Lifespeed Tech

So I was having problems with the Dell 6448.  It would randomly go into diagnostic mode and disconnect everything.  Like I said, it was an old box and heavily used.  I did a little research and picked up a Netgear XS712T from Amazon.  I installed an Intel X540T2 into each of the R610′s and R510.  I ran the NFS data stores from the R510 to the R610 hosts on the 10 GbE network.  I then created 2 separate distributed switches in esxi, one for the internal network and one for the production network running each one on its own discrete switch and network.  Each host has 4 nics and I split these into dual load balanced nics on each network.

If you haven’t already guessed, I am a fan of VMWare.  I have been using VMWare since 2002 when I used VMWare workstation to create virtual machines for my development servers.  Virtualization has always been a tool that I cannot live without and VMWare makes the best.  They aren’t paying me for this, this is simply my opinion.

I purchased a second Dell R610 from Ebay.com for another $610.00, I put 64 GB of ram into it for $540.00, two more Samsung Pro 850′s and 2 more WD 15K SAS drives ~$2160.00.  This doubled our capacity and made things much more comfortable for me to sleep at night.  Our first MVP was cool.  We could upload images and we had a web based DICOM viewer.  You could manage your profile, upload images, view your gallery.  Everything was asynchronous and we had micro service applications running in the background handling the processing.

About March 2015 I decided that I wanted to pivot with our tech again.  Looking at the types of business that we wanted to conduct, I decided that ASP.net web forms was not an easy development environment for my newest employees, Augustine Walker and Elizabeth Wendling.  Everyone was tripping over each others builds, we were trying to use github with Visual Studio and that was simply a difficult journey for us as a group.

I split everything into its component parts with Liz programming HTML, Javascript and CSS as a single page app.  Augustine and I broke the back out into a kinda RESTful C# webapi IIS application.  I split out everything from SQL into a Redis instance, with the exception of logging and a few other tables.  We still used the C# services with RabbitMQ.

We added a BETA pipeline and added HAProxy load balancers in front of the Nginx webservers and the C# webapi servers.  Quickly consuming the additional processing that I added with the second esxi server.  I knew where I wanted to go and I knew that it would be a much better world for us if I were to build my own budget cloud.  I made the decision to use VMWare as up until this point the hypervisor was about the only thing stable in our organization.  With the wifi problems, switch problems, C# service management, etc, etc I was quickly consumed with managing a tech company.

Money has been tight in our organization, we are pre-money and bootstrapped by an inner circle of investors.  I was able to arm wrestle my partners out of a little bit more cash to finalize the build out of our private cloud.  I purchased 2 more identical Dell R610′s same as the ones previously purchased with Intel X5675′s, they came with 96 GB of ram each for $1100.00.

I debated long and hard on what I wanted to use for a SAN.  I decided on a Dell R510 12 bay server with the same Intel X5675 processors.  This has been an amazing and wonderfully stable box.  I paired it up with FreeNAS 9.3 and 12 Samsung 1 TB SSD’s.  It is like a warm blanket around you on a cold winter morning.  I love this combination, it is fast, it is stable, it is flexible.  I can go on and on.

I put all of the esxi data stores on the R510 on FreeNAS using NFS.  I mapped the NFS drives to each of the hosts.  I load balanced the 4 Nics and we ran for several months on that setup until I started having issues with the Dell 6448 switch.  In its defense it was old and beat up, for some reason it would run fine for random periods of time, then it would go into diagnostic mode and disconnect everything.  Yes even the data stores on the R510.  That was catastrophic in nature and would bring everything down hard.

Early on as I started architecting and building our technology I came to find that the current cloud providers were not offering me what I needed as a startup.  Either their support was lacking or difficult or the prices were exorbitantly high for the level of service that we were getting.  I made my first pivot as tech lead of this company.

