Albacore Systems has announced a significant infrastructure upgrade to their hosted server platform.
Businesses seeking greater stability from their declaration and forwarding software from any Internet connected device are choosing Albacore’s hosted servers because they offer lower capital costs as well as fixed ongoing costs. This is combined with market leading functionality, security and support from the Albacore team. All of the licensing, power and bandwidth costs are included in the ongoing costs for the solution.
Albacore also provide and manage any CSP connectivity that is required on hosted servers to provide seamless access to HMRC CDS.
The design of the solution means that all aspects of customer virtual machines exist at a virtual level within the solution, above the level of a single server hardware instance – that’s in terms of their storage, memory, processing and network. These customer virtual machines are therefore able to tolerate a failure of 1 physical server within the collection of multiple physical servers that provide the overall solution.
Each customer virtual machine on the platform benefits from the installation of a management agent. This software provides pro-active monitoring and alerting to Albacore engineers as well as detecting and resolving issues on customer servers using automation. The management agent also controls the delivery of Microsoft security updates. These are individually approved by the Albacore team before rollout to customer servers to minimise the likelihood of an update effecting the functionality of customer systems.
Having a resilient hosted server setup is excellent but it’s far from the whole picture. Reliable backups are of utmost importance, so Albacore’s hosted servers also include onsite and offsite backup routines. Highly granular onsite backups of each server are completed every day using Veeam software. The data on customer hosted servers is also backed up offsite to cloud based storage to maintain offsite versions of the data. All backup routines are monitored, with actions taken to ensure their success. Disaster Recovery (DR) solutions can also be incorporated, offering a maximum 4 hour failover to alternate hardware at a separate location.
The hardware that provides hosted servers to our customers is located within a Tier III datacentre. The location is ISO27001 certified. The site has blast proof windows, specialist security doors and biometrical access control. Access is by appointment only with full audit logs, and continuous video surveillance with motion sensitivity is in place with 12 months of CCTV history available. Power to the facility is fed from 2 separate substations on independent rings on the national grid, and in addition the facility offers redundant UPS systems providing 20 minutes of battery at full load. These UPS systems are backed up by redundant generator protection with 10 days of fuel stored on site.
Internet connectivity to the facility is unrivalled on the south coast, being fed redundantly from 2 separate exchanges and via 4 ISP’s. A dedicated 1Gbps Internet connection is assigned to the Albacore hosting platform, with ample opportunity to scale up as required.
Security is at the core of the hosted server offerings. All Internet browsing that takes place on customer hosted servers is filtered by a constantly updated globally aware service. Tight change management policies are in place and Albacore works pro-actively to ensure all aspects of the hardware and software of the solution are updated and secure at all times.
Secure passwords are set for all users by default but Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) is quickly becoming an industry standard so this is quoted in all new solutions. It’s the biggest single improvement that customers can make to improve their security stance.
Albacore’s key asset is the quality of support their customers receive from their Southampton based helpdesk. Unlimited telephone and remote support is provided by the team of 15 skilled engineers, backed up by administration and management staff.
Businesses choose and stay with Albacore because of the comprehensive knowledge and understanding of both the IT and Freight industries that only they can bring.
