Wikipedia:Ultraspeed Managed Hosting

Ultraspeed Managed Hosting is a managed hosting provider based in Shoreditch, London. From its launch in 1998, Ultraspeed has served organisations of all sizes, from small businesses, FTSE companies and government. As of 2011 they host over 50,000 UK based websites. Their products include a platform which has been designed to meet the high volume, short term nature of viral marketing campaigns and proved useful for the BHF's Food4Thought campaign in 2008, where it performed well in dealing with the 390,000 visits in the first week of the 4 week campaign.

Diskless server system
Prior to deploying the diskless platform, Ultraspeed was struggling with poor storage utilization and the environmental and financial costs associated with these issues. In 2007 Ultraspeed used BlueArc's Titan 2000 'storage area network'(SAN) to produce a diskless Web Hosting platform. This technology means that Ultraspeed is able to change a server over in around 15 minutes.

The 'diskless server system' DSS servers ‘boot’ from the SAN via Gigabit Ethernet connections, all Data is continually replicated across the SAN, and should an individual’s SAN hard disk fail, it is swapped out and the replacement is automatically populated with data without the customer being affected. For those who have a hosted website the customers servers are automatically “snapshotted” on a daily basis by the DSS, to enable a fast fullback to that particular time-point should the need arise.

Data centre and virtualisation
In March 2010, Ultraspeed opened a second data center in Amsterdam implementing a modular infrastructure design including multi-tenant 3PAR storage, VMware, Extreme Networks switches and customized servers. They are a member of 3PAR's Cloud Agile Program and a VMware partner. VMware are a makers of the technology needed for virtualization, which underpin cloud computing. Virtualization is a software layer which allows users to abstract their applications from the underlying hardware. This means (in theory) that the application can run on any machine anywhere.