Customers 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 provide and manage any CSP connectivity that is required on hosted servers to both the CHIEF and CDS systems.
The design of our 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.
Our platform currently provides servers for more than 40 businesses and serves well over 500 users, ranging from micro businesses to corporate clients. The platform uses Hyper-converged Infrastructure (HCI) and is designed around Hewlett Packard Enterprise server hardware configured with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct on Windows Server 2019.
Purchased outright by Albacore and commissioned in 2021, the server hardware has been specified from component level to offer best of breed resilience and performance.
Each customer virtual machine on the platform benefits from our 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 our 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 our hosted servers also include onsite and offsite backup routines. We take highly granular onsite backups of each server every day using Veeam software. We also send offsite copies of these backups to an external location in Albacore’s sole control. Lastly, customer hosted servers back up data to the Microsoft Azure Cloud. All backup routines are monitored by our engineers with actions taken to ensure success.
The server hardware that runs our hosted server is located within a Tier III datacentre. The datacentre is located about 15 miles from our office, about 20 minutes up the motorway from our HQ if we need to visit. 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. We have a dedicated 1Gbps Internet connection assigned to our servers, with ample opportunity to scale up as required.
Albacore’s key asset is the quality of support our customers receive via our Southampton based helpdesk. We offer unlimited telephone and remote support from our team of 15 skilled engineers, backed up by administration and management staff. The comprehensive knowledge and understanding of both the IT and Freight industries that only Albacore can bring to the solutions we deliver for our customers is why our customers choose us and stay with us. We will continue to invest in hardware and facilities as well as in people and tools to continue to provide our customers of all sizes with best of breed hosted server solutions.
Albacore is exhibiting at Multimodal on stand 3044
