IT Development/Proposals/Infrastructure

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
• 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??).