Our Infrastructure

Interconnects

We are only as good as our interconnects, and that's why GEN has two disparate interconnects to each data-centre, one from BTnet, and one from VirginMedia. These can be load balanced to provide redundancy, even in the even that one fails completely we're still up and online (not that either have ever failed it has to be said).

Virtualisation

We have currently three clusters, AVALON, NEBULA and EQUINOX. Each has 16 physicals, 96 cores, 4 CPU's, which gives us just over 6000 cores. We use automation and management to migrate live workloads from one cluster to another so we achieve maximum performance for our customers.

At this time of writing (2024Q1) after recent upgrades we have enough capacity to quadruple our workloads and still have capacity to spare.

Virtual Shared Hosting

We're not fasthosts or another £1/month hosting provider, we don't need or want the types of sites that are hosted on that sort of platform. We host sites for companies who need uptime and bandwidth guarantees and service level agreements. We currently have three private virtual hosting clusters

• DAKOTA - Hosts mainly static sites or sites with low compute overheads with a standard set of features.
• ATLANTIS - Hosts more active and compute heavy sites with an extended set of features together with VAR's
• AURORA - Hosts sites with very high bandwidth demands, and with a flexible set of features

Virtual Private Hosting

If your needs are out of the park for our shared virtual, then private virtual is the way to go, you'll have your own server to configure as you desire and we'll help with backup, monitoring and of course technical support every step of the way.

Private Virtual is expensive, and its charged in a different way to virtual shared, but the added flexibility of your own server, combined with flexible performance from 1 to 96 CPU's and 2GB to 128GB of ram, you will never run short on performance.

Containers

We offer a full portfolio of containers, from our own to industry standard from the likes of docker hub or LXC. These can be spun up as needed to supplement both shared and private virtual hosting and is often a more economic way to handle out of band services such as Redis, Mongo, Postgress, Grafana, Influx etc.

Big Data

GEN, as a provider of big data services to companies that need large volume data processing at a sensible cost, operates a four node Galera data cluster running on Gen 10 DL580 machines with 1TB of ram and fibrechannel storage. This capability allows us to process billions of rows in seconds, and with our investment in Hadoop, we can run distributed queries across the cluster. Very few companies in the world have anywhere this capability for data processing at scale.

Storage

GEN Operates a 18PB Storage SAN fabric which can be partitioned into SFTP, iSCSI, S3, NFS, SMB, AFP, WEBDAV and CIFS storage and accessed across the estate. This storage architecture underpins our ability to scale our storage capacity to meet the needs of our customers.

Support

One of our major USP's is that we will support you, every step of the way. If you have a virtual shared website and have issues, we're here to help, if you have your own virtual private and are having issues getting some software to work, even if its not our, even if we know nothing about it, we will help you. This is the promise we make to all our customers, if you need help, we're here.

Realtime Status

Whilst many if not all of our competitors hide behind a weak support channel (if any) in the event they are having issues, we do not, our status page (green tick top right) is generated in realtime from our network monitoring platform. We monitor our infrastructure 24/7 at the NOC and any outages are handled swiftly by the team. We do have maintenance windows like any company, but we TELL YOU in advance if any services will be affected, and when they are, its usually momentary and in the middle of the night.