Hi, I'm Lee and I'm the Head of Network Development here at PlusNet. This blog is intended to give you a brief overview of the projects that the Networks team are currently working on.
First of all we have the new anti-spam platform, as most of you will know we are in the process of moving customers over to a new anti-spam platform which has been developed in conjunction with Postini. Read more about this.
We haven't just stopped there though, we are still trialling other solutions internally to ensure that we can give you the best service available.
Over the last few months all departments have been working to integrate Madasafish into PlusNet. This is still in progress and as you can imagine has a lot of involvement from a Networks perspective. As part of this we're taking the opportunity to increase capacity and in some cases replacing platforms which will benefit all customers.
Security is of prime importance to us at PlusNet, because of this we have been rebuilding our core network to the highest security standards. There is still work in progress as we continue to move the last remaining systems over to the new high security platform.
The IWF are an organisation in the UK working in partnership with government departments in order to minimise the availability of illegal internet content, specifically child sexual abuse images and racial hatred content. We have already implemented a solution for this across our network using the list of addresses provided by the IWF. In addition to the IWF work, we are also looking in to a trial of a clean feed solution that we hope may form the basis of offering customers' connections protection from some of the threats present on the internet.
We've just spent a considerable amount of money on 10TB of new NetApp storage that will form the heart of our improved backup platform. The current backup platform didn't provide the capacity or performance we required. We are also going to be adding more storage on to this later in the year.
Our Ellacoya-based traffic management system is one of the major differences between us and other ISPs. We are currently in the process of rebuilding the back-end section of this platform in order to add further resilience and disaster recovery.
As a company we need to know which servers are where and what they do as well as how much storage they have, the software on them and the support and spares available for these. This is an ongoing process as servers and assets reach the end of their lifecycle and are replaced or upgraded. This is also important from a security standpoint as we need to make sure that any software is patched to fix any vulnerabilities that may be exploited.
Recently we moved the Webspace and FTP services over on to new NetApp storage. This will deliver a number of improvements including improved resilience and point in time recovery.
We're planning a major rebuild of our data centre environment in Sheffield. As part of this we will be upgrading the power, cooling and taking the opportunity to refresh some of our network equipment. In addition this will remove some of the legacy problems we have around cabling etc. To enhance our geographic diversity, and move to a better environment we are also planning to move one of our Sheffield sites to London.
PlusNet is a referrals based company, which is why we offer customers discounts for referring friends or family to sign-up with us. We are looking to take this to the next level by offering a partner product which would allow us to extend the reach of our broadband services to affiliates.
Faster speeds is something that customers have been looking for ever since LLU providers came into the market and could offer speeds higher than those available over BT Wholesale equipment. Working with BT we are now planning how and when we will be able to access their new 21C network. One of the main advantages of this is the speed increase, we will be able to offer speeds of up to 24Mb dependant on connection quality.
Whilst we continue to work on improving the platform and adding new services we still need to make sure that everything is running as smoothly as possible. This is the job of the Network Operations team who are here to improve and correct network problems.
The improvement don't stop here though, we are still planning a raft of other system upgrades and new developments. I hope to be able to update you on these later in the year.
Thanks for reading,
Lee
Network Roadmap