Memset, Dedicated Hosting

Memset Joins Influential Aldersgate Group

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 11:33:38 +0000

Award-winning British cloud provider, Memset®, has been accepted as a member of the influential Aldersgate Group.

The Aldersgate Group, founded in 2006, is an alliance of leaders from business, politics and society aimed at promoting the move to a sustainable economy. Its broad membership of leading organisations gives it an authoritative voice both in shaping policy and driving action for change.

Kate Craig-Wood, MD of Memset, said: “As a leader in the field of energy-efficient Web hosting and cloud computing for many years we hope to be able to share our expertise and learn from other members in pursuit of our strong environmentalist philosophy.”

“Further, we’re extremely pleased to be able to have a ‘voice’ via the Aldersgate Group which we see as complementary to our other memberships, the Green Economy Council and Intellect's Climate Change group, in driving forwards the common goal of making Britain an exemplar low-carbon economy,” said Craig-Wood.

Key to the Aldersgate Group is their philosophy of collaboration between different industries, organisations and individuals, engaging with key decision makers in a proactive, constructive and impartial way. Memset joins an impressive membership base that includes big name IT players such as the likes of Microsoft and BT.

About Aldersgate Group

The Aldersgate Group, founded in 2006, is a high level policy think tank and membership organisation that brings together progressive businesses, environmental campaign groups and influential individuals - including MPs and peers from all three major parties. Its core priority is to make the economic case for high environmental standards, which it believes will be a major part of future economic growth and international competitiveness.

To help the UK become the world's first low carbon economy, Aldersgate Group lobbies Government for a policy framework that incentivises low carbon practices and a regulatory framework that supports sustainable business decisions. Crucial to the work of the Aldersgate Group is the understanding that for an economy to be truly low carbon, action for high environmental standards must be co-ordinated across all levels.

Collaboration between different industries, organisations and individuals is integral to the influence of the Aldersgate Group and PepsiCo UK joins a membership base that includes Friends of the Earth, WWF, Anglian Water, ASDA, BT, M&S, Microsoft, Philips, the Co-operative and parliamentarians such as Caroline Lucas MP, Peter Aldous MP and Lord Prescott. To ensure that all industries are represented - and none over represented - it limits the number of businesses that can join from each industry.

For more information please see http://www.aldersgategroup.org.uk/

Memset Passes Penetration Test in Readiness For G-Cloud

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 10:29:00 +0000

Guildford, Surrey – 16^th April 2012 - Award-winning British cloud provider, Memset®, today announced that their Miniserver VM™ (cloud compute) and Memstore™ (cloud storage) services passed penetration tests and IT Health Checks carried out by Encription who are CREST & Tiger certified.

Memset have already been awarded a Framework Agreement for the provision of G-Cloud services and are supplying services to government at Impact Level 0 (IL-0) from their public cloud, for example DECC's heatmap.

The hosting company has been putting their cloud products through rigorous tests in pursuit of assurance by CESG at up to IL-2.

Penetration Testing is a technique used by Security Professionals to identify security vulnerabilities and misconfigurations that could be used to exploit an organisation's Information Assets.

Encription, who carried out Memset’s test, found there were no vulnerabilities or warnings of any kind, confirming that Memset's systems' security. The tests included attempts to launch attacks on virtual machines (VMs) sharing the same host server and the failure to cause any impairment to the performance of security of the attacked VMs demonstrates the integrity of Memset's Xen-based hypervisor layer.

Memset's cloud services are built on oen source tools combined with a strong in-house development team. “We achieve user segration via a mixture of dedicated VLANs, Xen hypervisor with a number of enhancements to guarantee performance for Miniserver VM and OpenStack with further in-house additions for Memstore. We passionately believe that open source software is actually more secure,” said Kate Craig-Wood, MD of Memset.

"Memset is committed to ensuring security remains a top priority, delivering the highest level of protection and control together with an exceptional user experience for enterprise and government alike,” concluded Craig-Wood.

Memset Provides Cloud For CSE’s National Heat Map launched by DECC

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 15:02:47 +0000

- The Heat Map of England Delivered Via Cloud -

Guildford, Surrey – 29 March 2012 – Award-winning cloud provider, Memset has today announced they are providing the cloud services running the newly launched Web application, developed by The Centre for Sustainable Energy (CSE) to support the planning and deployment of local, low-carbon energy projects in England.

