Following the recent highly successful launch of version 2.0 of its integrated suite of storage, replication and web clustering software, HybridCluster, an early stage software solution provider to the cloud and hosting industry, today unveils full details of the ultra-high availability platform within HybridCluster 2.0.

As standard functionality of HybridCluster 2.0, the ‘Self-Healing’ ultra-high availability platform has been designed from the ground-up to automatically recover when data centre hardware, software, networks or even entire regions fail. It does this using automatic backups and snapshots that are taken every few minutes and distributed across all the machines, combined with the automatic migration of websites and applications between all machines.

“Our self-healing platform enables hosting organisations to launch highly profitable HA services to their clients at a fraction of the cost of competing solutions,” said Luke Marsden, HybridCluster’s CEO and founder. “We dramatically reduce both capex and opex: our clustering software utilises low-cost hardware driving capex down and we fully automate the recovery processes when a server or site goes down”.

HybridCluster Self-Healing also transforms the normal concept of a backup/recovery regime for hosting businesses. Rather than taking daily or hourly backups with a separate backup application and using this as the primary means of recovery from a disk or server failure, HybridCluster self-healing continuously and automatically replicates data across machines and fully automates failover/recovery procedures between machines in a cluster and across clusters.

“Using HybridCluster self-healing HA clusters helps us recover from failures automatically and seamlessly rather than relying on a patchwork of monitors, scripts, and manual procedures.” stated HybridCluster customer, David Kirkham, Managing Director at Beyond Colour, a creative marketing agency based in York in the UK who been hosting their own dedicated servers providing solutions for individuals to enterprise customers across Europe for over 15-years.

HybridCluster Self-Healing provides fully automated recovery from site, server, network or disk failures – and measured in seconds and minutes rather than hours and days.

“Cloud and web hosting companies live in fear of data centre outages, which frequently result in damaging their margins and reputation,” stated Ben Kepes, technology evangelist, commentator and HybridCluster investor and advisor. “With HybridCluster’s high-availability platform, hosters can provide ultra-high availability web applications, databases and email at a fraction of the cost and time of competitive systems.”

HybridCluster 2.0 is available immediately to cloud and web hosting service providers. Cloud and hosting service providers can sign up for a trial.

Visitors to HostingCon in Austin, Texas, from June 17 to 19, can see HybridCluster in action on the exhibit floor at exhibit #723 as well as see HybridCluster’s CEO, Luke Marsden, first up on the Tech Track on the conference agenda.

The post HybridCluster 2.0 self-healing, ultra-high availability capabilities unveiled appeared first on HybridCluster.

As we continue in our endeavours to innovate and improve, to transform the standard of shared hosting and present a real, affordable solution to the traditional problems faced by hosting providers, we’ve been looking through some CVs with the aim of expanding our technical support team and raising the bar to give you, our customers, the truly top-notch standard of care and attention we believe you can expect us to deliver.

While I was ringing a selection of candidates to invite to interview, I couldn’t help thinking back to my earliest days of getting involved in web development and some of the job interviews I attended as a starry-eyed and hopeful 19 year old.

It was at the start of one of those grillings in which I first encountered a question that I’ve now come to know as a common, stock interview challenge for programmers – one I’ve been asked probably about four times now in the course of different interviews over the years.

It’s not difficult, not at all, it’s a question meant simply to filter anyone who’s made it to the interview only because they might have been….shall we say, a little creative with their curriculum vitae at the application stage

This question is known as “FizzBuzz” and if you’re not familiar, it takes the following form:

“Write code [generally in any language of your choice] that will loop through the numbers 1 to 100 and in the case of a number divisible by 3, output Fizz, in the case it’s divisible by 5, output Buzz and in the case the number is divisible by both 3 and 5, output FizzBuzz, outputting the number itself in any other case.”

