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05 October

Increased Capacity at Coventry Site

Additional Rackspace Available at Coventry Datacentre for Co-Location and Dedicated Server Clients

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As a result of customer demand we are pleased to announce that plans are underway to bring online a further data hall of forty racks at our Coventry site.

Construction of the new data hall is already underway and expected to be completed in the coming weeks with many racks within the new data hall having already been pre-sold to both existing and new customers. With separate electrical switchgear and UPS systems to our existing Coventry data halls customers can opt to spread their services between the halls for increased peace of mind and redundancy.

In addition to increasing the number of racks at the site, new welfare facilities and build rooms are being constructed for customers aswell as additional office space to house our expanding customer service team.

If you have any questions regarding the new data hall or would like to get in touch to arrange a tour once completed then please do not hesitate to contact us

02 October

Come and Find us at Cov Expo!

Coventry Expo!
We are exhibiting at Coventry & Warwickshire’s Chamber of Commerce Expo at the Warwickshire Exhibiton Centre today, come and find us at stand 147 between 10:30 AM to 3PM.

Entry to the event is free and on our stand you have the opportunity to take part in our “Rack Race” challenge and be in with a chance to win a luxury hamper!

More information is available at: http://www.cwexpo.co.uk/

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23 April

Centos 7.1 Released – LVM Cache Support

The Community Enterprise Operating System (CentOS) has announced the availability of first point release of CentOS 7. Derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1, this release has been tagged as 1503 and it is available for x86 compatible and x86_64 bit machines.  Centos 7.1 is available to be selected to all customers wanting to purchase any of our dedicated server services and can be selected from our list of operating systems when configuring your server.

You can download the operating system from our 10Gb/s mirror located within our Coventry datacentre: http://mirror.cov.ukservers.com/centos/7.1.1503/

An important feature to note is the introduction of Logical Volume Manager (LVM) Cache (built on top of dm-cache) this allows you to use SSD(s) to act as fast persistent caches to speed up access to standard SATA hard drives.  UK Servers is able to assist any customers wanting to set up their disks with LVM and use LVM cache on any servers running Centos 7.1.

The Release Notes explain the major changes:

  • As of March 2015 ABRT (>= 2.1.11-19.el7.centos.0.1) can report bugs directly to bugs.centos.org.
  • Support for new processors (Intel Broadwell) and graphics (AMD Hawaii)
  • Full support for LVM cache
  • Ability to mount ceph block devices
  • Updated Hyper-V network drivers
  • New libguestfs features
  • Full support for OpenJDK-1.8.0
  • Improved clock stability (for PTP and NTP)
  • Updated Networkmanager packages to version 1.0
  • Updated docker to 1.4.1
  • Updated OpenSSH to 6.6.1
  • New package: Mozilla Thunderbird
  • Update to numerous storage, network and graphics drivers
  • Technology Preview: Support of the Btrfs file system, OverlayFS and the Cisco VIC kernel driver.
31 March

World Backup Day – 31st March

World Backup Day

March 31st is World Backup Day!  World Backup Day is a day for people to learn about the increasing role of data in our lives and the importance of regular backups.

Customers are growing ever more concerned with security and availability within their hosting environments but many overlook the importance of a proper regular backup schedule. We are increasingly find that we are migrating many customers without a backup strategy in place onto our servers with many assuming their existing provider is already taking backups. (If they don’t mention they are taking backups then the probably aren’t!)

A good backup strategy for your server will involve at a minimum storing backups on a different storage device to where your main data is held, ideally on a different server offsite and with multiple backups being stored depending on the use of your server.

World Backup Day 2015

UK Servers offers customers two choices of backups, CDP or FT Based all of which are stored at a different geographical location to your main hosting environment a minimum of 100 miles away:

– Our continuous data protection (CDP) is a high performance disk-to-disk backup service enabling Linux and Windows disaster recovery and bare metal restores. We are able to take a snapshot of your hard drive, and in the event of a hard drive failure or user error, provide a full restore of the disks within a short timeframe. You can configure the frequency at which you backup your data (hourly, daily, weekly etc) using the web interface and then rest easy knowing your data is available in the event of any drive failure or accidental deletion. The CDP backup system also allows for restore of a single file, folder or database through the web interface system.

– Our File Transfer (FT) based backup system is a remote storage space accessible via the following protocols: FTP, RSYNC, SFTP and NFS. We can configure and monitor the backup of specific files or folders as requested. Backups can be taken nightly, weekly and monthly and stored as required.

world-backup-day-2015

World Backup Day is an independent initiative to raise awareness about backups and data preservation.  To help publicise World Backup Day UK Servers is giving all new and existing customers 50% off all UK Servers backup services from 30th March – 4th April. Simply quote promo code: BACKUP50 on our order form to take advantage of this.  More information can be found at: http://www.worldbackupday.com/

 

 

16 January

XenServer 6.5 Released – Available on all Servers

Citrix has announced XenServer 6.5, their newest release of the company’s commercial virtualization platform based on the open-source Xen Project hypervisor. With the update, XenServer now offers a full 64-bit kernel architecture, which allows customers to leverage the latest hardware and OS platforms, and supports enterprise-grade networking, storage and workload management.

As of today all UK Servers customers can opt to have XenServer 6.5 pre-installed on their dedicated server, the new 64-bit kernel architecture features significant improvements in networking and storage performance, providing customers with a virtualization platform for running new and existing workloads in their workspace and datacenter environments. The new release also re-introduces enterprise-class features for workload balancing (WLB) and distributed virtual switch controllers (DVSC).

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Official update notes are as follows:

XenServer 6.5 introduces many architectural improvements which aim to improve overall performance and removes a number of scalability limitations in XenServer 6.2.

  • 64-bit Control Domain Linux Kernel
    • The new 64-bit Control Domain (Dom0) enables XenServer to accommodate many more PCI devices per host (NICs, GPUs, and so on), and allows the use of devices that are 64-bit only (including many Solid State Drive solutions).
  • New Xen Project Hypervisor v4.4
    • XenServer 6.5 includes the latest Xen Project hypervisor available; v4.4 delivers many improvements. It vastly increases the number of virtual event channels available for Dom0, from 1023 to 131071, which translates into a correspondingly larger number of attached virtual devices.
  • Re-introduction and Improvements to Workload Balancing
    • XenServer 6.5 sees the return of the WorkLoad Balancing (WLB) virtual appliance. WLB gives system administrators deep insight into system performance, allowing infrastructure optimization.
  • Distribute Virtual Switch Controller – new version included and deprecation rescinded
    • The Distributed Virtual Switch Controller (DVSC) is fully supported within XenServer 6.5 and the deprecation notice issued at 6.2 is rescinded.
  • Newly Supported Guests
    • Support is added for the following new guests:
    • Ubuntu 14.04
    • SLES 11 SP3 and SLES 12
    • CentOS 5.10, 5.11, 6.5, and 7.0
    • RedHat 5.10, 5.11, 6.5, and 7.0
    • Oracle Linux 5.10, 5.11, 6.5, and 7.0
    • Oracle UEK 6.x

XenServer 6.5 Full Release Notes

XenServer 6.5 Product Page

 

13 January

Customise your Server Quote Tool

We have today re-launched an updated and improved version of our online dedicated server ordering quote tool.  When ordering dedicated servers customers can now fully customise a server to their specification with the ability to customise hard disks, RAID cards, memory and operating system.

The customised quote tool can provide upto 4,000 different server configurations however if you have a hardware requirement in mind that is not listed then please don’t hesitate to contact us and I am sure we will be able to help out!  To customise any server simply click the order now button on any of our product pages and continue to configure

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