Hardware

We're really not a hardware company. However, we like to tinker, have our own lab and rarely use anything off the shelf. Mostly we take commodity hardware and assemble products that meet our needs. Very occasionally we’ll do this for a client and even more rarely some of what we do may be of interest and use to others!

Although most of our clients run their own extensive data centres and you’d expect them to be able to provide more than adequate resources, we find it usually far more productive (less red tape) to be able to prototype on our own hardware and in our own environments. Knowledge is usually far easier to bring into an organisation than hardware.

Largely the information is here as reference designs and ideas for your use; though if you require more details or something built for you, get in touch and we’ll work something out.

The Lab

Frequently we find that whilst our clients may be multi-billion dollar business running large data centres with tens of thousands of cores, procuring the necessary hardware in order to be able to prototype new design is not just difficult but sometimes impossible.

To mitigate this, we run a fully featured lab environment complete with an enterprise grade software defined network. We have both virtual and physical machines and containerisation technologies.

All this is available for use at client site if needed through our redundant network links and VPN servers.

1U Network Control Plane

This is an example of something put together for our own purposes. A 1U high installation that provides us the necessary hardware to run our network. It comprises of dedicated hardware to run DNS and VPN servers, a Ubiquiti Networks Unifi controller and a command centre to run our lab.

Constructed from a readily available off the shelf components including three Raspberry Pi 3s and an Intel NUC as well a couple of power supplies and some dedicated cabling. It connects into the rack as a single 1U machine.