The National Heat Map, launched today by the Department of Energy and Climate Change is a publicly accessible resource providing high-resolution maps of heat demand across England. It aims to help local authorities, community groups and other users identify locations where heat distribution projects are most likely to make a difference – by cutting carbon emissions and reducing heating costs.

CSE has not invested in any IT infrastructure to provide access to the National Heat Map, instead delivering the content via Memset’s suite of cloud services. Only one Memset Miniserver VM® virtual machine is required for the core of the system. The heat layer images are being stored in Memstore™, Memset's cloud storage solution, and being delivered via the high-speed content delivery network (CDN) that comes as part of Memstore™.

The Memset development team reported that today's launch, with a peak of 9 million requests per hour, was an excellent stress-test of the CDN service. The AGILE team wrote, tested and deployed a performance enhancement patch this afternoon, ironing out a minor lag issue CSE were reporting.

Kate Craig-Wood, MD of Memset said: “It”s really exciting to see our technology being used for such a great environmental purpose, especially when CSE is using technology in an environmentally friendly way as well - delivering the content via the cloud means the service itself has a reduced carbon footprint compared to the old-school approach of dedicated hardware.“

CSE’s Head of Research and Analysis, Joshua Thumim said: “The National Heat Map represents a big step forward in the use of the web to provide intelligence and support for the development of local energy projects. It combines a very detailed geographic model of energy use with a range of user-friendly visualisation and reporting tools, providing sophisticated GIS functionality to non-technical users via a standard web-browser. We think it’s the future of energy mapping.”

The National Heat Map can be accessed at ceo.decc.gov.uk/nationalheatmap and requires Internet Explorer 7 or higher. Firefox, Chrome or Safari are recommended.

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Budget 2012: Why It Needs To Be More Than Words

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 17:28:22 +0000

- IT Entrepreneur, Kate Craig-Wood Explains What Action We Need From The Government -

Guildford, Surrey – 21 March 2012 - At 12.30pm today, Wednesday 21st March 2012, Chancellor George Osborne announced The Budget 2012. IT entrepreneur, Kate Craig-Wood and co-founder of cloud computing provider, Memset is impressed with some of the Chancellor’s ‘intentions’ but she spells out what exactly the government should put into place to deliver on their promises:

Technology

First, I am delighted that the Chancellor has stated an intent to make the UK Europe's technology centre. Now that the old "big three" of finance, retail and construction are floundering, technology really has the potential to become a major engine of growth for UK PLC. Cloud computing is a prime example; the UK already has something like a 10% global share of the market which is growing at over 20% per year and will be worth £25bn by 2015.

“I see a future where Britain has a triumvirate of export strengths; legal services, financial services and technological services - three areas with great synergies and ones in which we already excel.”

The promise of investment in faster broadband is very welcome - and necessary to achieve the above goal - but it needs to be more than words. Unfortunately the numbers he mentioned - £150 million to create "superconnected cities" - are out by at least an order of magnitude! We need a few billion pumped into broadband infrastructure to catch up with the rest of the world.

By contrast it enrages me that we are spending £40bn on white elephants like the high speed 2 rail link. Using the same metrics as were used to justify that project (mostly time savings), money spent on broadband would deliver £30 of benefit for every £1 spent - 10 times better than the train links return on investment! (source: Broadband Stakeholder Group) Further, 20-30% of Britons remain without access to broadband and they are generally among the most socio-economically deprived.

In summary, serious investment in network infrastructure would help the needy, rather than a minority of suits, save us all time (and therefore money) and stimulate innovation by providing British Internet / cloud services companies with a hot-bed of users to hone their products that can then be exported to the world!

I of course welcome the reduction in business tax and improved research and development allowances as well as well. They will help high-growth technology companies like mine fulfil their promise of driving economic prosperity; my brother and I (the owner-managers of Memset) leave most of the profits in our business in order to fund our growth - especially necessary given the banks' continuing reluctance to lend. By taxing those profits we leave in rather than what we take out government was stifling our growth, which in turn was reducing the rate at which we take on new staff and so forth.

