, lots of documentation, and a large community. More complex websites, such as Fubra Passport, we decided to use the Zend Framework’s MVC system.
Wordpress itself is not currently suited for a CMS, as it is a single blog installation. Scaling this ourselves to install multiple copies would be too unpractical. However, Wordpress-MU, a modification to Wordpress written by the same company, Automattic, allows multiple blogs in a single installation. It is used to host their blog hosting service Wordpress.com.
Fubra Video Player for YouTube (FuTube)
Last Monday we released a simple media player icon set available for free download whilst we continued to make progress on our YouTube video player interface aka FuTube.
FuTube is a free to use flv video player that simplifies the user interface of YouTube videos, removing the bulky default look and replacing it with something a little more elegant.
We are now pleased to announce that the first version is almost complete, allowing us to demonstrate and publish what we have done so far. Here is an example of how the player looks with no customisation:
LINX66 Presentation
Today saw day 1 of LINX66, the LINX members meeting at Goodenough College in London. As a LINX member we dispatched our MD Brendan to make a short talk to the group about one of our latest projects — our in-house datacentre.
The presentation briefly covered why we had opted to develop our own infrastructure, how we have gone about implementing all the ancillary services required in a datacentre environment, the network and technology we have built the main services around, how we had gone about detecting and overcoming the inevitable problems which crop up during the day-to-day running of such a facility, and finally the services we are offering at our facility. Brendan then took questions from the floor relating to the final price tag of the project, as well as addressing some of the technical questions relating to our environmental monitoring network.
For more information download the slides which accompanied the presentation (they’re in PowerPoint format).