IT Development/Proposals/Infrastructure

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Outline for the new infrastructure/servers:

• Easy to migrate (OpenStack based; which is also open source so another plus!)
• Secure (multiple servers, sandboxed instances)
• Versatile ie. easy to maintain (cloud-based to allow quick migration & scaling)
• Resilient (Hardware failure tolerant)
• UK-based (to simplify compliance issues)

Suggested infrastructure

• Confidential data; CiviCRM, Office Wiki, Ticketing, Source Control etc.
• Community; Public wikis, community services/software (Etherpad, QRPedia etc.)
• Services; email, mailing lists, etc.
• Development; for testing & pre-production deployment
• Hot Backup; of both the above & office data

Later on:

• Mirror; on different provider, mirroring essential services etc.
• Archival storage; long term cold storage for backup data

There are a couple of suppliers that would meet these requirements, I will outline them below.

Suppliers

Rackspace (http://www.rackspace.com)

• OpenStack: Yes
• Scalable: Yes
• UK-Based: Yes
• Monthly cost for one basic server: ~£15
• Bandwidth (limit/cost): £0.12/GB
• Total guessed cost/month: £80-90
• Comments: friendly control panel, other services such as separate firewalls and load balancers if needs be.

FireHost (http://www.firehost.co.uk)

• OpenStack: Yes (checked via phone)
• Scalable: Yes
• UK-Based: Yes
• Monthly cost for one basic server: ~£180+
• Bandwidth (limit/cost): Included in basic server price
• Total guessed cost/month: ~£900
• Comments: Control panel seems OK, they are PCI compliant which is interesting and focused on security, but it comes at a large premium

Coreix (http://www.coreix.net)

• OpenStack: Yes
• Scalable: Yes
• UK-Based: Yes
• Monthly cost for one basic server: ?? (indicated about the same as Rackspace on phone)
• Bandwidth (limit/cost): ??
• Total guessed cost/month: ~£100 based on discussions on phone (they say they will be competitive with Rackspace)
• Comments: The best supplier on paper, and extremely friendly support team on phone - but their cloud product doesn't launch till January. Might be worth considering in future

Elastic Hosts (http://www.elastichosts.com)

• OpenStack: No (they use Linux KVM which is another open source package)
• Scalable: Yes
• UK-Based: Yes
• Monthly cost for one basic server: ~£15
• Bandwidth (limit/cost): £0.10/GB
• Total guessed cost/month: £90
• Comments: An interesting option; good control panel & good options, they also have two data centres in the UK which might allow for redundancy within the same provider (cheaper??). Unfortunately the two data centres are accessible through two different control panels... so not exactly "easy" :(