I purchased a Dell R610 used from Ebay.com for $600.00.  I installed 64 GB of ram and 2 WD 15000 RPM SAS drives.  I specifically bought a dual 6 core X5675 because I wanted that extra overhead of processing that these fantastic Intel processors gave me.  I bought 2 Samsung Pro 850 1 TB SSD’s.  An old Dell 6448 switch and connected it all up behind our Cox 50 Mb cable modem.  Capital expenditure of:

Dell R610 - $610.00

64 GB ram - $540.00

WD 15K drives - $50.00

Samsung Pro 850′s - $960.00

Dell 6448 - $100.00

$2260.00 plus some shipping.  I immediately purchase the VMware essentials plus kit.  This honestly is the best tool for a small business.  I initially put the dual WD 15K drives into the R610 in raid 1 and installed esxi 5.5 onto the machine.  I put the dual Samsung Pro 850′s in the R610′s bays and ran them no raid, pass through on the Dell Perc 600.  The first virtual machines that I created was a domain controller and developer workstations that they would RDP into.  I added an OpenVPN server that allowed remote connections from my staff’s homes where they would RDP into their virtual machines.

The hardware worked fantastically, we were able to move quickly and keep productive creating our first MVP with a virtual SQL Server, virtual IIS ASP.net web forms application.  We used C# services to handle discrete tasks asynchronously with a RabbitMQ bus.  Being able to quickly add servers with VMWare kept us plugging ahead making decisions quickly and cheaply.  I could spin up as many servers as I wanted to while keeping cloud costs to nothing.

I wouldn’t realize the full savings of running my own cloud until I threw in CI and a testing pipeline of servers.  In February 2015 we had 2 SQL Servers (DEV,QA), 2 IIS Servers (DEV,QA), 2 RabbitMQ Servers (DEV,QA), 2 Redis Server (Dev,QA), 1 Domain Controller, 1 File Server, 1 vCenter Server, 1 CI Server, 1 Jira/Confluence Server, 1 VPN Server, 3 Developer Virtual Machines.

17 servers that on AWS would be ~$100 each per month!  Yes I could consolidate servers and minimize that monthly expense some, but why should I?  I have the ram and the processing.  I was worried about redundancy.  If that 3 year old Dell went bad, everything would come to a stop.  I bought another one…

Hi my name is Chad.  I am Co-founder and CTO of Lifespeed.io.  Recently I made a decision that I wanted to share our technology with the world as a pre-money startup.  What works for us may work for your company.  I hope you enjoy reading about our tech! :)

When my co-founders Nolan Murtha, Matt Good and I decided to build a medical image repository we had all come from specific circumstances that had forced us into taking care of a loved one.  Mine in particular required me to lug around stacks of CDs that had MRI’s and CT scans along with several X-ray images of the spine.  This was a pain and we decided to do something about it to facilitate the transfer of data from doctor and facility to doctor and facility.

I have been building technology for all of my life.  In the form of software, databases, and hardware.  This was a challenge that I was up to and was looking forward to.  Early on for our MVP I decided to go with the Microsoft .NET stack.  Webforms, SQL Server and C#.  Since that day in December 2014 we have pivoted and pushed the limits of that stack.

Early on I had made a decision that I wanted to have a fully automated DevOps environment that would be responsive and elastic to load on the system.  I wanted our systems to be housed on our internal cloud system, due mostly to my experiences with Azure at the time and AWS’ security issues that I was hearing.  I have not regretted this decision in the slightest.

Originally building upon Azure, I experienced multiple problems on login with Azure not being able to find my subscription.  This caused many problems, for one I was not able to manage my virtual instances or storage.  The support was non existent.  Emailing support usually involved a several day wait time and much back and forth through email.  I stopped using Azure early on.

I switched to AWS.  I started by building a SQL Server instance that was pretty small along with an IIS web server.  I put in a Redis server and a RabbitMQ server.  They were pretty small.  All in all I think the monthly estimate for these servers was running approximately $75 a piece.  As you can see with those prices, building anything to scale on AWS will quickly consume you as a startup.