Vision Nine goes live!

YottaServe becomes ACC Yotta, becomes ACC International Ltd!

Many of our customers will have started their business relationship with us operating as ’YottaServe’. You may (or may not!?) be interested to know that the reason for choosing this rather bizarre name all those years ago was due to our pioneering work with an extremely scalable disk storage solution we discovered (and has since been acquired by HP). The big idea was that we could (theoretically) serve our ’Yottas’ of disk space to all comers. Just to put that into perspective, one YottaByte equals one quadrillion gigabytes and the last time someone ran the numbers - it was estimated that all the hard drive space on the entire planet still does not yet add up to one single YottaByte!

Well I guess there was nothing wrong with having aspirations...

Over the last four years - our service offering has grown far beyond high performance application focused hosting so recently we felt a need to tweak things a little bit on the naming front.

At the end of last year, YottaServe became ACC Yotta, and midway through this year, we finally bit the bullet and dropped the Yotta bit. The general feeling from both customers and suppliers was that it sounded a bit too quirky (one person that shall not be named insisted that ’Yotta’ made her think of a Turkish Kebab shop owner).

Hosting customers - do not panic! Our state of the art hosting centre remains central to everything we do, and this will always be the case. The consulting side of our business has only grown because of our continued development and investment in our high performance hosting infrastructure. It continues to be our showcase - the hard evidence of our technical expertise. If people tell us something can’t be done - we can tell them that not only can be done - we’re actually already doing it!

If you would like a re-cap on the products and services that we now carry - I’d recommend checking out the Products & Services sections of our recently refreshed website.

In September 2011, ACC International Ltd. became the first and ONLY company in the UK to achieve Oracles coveted Oracle VM ’Specialist’ accreditation! WOW!

ACC signed up as Oracle Gold level partners in the summer of 2009 as we had been extremely impressed with the near native performance of Oracle’s server virtualisation offering  - ’Oracle VM’. Soon after this discovery was made - Oracle acquired Virtual Iron Inc., the makers of our existing private cloud platform. So understandably - we wanted to be first in line for the new product.

While waiting for Oracle to merge the best bits of their own ultra scalable cloud solution (Oracle VM 2.x) with all the best bits from Oracle Virtual Iron, we embarked on a specialisation program, a partner accreditation which involved a number of exams to be passed, along with the fulfillment of certain other business criteria, such as customer references and sales targets to be met. It was an extremely challenging program, and took us an entire year to complete.

As it turned out in the end, Oracle released the finished product, Oracle VM 3.0, on the very same week we finally obtained ’Specialised’ partner status, so that’s extremely fortunate timing, and Oracle couldn’t have planned the release date for OVM 3 better!  We are deep in Oracle VM 3.0 testing right now, and I can tell you - it’s definitely been worth the wait!

If you want to know more about the building of our next generation private cloud hosting system - using Oracle VM 3, you can read more about this in our blog entry ’Building The Cumulonimbus Of Cloud Solutions ’

ACC beings first trials of new high performance Private Cloud Infrastructure based on Oracle VM 3.0

The term ’cloud computing’ unfortunately seems to have turned into a ’one-size-fits-all’ catch phrase, which is a shame because if you look out of your office window - you will notice that, no two clouds are the same! The existing solution utilised in our current hosting solution is Virtual Iron, or Oracle Virtual Iron, as it is now known as. This platform, although still supported, is no longer being actively developed, and as such, it’s always been the plan for us to migrate over to Oracle VM 3.0.

Interesting facts about Oracle VM 3.0

• Oracle VM is free
• The only VM platform to have I/O offloading (utility server roles) built in at base architecture level
• For updates / patches, affordable support options cover server with either two sockets or more
• No other / hidden license costs
• Each VM host supports up to 160 physical CPUs and 2TB of RAM
• Each VM guest supports up to 128vCPUs and 1TB of RAM
• Live migration of VMs via SSL
• OVF Support
• Only VM platform supported for Oracle products

Thanks to the immense amount of expertise we have built up on Oracle VM over the last year thanks to the work on the specialisation program, we are in prime position now to start deploying it. As is ACCs ’Eat your own dogfood’ tradition - we fully deploy technology ourselves, before providing it out to consulting customers.

A new cloud solutions also presents a good opportunity to refresh the hardware.

We were the first (and only?) company to coin the phrase ’hosting without the toasting’, and ’AMPs are the new U’. We understood, five years ago, that we needed to reduce the power footprint of the servers that we hosted in order to become more in tune with the environment. OK and also to save money! Our existing servers are already extremely low power, but the new solution will use even less power - half again in fact. They will also take up half the physical space again than the current solution. Thinking about it another way, it enables us to double the amount of server capacity we can use for customer requirements that need to expand in a hurry.

Follow this link if you are interested in learning a little more about the incredibly efficient Supermicro SuperServer 6026TT-H6IBXRF  server