Virtiso Hosting Platform and my Work

A couple of you have heard that I started a new company and asked my what I was doing. I thought it would be nice to explain that a bit in a blog post here. First of all my new company is called Virtiso BV and is based in The Netherlands. I'm in the IT business as long as my memory goes back and in the ISP business since 1996. I have seen it all and done it all so I think I know what I'm talking about. I have also been an entrepreneur for the last 18 years. My main business is helping Small and Medium Businesses (SMB) with their IT needs. Whether it is advice or helping them to build a website, webshop, a groupware solution for E-mail, Calendars and Contacts or other Private Cloud Based solutions. To facilitate all this I build a small VMWare based hosting platform. Here you can see 8 Sun X4200 servers that have ESXi 5.1 running on them. On those physical servers I can run many virtual servers. And that is where my business is going now. Renting out both managed and unmanaged virtual servers.

For the geeks I also included a picture of the backside of the rack. The machines are all on rails by the way so I can roll them in and out easily for maintenance. These servers are located in the datacenter BIT-2A of the company BIT BV in Ede. This is the company I started together with my partner Henk in 1996. We are both still share holder, but no longer active in the operation. BIT has grown onto larger customers with high demands. With my own company I'm focussing on the market below. Small entrepreneurs, freelancers and companies with smaller IT needs or companies that just need decent webhosting without 99,99% SLA needs. Even so I tried to setup my platform as redundant as funds allow. There are two netscreen firewalls, double internet feeds, the VMWare platform is fully redundant and I also rent storage on a very redundant NetAPP cluster from BIT.

Here is the management platform. Here is also some storage that I use for backups only and the servers to manage the Sun cluster. The network stuff in in the picture on the lower right. Here you can see the switches and firewalls. BIT provides me also with redundant powerfeeds with both UPS'es and Diesel generators on both the A and B feed. So I guess this platform is not too bad :) Do let me know if you are reading this and think that I can help you out with something. I'm specialised in VMWare, Microsoft and Ubuntu Linux but I'm also very experienced with Kerio Connect, Control en Operator. Very cool products. Do look them up if you never hear of them on http://www.kerio.com. These product I also rent out as a managed service.

Next to this technical stuff I also design websites, build webshops and develop software. For the graphical side you probably have seen my 3D animations as well. That is another hobby I run next to my music stuff. For this 3D stuff you need a lot of computer power as well. Even rendering out a small animation takes a long time. For this I'm also building a platform in BIT's datacenter. This is a seperate platform from the hosting platform. I will show you this in the near future as well. I hope to find some customers as well for this in the graphical business. So I would say if you know someone who is looking for rendering capacity do let me know as well. And if you are looking for a datacenter in Europe/The Netherlands do check BIT out :) http://www.bit.nl. OK I hope it is a bit clearer what I do now. The website for my new company is hardly finished btw so I'll post that later when I think it is suitable :) If you have questions do ask of course :) Just send me an E-mail.

BIT Project (Part 2)

Last time I showed you the rough model of the building of BIT BV, but now it is time to add detail. Today I spend a couple of hours modeling this security camera. BIT has a lot of these all around the building. I modeled it as close as I could from some picture I took of them. It looks simple I guess, but I can tell you it is a LOT of work to model something like this from scratch in Cinema 4D. Well I'm quite happy with the outcome myself and I'll put them on the building soon. There is a lot of other stuff I also need to model and I'm starting to get an idea of how huge this whole project will be. I hope to update you soon with some more stuff I made.

BIT Project (Part 1)

At the moment I'm working on quite a big and ambitious project. If you have read my biography you will know that music is just a hobby for me and that my main job is actually operating a business ISP company that is running a couple of data centers in The Netherlands. Our current website is Dutch only and needs a big overhaul. I'm currently working with my colleagues on some ideas for the new website. The first this is that is needs to go in a multilingual CMS system. So the good news is that you guys will be actually able to read it later on :)

One thing we want to have on there for sure is a virtual tour through our data centers. The idea is to use real video footage in combination with 3D animated graphics. But before you can create any animation you need to build a model of the whole building. And that is what I'm currently doing. Bart Auceps made a start with the model a while ago in Autodesk 3D studio max and I just completely redid large parts of his model in Cinema 4D and also made some adjustments and additions already to the model. I'm also redid the texturing already.

So now the rough outside of the building is almost done and I need to work on the detail and the interior and after that I need to build the server rooms of the data centers. Most things here I did from the top of my head, but next week I'll take some pictures of details of the building to be able to reproduce that also in the 3D model. I guess this will be project that will take a couple of months for sure. I will post updates on this blog from time to time so you can follow along.

In our house style we use a couple of Dutch bridges as a metaphor for stability and reliability. In the past we took pictures of these bridges and altered them, but for the new website I'm also experimenting with a rendered approach. In the picture on the right you see a bridge that in real life is in Amsterdam, but now it is in my computer. In this way I can get it from any angle and position the water and clouds etc. anywhere I want. I don't know if we will use it yes, but I hope so, since I think it is starting to look quite realistic. If you are interested in the old website and the company you can have a look on http://www.bit.nl/. This website is Dutch only, but I guess you can use Google Translate to read what it is about. There is a lot of text on there btw, but the new site will have more graphical elements and less text for sure. You can click all the pictures for a bigger version btw and every thing you see is computer generated. No actual pictures where used anywhere.