Investment

As for loans to start new businesses and support for school leavers with apprenticeships, they are targeting the wrong areas! It is the established, proven technology businesses 10-250 employee range - the "gazelles" - that have the greatest potential for growth and exports. Due to scarcity of bank finance such firms are turning to venture capitalists who in turn almost always end up selling them to the US, depriving Britain of their goodness - we need more pressure on banks to share at least some of the risk with the owners.

We Need Highly Skilled Workers

As for apprenticeships, such firms are also in dire need of highly-skilled workers, not school leavers. We have to fight tooth-and-nail to get top-quality programmers and systems administrators which is hampering our ability to grow as fast as we would like (ie. we'd recruit more if we could find them!). It is true that we and our peer-group companies won't be employing school leavers (our minimum requirement is a 2:1 degree in a STEM subject), but encouraging universities to churn out more science and technology graduates will encourage our growth and in turn economic prosperity for all.

Finally, on a more personal note, as one of the much vilified "1%" I welcome the cut in top-rate income tax, but not purely for selfish reasons. At 50% it was at a level where my brother and I were genuinely starting to consider the merits of emigrating and taking the company with us. Britain cannot afford to alienate its golden geese for the sake of what is petty change in the grander scheme. 45% brings it just about under the pain threshold.

Memset Turn To Apprenticeships To Plug Skills Shortage

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 16:27:08 +0000

Award-winning cloud computing provider, Memset, have today announced they have launched an apprenticeship scheme due to the ongoing frustration of not being able to recruit the right people with the right skills.

Whilst the government is doing all it can to encourage businesses to take on apprentices to help develop the skills of the British workforce and to promote the growth and rebalancing of the UK economy, Memset’s apprenticeship scheme has been launched for an entirely different reason.

Memset MD, Kate Craig-Wood, explains: “We’re turning to apprentices as universities just don’t seem to be teaching the right skills. For example, there are hardly any courses that teach Python programming or Linux systems administration despite the fact that they are becoming the tools of choice for the globally-leading ICT companies. We’re faced with having to sift through a lot of graduates who are of little use to us, who have often been encouraged to take 'business' or 'entrepreneurship' modules rather than practically applicable skills that are useful to an employer!”

“We’re hoping that by getting them young and training them as we want, we can equip them with the relevant skills that we need, and start them off in the right direction for a fulfilling career in the ICT industry,” said Craig-Wood.

Tim Hall Surrey County Council’s Cabinet Member for Children and Learning, said: “The number of young people in Surrey not in education, employment or training (NEET) is very low compared to the national average but the council’s goal is make sure nobody in Surrey is classed as NEET by 2015.”

Under Memset’s Apprenticeship scheme, for one week in every month the new apprentice will attend a comprehensive course in systems administration at a Microsoft training centre. The other three weeks of the month will be spent at Memset, working alongside the junior and senior systems administrators and putting new skills into practice. They will also have the opportunity to visit Memset's data centres and assist with server rack wiring and maintenance.

“By putting this apprenticeship scheme in place Memset can now invest in the futures of our local youth, and if this experiment with 1-2 apprentices works then we may well expand the scheme in coming months,” concluded Craig-Wood.

For information on these and other jobs at memset please see memset.com/jobs.

Memset Prove It Is Possible To Beat Moore’s Law For Power-Consumption

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 14:12:11 +0000

Memset, through their collaboration with Surrey University, have shown that it is possible to reduce power consumption faster than even Moore’s Law.

The research is an ongoing project examining the load levels and power consumption of Memset’s Miniserver VM host server estate which has been running for 32 months. The key findings have been that, contrary to accepted wisdom, CPU is generally under-utilised even after virtualisation and it is RAM and disk transactions which tend to be limiting.

Memset has been iteratively refining and fine-tuning the host hardware to optimise it for the actual load profile they are seeing from their clients. This has enabled Memset to reduce the average power consumption of their popular Miniserver VM virtual servers (1 x 0.7GHz Xeon core, 1GB RAM, 80GB RAID1 HDD) from 26 watts in mid-2009 to 4.7 watts by the end of 2011.