Now in Python, there are a number of innovative (if not entirely intuitive) ways in which you can accomplish that task in a single line of code (**cough** slices **cough**). But for all PHP’s pragmatics, I find it does, in many respects at least, lack the same supple flexibility of Python and I could forgive many a programmer for thinking a PHP one-liner on FizzBuzz just can’t be done. But the good news is it can, thanks entirely to PHP’s support for one of my favourites from when I first studied C++ as a teenager – the “ternary if” operator.

That’s basically an inline, one-line if/else construct, expressed in the simple form “condition ? statement-on-true : statement-on-false”

So here it is, a PHP one-line FizzBuzz:

foreach(range(1,100) as $x) echo (($x % 3 == 0) ? (($x % 5 == 0) ? 'Fizzbuzz':'Fizz') : (($x % 5 == 0) ? 'Buzz' : $x)) . ', ';

The post PHP One-line FizzBuzz appeared first on HybridCluster.

The structure of the XML is fairly predictable – items on the invoice are created as LineItem nodes in the document tree, for example:

<LineItems>
   <LineItem>
    <Description>Product 1</Description>
    <Quantity>1</Quantity>
    <UnitAmount>9.99</UnitAmount>
    <AccountCode>200</AccountCode>
   </LineItem>
   <LineItem>
    <Description>Product 2</Description>
    <Quantity>3</Quantity>
    <UnitAmount>12.99</UnitAmount>
    <AccountCode>200</AccountCode>
   </LineItem>
</LineItems>

Regardless of what type of API POST we’re making, the XML structure required always follows the principle you can see above – <ItemTypes> contain one or more child nodes of <ItemType>

Now, in our code, before we get to the point of making our API call, our system generates the invoice data in the form of nested arrays, such as the following:

    $data = array(
        'invoice' => array(
            'type' => 'INVOICE',
            'contact' => array('name'=>'John Smith'),
            'due_date' => date('Y-m-d',time()+($dayfactor*$days)),
            'date' => date('Y-m-d'),
            'currency_code' => 'GBP',
            'invoice_number' => 'HYBRID001',
            'reference' => 'HYB-001',
            'line_items' => array(
                array(
                    'description'=>'Product 1',
                    'quantity'=>'1',
                    'unit_amount'=>'9.99',
                    'account_code'=>'200',
                ),
                array(
                    'description'=>'Product 2',
                    'quantity'=>'3',
                    'unit_amount'=>'12.99',
                    'account_code'=>'200',
                ),
            )
        )
    );

Notice how the line_items element is a numeric array of associative arrays, not associative itself. What I wanted to do was create one simple, reusable and flexible method to translate an array like the above in to the XML structure needed for the API, without having to write a function that specifically dealt with LineItem nodes or required me to create an additional depth to the array. Because associative array keys must be unique within an array (that is, an associative array cannot have two distinct elements both identified by the key line_item), I needed a way to translate arrays of arbitrary depth to the correct XML structure.

Below is the snippet of code I wrote for this purpose. It uses the PHP XMLWriter PECL extension, which is included and enabled by default in versions of PHP > 5.1

    function camelcase($str, $ucfirst = false) {
        if($ucfirst) {
            $str[0] = strtoupper($str[0]);
        }
        $func = create_function('$c', 'return strtoupper($c[1]);');
        return preg_replace_callback('/_([a-z])/', $func, $str);
    }

    function xml_encode_array($data,$nodeblock,$ucfirst=false,$camelize=true,$w=null,$pkey=null) {
        $wn = $w;
        if (!$w) {
            $w=new XMLWriter();
            $w->openMemory();
            $w->setIndent(true);
            //$w->startDocument('1.0','UTF-8');
            if ($ucfirst) $nodeblock = ucfirst($nodeblock);
            if ($camelize) $nodeblock = camelcase($nodeblock);
            $w->startElement($nodeblock);
        }
        foreach ($data as $key => $value) {
            if (is_array($data[$key])) {
                $okey = $key;
                if (is_numeric($key) && intval($key) === $key) {
                    $key = substr($pkey,0,strlen($pkey)-1);
                }
                else {
                    if ($ucfirst) $key = ucfirst($key);
                    if ($camelize) $key = camelcase($key);
                }
                $w->startElement($key);
                xml_encode_array($data[$okey],$nodeblock,$ucfirst,$camelize,$w,$key);
                $w->endElement();
            }
            else {
                if ($ucfirst) $key = ucfirst($key);
                if ($camelize) $key = camelcase($key);
                $w->startElement($key);
                $w->text($value);
                $w->endElement();
            }
        }
        if (!$wn) {
            $w->endElement();
            return $w->outputMemory(true);
        }
        else {
            return;
        }
    }

