What is vCluster (version 2 beta)?
By Joe Gardiner Wednesday, 2nd May 2012
The CatN team and I have been working on the vCluster product for quite a while now.
The last time I checked, including vCluster 1.0, it has actually been for 2 years. Never fear though, we are rapidly approaching product launch and are in the final stages of development. As this mile stone draws closer the team and I have decided to put together a series of blog posts explaining the new vCluster version 2 beta, the development process we have gone through to get to this point, and to deliver a tour of the new control panel and product / packaging model.
This is the first post, and as Head of Product, I have written it to address the commercial and product feature elements of vCluster 2.0 from the user’s perspective.
Posted in Product Development, Updates, vCluster | 2 Comments »
Why I don’t use (long term) product roadmaps
By Joe Gardiner Thursday, 8th March 2012
I don’t use product roadmaps because I am not psychic.
Product roadmaps certainly have their value in determining an initial path in the early days of a product, but as soon as you start interacting with customers / users (which arguably should be straight away) the product roadmap becomes redundant. Don’t get me wrong, in some companies a roadmap is very valuable, but in CatN we work in an Agile way and defining the plan for a product over a two year period does not fit in with this methodology.
Posted in Product Development | No Comments »
Value for money: one year on
By Joe Gardiner Friday, 3rd February 2012
At the end of June last year I published a report entitled ‘Does the UK Government get value for money?‘ which analysed the COI’s ‘Reporting on Progress 2009/10‘ document. The publication listed key website metrics such as page views, hosting expenditure, and page requests for departmental customer facing websites, not backend applications. Using these metrics I was able to calculate figures such as the cost per request for each department and specific departmental websites in order to analyse performance.
Following this report there was a reasonable amount of press interest, it also formed the basis of my Innovation Launchpad presentations which took me to the final stage (and Downing Street) as one of ten. Now the Cabinet Office has published the 2010/2011 edition of the report it gives me the opportunity to revisit my initial findings and see whether or not if, after a year of lobbying, the UK Government’s new ICT strategy does in fact get value for money.
Posted in Government Hosting | 1 Comment »
Introducing SocialBizzle.com
By Joe Gardiner Tuesday, 31st January 2012
I met with Lee and Ali last year to talk about SocialBizzle.com and how CatN vCluster could help their business grow not only through stable, fast hosting, but also through a partnership with CatN. My objective is to build an eco-system of innovative, creative businesses who can offer additional services to CatN customers. If you check out our partner page you can see some of the people we are working with catn.com/partners. SocialBizzle certainly fit the bill, and we’re currently discussing how we can work together.
Posted in Partners | No Comments »
An apology for this weekends downtime
By Joe Gardiner Wednesday, 2nd November 2011
Following on from our Senior System Architect, Mark Sutton’s, post (NFS Outages) I would like to describe our plan moving forwards, and how we are going to react to the issues over the weekend.
On Friday our NFS server that powers vCluster malfunctioned causing all our web facing servers to lock up, waiting for disk IO. This caused downtime that began at approximately 16:10, Friday afternoon. This downtime went on intermittently throughout the weekend with services not reliably available until Monday lunchtime.
Of course this is unacceptable so let me begin by apologising to all our customers and vCluster users who were affected by this down time. We have worked tirelessly throughout the weekend to restore normal service but it is clear this is just the beginning.
To restore your faith in our service it is important to understand what went wrong from a technical perspective and I hope that Mark’s post will give those who are technically inclined some comfort that we have identified and fixed the root cause. We also want to assure you from a strategic perspective by showing what we have put in place to allay any concerns you might have in this area.
Posted in Service Announcements, vCluster | 3 Comments »