New: reboots and additional VM info in control panel 1 Jul 09

A few days ago we deployed some improvements to our control panel, enabling tighter integration with our backend infrastructure. For the technically minded (or remotely interested) we’re using the magic of AMQP/RabbitMQ to enable this integration and we’ll be using this system to do more over the coming months.

The first fruits of this integration include the ability to initiate a reboot of any of your Brightbox virtual machines and enable you to view more information on the underlying physical host server and storage device.

You can now reboot any of your virtual machines via the control panel by simply clicking the “reboot” link and specifying either a “soft” or “hard” reboot. A soft reboot is the equivalent of running the shutdown -r command within the OS, whereas a hard reboot is equivalent to cutting power. In most cases, if you want to reboot your virtual machine you’ll want to try the soft option first to avoid the risk of filesystem corruption.

The additional virtual machine information is available by clicking the “full details” link next to one of your products. You’ll now see an additional two rows of information, “Host server” and “Storage”, which will now enable customers to make more sense of our status messages when, for example, we need to do some planned maintenance on a particular host server.

We’re constantly working on improving our control panel and we hope these two items are useful to customers, more improvements to follow soon :)

Brightbox SAN storage quotas doubled! 16 Dec 08

Last week we announced a tasty increase in bandwidth allocations for all Brightbox virtual machine products. Today, we’re just as pleased to announce that we’re also doubling the SAN storage allocation of all Brightbox products…

• Brightbox 256 – was 5GB now 10GB!
• Brightbox 512 – was 10GB now 20GB!
• Brightbox 1GB – was 15GB now 30GB!
• Brightbox 2GB – was 20GB now 40GB!

Check out the updated product matrix for full specs.

Don’t forget, our storage isn’t just any old storage! Brightboxes are spread across multiple SANs, each of which have 14 disks in RAID10 (with hot spares of course :)

Also, our storage network is independent of the Xen host servers so should a problem occur with a Xen host, we can migrate customers to another node almost instantly.

The new storage allocations are available immediately on all new Brightboxes. Existing customers simply need to submit a request via the Helpdesk and we’ll schedule the storage increase (a short amount of downtime will be required to pick up the new storage allocation).

Brightbox at FAB 2008 — Files and Backup Seminars 13 Feb 08

I’m attending the UKUUG Files and Backup Seminars next week (19th and 20th February) in London.  It’d be cool to meet up with any customers (or just random friendly geeks) if you’re around.  Beers are on us.  Drop me a line at john at the Brightbox domain (the uk one) and we’ll sort it out.  I’ll be the one with the laptop and the keen interest in data storage.