Given the array you saw earlier in this post, this code snippet will generate the correct XML. It does this by taking an array key such as line_items, transforming it in to LineItems, then stripping of the final ‘s’ when it recursively processes the numerical arrays that contain each individual item array. This way, there is no need to write separate methods or add extra depth to our data array to wrap specific node names such as LineItem – they can be extrapolated from their plural parent name.

Credit: I didn’t write the camelcase function used by my XML generator, that’s a public domain snippet from somewhere on the web.

Licence: The xml_encode_array function is cheerfully released in to the public domain for any purpose. Enjoy

The post PHP – Generating XML from arbitrary-depth associative arrays appeared first on HybridCluster.

BRISTOL, UK (1st May 2013) – HybridCluster, an early stage software solution provider to the cloud and hosting industry, today announces completion of a $1m fundraising and immediate availability of version 2.0 of its integrated suite of storage, replication and web clustering software. Amongst the investors are established industry figures including Jason Seats (former VP of Engineering of Rackspace Cloud), Charles Grimsdale (partner at Eden Ventures and former CEO & founder of OD2), Anil Hansjee (former Head of Corporate Development, Google EMEA) and Toivo Annus (former Head of Engineering at Skype).

Luke Marsden, CEO and founder at HybridCluster, said:

For too long web hosting companies have lived in fear of unforeseen failures, spikes in traffic or user error striking their operations, stopping their business in it tracks. With this investment in the company we are now able to launch Hybrid Cluster 2.0 and compete effectively in the hosting market across Europe and North America.

Liam Eagle, Analyst, Internet Infrastructure Services at the analyst firm, 451 Research, pointed out:

HybridCluster is a compelling platform in that it targets system failures and spikes in demand. Performance and availability are two on-going challenges for shared hosting providers, and two key metrics by which their customers measure their services. Hosting providers are likely to appreciate it as a means of bringing the benefits of cloud technology to their hosting environments.

HybridCluster 2.0 provides service providers the ability to create cost effective, high availability hosting and email infrastructure. It provides:

• High-Availability: Self-healing to automatically recover when hardware, software, networks or even an entire region fails – and in less than a minute from a backup made less than a minute ago.
• Intelligent Auto-Scaling: Scaling to provide and charge for scalability in response to spikes in traffic.
• Rapid Restore Data Vault: ‘Time machine’-like capability to allow hosting company customers to roll back to last good version of files themselves in case of accidental data loss or malicious attack for websites, databases and mailboxes.

Jason Seats, former Rackspace Cloud VP Engineering and MD of TechStars Cloud, stated:

HybridCluster is a rare combination of a disruptive and game-changing technology from a company run by an inspiring and highly motivated team in a market that has undeniable need for, and clear benefits, from the technology

BrickStreet Data Systems, a provider of high availability SaaS and website hosting to businesses in North America, has been a HybridCluster customer since February 2013

We wanted to grow our hosting business but our old platform was vulnerable to systems failures, traffic spikes and end users deleting their own files. It was also exceedingly difficult to do even routine maintenance on each server,” explained, Andrew Skattebo, CEO of BrickStreet Data Systems.