Moore's law is a good approximation for rate at which energy efficiency of computers improves. Even taking the more aggressive figure of a doubling of efficiency every 18 months* Moore's Law predicts those VMs should be using 6.9 Watts - 47% more than Memset's power usage. A typical modern dedicated server with four times that capacity would use at least 70 Watts which further highlights the merits of virtualisation and Memset's approach.

Kate Craig-Wood, managing director of Memset, said. "ICT has been highlighted by both the Global e-sustainability's SMART 2020 report and the World Wildlife Fund in their 'Saving the first billion tonnes' report as vital to the transition to a low-carbon society through approaches like dematerialisation and intelligent resource management. However, many people are concerned that we will be trading one carbon source for another."

"I hope that this research and the future projects I am personally leading at Memset in collaboration with Surrey University will help put those fears to rest. ICT really can deliver its promises of a greener society without itself becoming a major indirect source of greenhouse emissions."

Notes:

*Moore's law technically refers to a doubling of CPU transistor density every 24 months, however when computers are viewed overall including other advances such as multi-core, higher clock speeds and storage density their performance per £pound or per watt doubles roughly every 18 months.

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Large System Integrators Losing Their Hold On Government Contracts As G-Cloud Partners Are Announced

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 14:09:50 +0000

- SMEs like Memset Lined Up To Bring Benefits Of Cloud To Public Sector -

Award-winning British cloud provider, Memset®, today awarded a Framework Agreement for the provision of G-Cloud Services, says large system integrators are starting to lose their hold on government contracts as the G-Cloud partners are announced.

One of the visions of G-Cloud is for 25% of contracts to be awarded to SMEs. Memset are delighted to see that the government appear to be trying to make good on their 25% promise, with a significant amount of SMEs named in the approved list announced by the cabinet office today.

Kate Craig-Wood, MD of Memset said: “G-Cloud has the potential to be enormously disruptive. It heralds the breaking of large systems integrators' strangle-hold over government ICT. In my view as tax-paying technology expert their consultancy-lead, bridge-building approach has historically delivered remarkably poor value to government.”

By gaining the Framework Agreement for the provision of G-Cloud services Memset are one step closer to helping the government realise the enormous savings to be gained by switching across to a pay-as-you-go type arrangement for infrastructure and/or software. This is exemplified by Memset's stated intent to offer their services at the same prices that they normally charge customers (publicly available on their Web site), which at present are the lowest in the UK for virtual machines and cloud storage.

The next step for the IaaS cloud provider is to go through the CESG Pan Government Accreditor's accreditation process. Following earlier scoping meetings, Memset are confident that they will be able to host services and content up to Impact Level 2; that requires ISO27001 with some extensions that Memset believe they already have in place whereas IL1 is mainly based on just ISO27001.

As a very security-oriented company, Memset had already gone well-beyond the requirements of ISO 27001, so gaining the G-Cloud framework agreement was less work than what they usually have to put into just one tender for a local council project.

“Gaining our approved G-Cloud Framework Agreement is incredibly exciting for us. As one of a new breed of government ICT supplier we sincerely intend to work with government to delivery better quality, secure and environmentally friendly ICT services at vastly lower prices than those to which they are accustomed.” concluded Craig-Wood.

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Memset Announces Virtual Server-MiniServers With Free Pre-Installed Microsoft Server 2008

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 15:04:28 +0000

- Bundled package comes with free software for quickly building and deploying websites -

Award-winning web hosts, Memset have today announced one of the cheapest and versatile ways for businesses to deploy a professional website or have a web presence both quickly and easily. By combining Memset’s award winning, Miniserver VM® virtual server with a free copy of Microsoft’s Windows 2008 Server R2 Web Edition, customers are able to make websites to last throughout the businesses lifetime.

The free software bundled with the package includes Microsoft Windows 2008 Server R2 Web Edition pre-installed and ready to go straight out of the box. The Miniserver also comes with Microsoft’s Web Matrix, this web development tool makes it simple to download and install such software as Wordpress, Joomla, Dotnetnuke and Orchard. Security is taken care of as well with Sophos Server Anti-Virus and customers will also have access to SQL Server 2008 Express.

Memset’s Windows hosting package supports all programming languages, such as ASP, ASP.NET, Silverlight and many more. These allow clients to mix and match the language on one server. Clients can run PHP, or ASP and ASP.NET in the same account.

