Our Technologies
We're strong believers in openness and keeping the customer informed. So as part of that philosophy we've put together this page to give you a taste of what technologies we use and why.
Web Applications
Most of our sites are situated on one of 4 main servers at various places in the UK. We've also got 3 development servers at our Bromsgrove office for well......erm - developing!
Hardware
- 4Eyes & Claymore(Debian) - Two located in Studley which is about 30miles away from Birmingham in the West Midlands.
- KIT(Debian) - So named for it's KIT-like RAID-card lights this server is one of our key web servers.
- Baggins(Debian) - This is one of the the 2 backup management servers we have running 24/7. If this fails the secondary kicks in and we're notified via text. Thats just the backups - imagine what happens if we lose a live server!
- Jumbo(Windows) - Our main Windows server which manages one of our clients busy CRM service.
- Dedi(Debian) - Based in the London Docklands and hosting many our company websites.
- Why we use Debian so much?
Languages
We like to use the right tool for the job and so we've got a range of languages we bring to bare dependent on the task at hand.
- PHP5 - This is our primary web development language with many of our websites and applications built on it.
- Ruby - We like to use this great scripting language for our web and data mining work because of its libraries and support such as Hpricot and scRubyt.
- Python - Is being used mainly as our workhorse language to carry out server maintenance tasks, monitoring and backups.
Telephony
For all of our telephony systems we use the soft-switch PBX Asterisk and have 4 of these currently active and another 2 on stand-by should anything unexpected occur. Each of these servers can handle hundreds of lines in both ISDN and using VoIP across their dedicated lines.
We're proud of our Asterisk cluster and what we've made it perform. In fact in 2 years we've had only 2 unplanned outtages and those each lasted 15 seconds - about the time it takes for the server to restart itself.
We've dont a lot of work integrating Asterisk into PHP using the built-in AMI and AGI. Its this integration we've put to great use in our EBOSS system. We've put together a case study on how Essential Loans have maximised their use of this technology.