That’s why after months of research and testing and finding other solutions either too complex or too expensive, we chose and deployed HybridCluster.” Skattebo added: “Today we can offer a more cost-effective, high-availability hosting platform that is easier to maintain and takes away many of the risks that normally affect a business like ours.

Today web hosting providers across Europe and the Americas are using HybridCluster – the majority of whom are now live on version 2.0.

HybridCluster is available immediately to cloud and web hosting service providers. Users can visit www.HybridCluster.com to sign up for a trial. Visitors to HostingCon in Austin, Texas, from June 17 to 19, can see HybridCluster in action on the exhibit floor at exhibit #723 as well as see HybridCluster’s CEO, Luke Marsden, first up on the Tech Track on the conference agenda.

– release ends –

About Hybrid Cluster (@HybridCluster)
HybridCluster has triggered a rethink about cloud and hosting industry’s dependency on high cost, legacy virtualisation and storage stacks that fail to fully protect both businesses and end users. Computer scientists and industry experts have combined at HybridCluster to deliver breakthrough storage and hosting platform technology that automatically detects and recovers data centre outages in less than one minute, delivers 4x better density of customers per server, and offers end user to self-recover lost files and data.

Founded in 2008 and based in Bristol, UK with offices in Europe and America, HybridCluster’s backers and advisors are widely recognised and respected industry veterans, and its customers amongst the most innovative hosting providers across Europe and the Americas. HybridCluster is a SETsquared company.

Press contact: Nick Gregory (nick@mxl.co.uk) +44 7966 841 688

Notes to editors

Tags: cloud infrastructure, PaaS, web hosting, data centres, software, hosting platform.

Resources:

• Visit HybridCluster at www.hybridcluster.com
• Product demo video at www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=JXIYKvR3fQM
• More about HostingCon 2013, the Web Hosting and Cloud Service Providers conference, at www.hostingcon.com
• Product Trial link: www.hybridcluster.com/product/trial
• Product Whitepaper: www.hybridcluster.com/resources
• Artwork and Photos: Available on request

Investors and backers of HybridCluster
HybridCluster has attracted an elite group of VCs and angel investors — including experts in the Cloud Infrastructure space – who recognised the game-changing potential of HybridCluster and have invested US $1m in the early stage company to accelerate customer adoption.

Investors include:

• DN Capital www.dncapital.com
• Jason Seats (former founder Slicehost, Rackspace Cloud VP of Engineering and MD TechStars Cloud) www.jasonseats.com
• Charles Grimsdale (partner at Eden Ventures and former CEO & founder of OD2) – edenventures.co.uk/team_profile.php?id=4
• Toivo Annus (former Head of Engineering at Skype) – angel.co/toivo
• Anil Hansjee (former Head of Corporate Development at Google EMEA) – about.me/ahansjee
• Eric Barton (former CTO of Whamcloud Inc and expert on distributed systems) – www.linkedin.com/in/ericbarton
• Ben Kepes (Advisor, Investor, Commentator on Cloud Computing and Technology) – www.linkedin.com/in/benkepes

Dave Embleton, Mark Farmer (Eden Ventures); Thomas Jones, Anton Wellenreiter, Bo Pedersen (Charlotte Street Capital); Allen Jewhurst, Robert Paul, Chris Mairs, John Lazar (AngelLab); Julian Carter (EC1 Capital), Steven Algieri, Jon Hodesdon, David Priseman, Clint Watson; Simon Murdoch, Damien Lane, Adrian Lloyd (Episode 1).

Advisors include:

• David May (Professor of Computer Science at Bristol University, CTO of XMOS) – www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~dave/
• Anne Johnson (CEO Cunning Systems and Advisor) www.linkedin.com/pub/anne-johnson/1/56b/818
• Martynas Nikolajevas (Serial Entrepreneur and Business Developer in Hosting) www.linkedin.com/in/martynas

The post Self-healing cloud technology receives $1 million investment appeared first on HybridCluster.