Memset sales manager, Nathan Johnston said: “The software has been developed with ease of use in mind and gives you a secure platform for quickly building and deploying websites. It includes full ASP.net support, PHP support, SEO reporting and SQL Server. Together with a reduced price on our Miniserver Virtual Servers, customers really are getting a lot for their money.”

Memset is one of the world’s most reliable web hosts, regularly appearing in Netcraft’s tables for reliability and voted PC Pro’s Best Web Host for the last six years, this leading UK publication said: “A reliable web host is every bit as critical as a dependable ISP to an online business, and there's no doubting Memset's credentials. In excess of 99% of Memset's customers said they would use the company again - the highest score for any company in any category of this year's awards.”

Memset also offer Linux based servers as well, as well as cloud computing packages for any sized business.

Memset’s Windows hosting package is available for £34.95 per month until the end of February, for further information please see here: http://www.memset.com/windows/

Memset A Winner At All Major IT Awards In 2011

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 12:05:51 +0000

- Topped off with a UK IT Industry Award Last Week -

Guildford, Surrey – 18 November 2011 - Award-winning British SME, Memset® has scored a hat trick of industry awards in 2011, adding Best Small IT Supplier at the UK IT Industry Awards 2011 to their throng, held at a ceremony in London last week.

The UK IT Industry Awards, presented by the BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, in association with Computing magazine, represent the benchmark for excellence for the entire IT profession, showcasing best practice and innovation.

Collecting the award for Memset was MD Kate Craig-Wood who said “We’re very honoured to be awarded Best Small IT Supplier by the BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT and Computing, in what is known as the ‘Oscars of the IT Industry’. The Memset team have worked tirelessly in the pursuit of excellence and we’re delighted that our small business has shone out amongst much larger enterprise heavyweights at these awards.”

The judges said they were impressed with Memset's innovative use of Open Source technology and that they were sticking to their goal to: To be the best IT host in Britain through integrity, openness, fairness, hard work and being smarter than the competition.

Contributing to Memset’s hat-trick of awards in 2011 was their award of ‘Best Managed Service’ at the 13th annual ISPA awards. ISPA awards are the leading internet services specific awards.

Finally, Memset’s sixth consecutive year as being voted the UK’s ‘Best Web Host’ at this year’s PC Pro Awards has topped off an impressive year of award wins for the small British business.

The PC Pro Awards are arguably the most respected awards in the consumer/small business technology space. The judges said: “A reliable web host is every bit as critical as a dependable ISP to an online business, and there's no doubting Memset's credentials. In excess of 99% of Memset's customers said they would recommend the company again - the highest score for any company in any category of this year's awards.”

Memset wins Best Web Host for SIXTH consecutive year at PC Pro Awards 2011

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 08:51:02 +0000

Memset, the UK's leading virtual machine cloud provider, has been awarded the PC Pro Excellence Awards 2011 for Best Web Host. This is the sixth consecutive year that Memset has scooped this prestigious award at the PC Pro Reliability and Service Awards held last week.

These awards are the most comprehensive guide to customer support and product reliability in the UK and Europe and are compiled from the UK’s largest independent survey of IT customer satisfaction. This year, more than 11,000 people voted in the survey, with each of the 19 awards decided by reader votes alone.

PC Pro said: “A reliable web host is every bit as critical as a dependable ISP to an online business, and there's no doubting Memset's credentials. In excess of 99% of Memset's customers said they would use the company again - the highest score for any company in any category of this year's awards.”

Kate Craig-Wood, founder of Memset said: “The PC Pro Awards continue to be one of the most respected accolades to win in the IT industry as they are awarded purely by public vote. There is no better testament to our service. We are delighted to have won this award for an amazing sixth time and are grateful to our customers for their continued support.”

“Our continued success in the PC Pro awards is down to the Memset crew, for their unwavering dedication and hard work over the last 6+ years,” concluded Craig-Wood.

Alasdair Davies, who took the time to vote for Memset in the awards said: “Memset are by far the best host I've used. Phones are answered in less than 10 seconds and email support replied to in less than 10 minutes."

Memset were also a finalist in the category of Business Product of the Year with their Miniserver technology.