No one likes vendor lock-in. It’s an artificial limitation on technology, designed to benefit the vendor, not the customer. The restrictions may seem insignificant on day one, when the technology may appear to be the best option currently available. But the world keeps spinning and technology keeps evolving, until you’re stuck with a platform that cannot appropriately adapt to suit your new situation without considerable expense. The big, proprietary public cloud vendors of today didn’t invent vendor lock-in, but they certainly know how to work it to their advantage. Cloud Computing isn’t owned by anyone. Companies locked into a proprietary cloud service lose the flexibility  needed to make good business decisions; making vendor lock-in a real threat to your competitive advantage. What might put you ahead one day can hold you back the...

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I’m excited about OpenStack. “But you’re a cloud computing nerd anyway,” you say. “Why should we care?” I’ve worked in a few cloud businesses over the years in both London and Sydney, watching cloud computing evolve from niche technology to mainstream buzzword. So, yes I can get disproportionally excited about things that may seem boringly technical and nerdy to others. You’re probably not that interested in the capabilities of an Intel 12 core Xeon E5-2697v2 CPU, for example. But I think OpenStack is different, and something all businesses should be aware of, because it’s going to change the way you manage your business data and hosting. This open source cloud platform is on the cusp of disrupting the cosy, established world of the proprietary cloud providers, just as they themselves...

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One of the big problems we face here at Anchor is the weight of knowledge that we carry around. We’ve been in business for almost 15 years, and the amount of information that we’ve acquired in that time is immense, largely due to the fact that we’ve dealt with many different technologies for many unique customers. How things work, how to fix things, how stuff gets done – these things tend to get encoded into people’s brains, and Anchor is no different. Even when it’s written down it can be hard to find that information. This is a challenge because it holds you back. Your ace employees with all the knowledge and experience are often the ones least available to teach new staff, which limits your ability to scale up...

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Anchor has been working on building a massively scalable data vault for metrics data. One of our engineers has written a blog post about what worked – and what didn’t – in the first version, and what we’ve learned from it. Motivation Here at Anchor we are reworking the way we store systems metrics. This has inspired the development of a new immutable and lossless Time Series Database (TSDB), a concept for which we have coined the term “a data vault for metrics”. We currently use Round-Robin Databases (RRD) to store metrics; unfortunately, aside from the simplicity and constrained size of RRDs, they don’t have much going for them. In particular, RRDtool:  by design, cannot import historical data; sacrifices data over time to save space; and requires one file per...

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Congratulations to Guy Cooper from Wave Digital  Guy has won an appleTV just by visiting our booth at The Melbourne eCommerce Expo, which was held last month. We’re always giving away cool prizes at events, so make sure you keep an eye out for us to be in the draw to win. You can keep up to date with our events by signing up to our newsletter, watching this blog, or checking the events page.

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  “Since beginning the program three and a half years ago, we’ve seen a membership growth by 300 per cent year on year. We see Anchor as an essential partner that enables us to smoothly move with this trend and continue our expansion. Anchor scales with us.” – Tim Phillips, Managing Director for Michelle Bridges 12 Week Body Transformation. The Company: The Michelle Bridges 12 Week Body Transformation is a program custom developed by the personal training celebrity to spring Australians into regular exercise routines, getting us lean and moving. Run completely via its core website, clients register for the program and once the agenda kicks off on its 12 week cycle, members spend the next three months dedicated to the schedule. Members are constantly tracking their progress towards set...

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Arthur C. Clarke’s third law of prediction states that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” – a fair description of the elation you feel when after hours of stumbling around in the dark you finally fluke the right DNS configuration change and BAM! – your blog, website, mail server or load balancer suddenly springs into life. Well, that’s true for me anyway! DNS (or the Domain Name System) can be a complicated beastie if you’re not working with it day in and day out; it is however an essential building block that makes the Internet possible and if you have ever tried to get a website online you’ll have had to muck about with DNS records at some point in your life (and probably will again!). The role...

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Storage ain’t storage anymore – not in the world of web hosting anyway. Long gone are the days of servers writing to locally installed hard disks; cloud storage is abstracted from the physical server itself, instead residing on a high-speed network of distributed storage clusters. These clusters contain gazillions of hard drives which automatically replicate your data between different nodes for safety, scalability, performance and ease of management. Storage can be consumed using one or more different interfaces depending on its suitability to the task at hand. Anchor’s distributed storage system is built using Ceph – and we love its speed, flexibility and industry leading reliability. Here’s an overview of the different ways in which Anchor’s storage platform can be consumed and why you might use one interface over the...

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“The hours they have saved me per week had allowed me to spend more time focusing on improving our website, customer experience, and marketing efforts – and thus increasing our traffic. Anchor has helped us double our traffic levels and probably a whole year sooner if I’d continued doing the work myself” – Gabriel Luis, Website Administrator, Just Bedding The Company: Since launching the business in 2005, Just Bedding has rapidly become Australia’s leading online manchester and bedding retail store. Receiving 60,000 monthly click-throughs, the company is completely dedicated to providing the best possible user experience to its virtual window shoppers and the 35,000 customers registered to the site. The Challenge: Unlike traditional retailers, the company is purely web-based with no bricks and mortar retail presence. With this, Just Bedding...

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Christmas is now less than a month away, and if you’re an Anchor customer you’re probably madly gearing up for the rush. The recent ClickFrenzy event gave everyone a taste of the excitement, and we’re quite chuffed to note that none of our customers experienced any load-related problems this time either. Booktopia, a veteran of last year’s event, was joined by Paddy Pallin, CostumeBox and Toyworld as business that came out on top by hosting with Anchor. If you’re an online retailer, rest assured that Anchor is here to lend a hand if you need it. Our team of expert sysadmins can get your site shipshape and performing at its peak. If you’re not sure your website will cope with the rush of customers, get in touch as soon as...

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