• I/O Based Auto-Scaling
• 3-10x Performance Improvement
• Database Time Machine
• Latest ZFS features from Illumos
• Complete WHMCS integration
• Many more tweaks and improvements

This is alongside the existing features of HybridCluster:

High availability

Automatically recover from site, server, network or disk failures in seconds and minutes rather than hours and days with self-healing.

Intelligent auto-scaling

Dynamically scale the resources available to any website or application by automatic live-migration of workloads whilst achieving industry-leading hosting density.

Rapid restore data vault

Move from a backup window to a continuous replicated environment, allowing customers and sysadmins to instantaneously rollback to automatically-taken snapshots.

Get it today and run it on dedicated hardware, cloud infrastructure or both in a Hybrid Cloud configuration:

Start a Free Trial or call us on EU: +44 (0)20 3384 6649 / US: +1-415-449-1165

The post HybridCluster 2.0: First LAMP-compatible PaaS software as drop-in replacement for CPanel, Hypervisor + SAN appeared first on HybridCluster.

Go ahead and sign up using the trial button below, and check out the new articles on our knowledge base for information on how to deploy it!

Sign up for a trial

Reply to the email you get on your trial and we may select you to join the exclusive trial period prior to our full general availability launch in June 2013!

Speaking of which, do come join us at HostingCon — where we’ll be exhibiting at booth #723 and I’ll be speaking about how PaaS is the future of cloud!

The post Get ready for our 2.0 release! appeared first on HybridCluster.

New web-hosting ‘co-operation’ technology makes service failure a thing of the past

At the annual SETsquared Garden Party and Innovation Showcase in Bristol last week, the pioneering technologies showcased included medical implants, audio devices and automated monitoring of social media.

Some of the South West’s most innovative technology companies from the SETsquared Business Acceleration Centres at the Universities of Bath and Bristol presented their businesses to large corporate companies, prospective investors and grant-funders at the event in Goldney Orangery, which attracted over 150 delegates – more than in the previous eight years.

In a time of economic uncertainty, the SETsquared Centre in Bristol was proud to announce continued success in it’s member companies’ fund-raising, achieving over £65mof investment in the last 5 years.

During the evening, eight selected companies entered a 60-second ‘Elevator Pitch’ competition to promote their businesses. The audience, of Venture Capitalists, SWAIN investors, representatives of the grant-funding and venture capital communities from London and the South West, senior executives from major corporates plus supporters and mentors of the SETsquared activity, voted for the best elevator pitch.

The winning pitch, from Luke Marsden of HybridLogic (pictured, above, receiving his award from Nathan Guest of Veale Wasbrough Vizards), explained how their innovative and patent-pending hosting platform solves three huge problems faced by web hosting companies and users of cloud infrastructure: keeping websites fast when they get spikes in traffic, automatically recovering in less than a minute when anything breaks, and allowing users to roll back to any point in time if they make a mistake. With the recent high-profile outages of service providers, this technology will be of immense benefit.

A further 7 ventures that are supported by the SETsquared Centres of Bath and Bristol showcased their work, including innovative businesses as varied as smart metering, Deep Brain Stimulation and online presentation tools.

EZE Vidra, Google’s Head of Campus, gave the keynote speech, outlining his thoughts on the future for high-tech startups, commented that the UK was a real technology cluster and that SETsquared was a key part of that.

Sponsored by the South West Angel and Investor Network (SWAIN), Veale Wasbrough Vizards, Baker Tilly and the SW Microelectronics iNet, the Garden Party provided an invaluable opportunity for the region’s high-tech, high-growth companies to network with potential investors and corporates.

Nick Sturge, SETsquared Centre Director commented, “We operate in difficult yet exciting times. SETsquared has been grown significantly over the last 10 years and we are now seeing the real opportunities to make SETsquared work for the city-region to accelerate jobs growth and sustainable economic growth. We are working closely with the City Council and others to explore how we can best contribute to the new Enterprise Zone.”

Professor Guy Orpen, Pro Vice Chancellor of Research and Enterprise at the University of Bristol commented: “The University is very proud of the work SETsquared does to support the development of the city’s leading innovative technology companies. Tonight’s event really helps to showcase why our region is such a vibrant place for such companies to be formed and to grow.”

The post HybridLogic declared best startup in South West England appeared first on HybridCluster.

HostingCon, held in Boston MA this year, sees the meeting of the finest minds and technology in the world of Hosting. If it’s new and important it’s at HostingCon.

Hybrid Logic has been at HostingCon for the last three days where meetings have been held with dozens of the most influential channels to market. From the largest hosting providers in Canada and the largest host in Europe to VAR’s and integrators.

Every meeting has confirmed the importance of our technology and the excitement being generated is a tremendous affirmation of the need for HybridCluster self-healing platform for the industry. Hosting providers are already signing up to license their own clusters and enjoy the significant benefits we bring.

Our unique approach destroys the traditional cost model for providing High Availability hosting. Without the need for expensive SAN’s, HybridCluster automatically fails over to already running servers somewhere else in the world when a server gets into my kind of difficulty. It is possible to fully restore service in under a minute from a backup that was taken less than a minute ago.

Adding to this is the ability to roll back time and restore databases, emails and files from any time in history and live-migrate sites from machine to machine with no downtime permitting automatic scaling from shared to dedicated hosting on demand.

Hosts are identifying with these benefits and are delighted that they can do more with less. Our unique solution even allows them to achieve 4x the density of typical VM hosting thus not only saving costs but increasing revenues.

HostingCon is the most important event of the year in the hosting industry and HybridCluster is creating a disruption to the hosting status quo.

The post HybridLogic takes HostingCon by storm appeared first on HybridCluster.

Great to have the team here at HostingCon 2012 (black shirts)! Tweet us at @hybridcluster if you want to meet up and we’ll demo our self-healing hosting platform to you!

The post Breakfast at HostingCon appeared first on HybridCluster.

Hybrid Web Cluster is a web hosting platform uniquely engineered to provide on-demand, indestructable, scalable web hosting

This is no ordinary hosting solution. The rules of the game have changed. Forget the usual paradigms of shared hosting, dedicated hosting, raid arrays, load balancing hardware and reclaim the man hours lost in trying to accurately predict usage, capacity and failure scenarios.

We provide unlimited hosting capacity and use our unique Hybrid Web Cluster management tool to automatically load balance your hosting requirements, across multiple servers, in multiple data centres, providing you with a 10 second failover guarantee.

This means that as your hosting requirements grow in terms of storage capacity, performance management and fault tolerance you don’t need to think about how to scale either vertically or horizontally. We’ve done the thinking for you.

Through an easy-to-use online configuration wizard you only need to estimate your usage requirements, choose the level of fault tolerance you require and simply start to use your hosting.

Because Hybrid Web Cluster is software-based, it is able to intelligently manage your hosting in real-time and respond to changing usage levels instantly. It actively juggles sites amongst the cluster of servers ensuring that delivery of your mission critical web sites and systems is always taking advantage of the maximum performance of the available resources.

Hybrid Web Cluster offers complete fault tolerance

A disk fails. No problem. Your sites stay live.

A server fails. No problem. Your sites stay live.

An entire data centre goes offline. No problem. Your sites stay live.

Due to Hybrid Web Cluster’s built-in redundancy, not only do your sites remain live but any data that has existed for 10 seconds or longer is still there and is able to be read and written to.

Gone are the days where the alert goes off in the middle of the night and you have to rally resources to solve a problem. With Hybrid Logic if any element fails, because we keep all your lights on, all repairs can be carried out at a convenient time of your choice.

So if you are interested in delivering web sites where scaling is never an issue, where failure of any part of the entire hosting environment is never an issue and you are guaranteed a good night’s sleep, you need to be talking to Hybrid Logic today.

The post Hybrid Cluster in plain English appeared first on HybridCluster.