Spark::red 2012 Review and 2013 Preview

New Relic provides performance metrics for all user request as well as application monitoring, troubleshooting, root cause diagnosis, and production Java thread profiling. In addition, New Relic provides pro-active planning tools such as alerts, capacity planning, scalability analysis, database usage analysis, Apdex scoring, and deployment history. More than 25,000 customers around the world use New Relic to ensure superior service for their critical apps.

With its own dedicated fiber-optic infrastructure and connections to more than 950 last-mile networks around the world, Limelight Networks has the ability to drive high-performance media playback for audiences everywhere.

Through partnering with Limelight, Spark::red offers Limelight Deliver and Acceleration services that are designed to accelerate rich media delivery to huge audiences and enhance their engagement with the content. As a result you can reduce the load on your own infrastructure while increasing website performance and revenue.

Blocking attacks at the network edge, CloudFlare keeps your website safe from threats, including DDOS. Using its distributed network, CloudFlare speeds up websites through static asset delivery, web content optimization and dynamic content acceleration.

CloudFlare was recognized by the World Economic Forum as a Technology Pioneer, named the Most Innovative Network & Internet Technology Company of the Year for 2011 and 2012 by the Wall Street Journal, and ranked among the world’s 50 most innovative companies of 2012 by Fast Company.

Spark::red, as an affiliate partner of Digicert, can order and manage your SSL certificates for you. We can help you decide whether you need WildCard, MultiDomain Unified Communications certificates, Extended Validation, or a combination of these to effectively secure your site and maintain PCI compliance.

Director of Support

Stephen has over thirteen years experience as a QA Engineer, Infrastructure Specialist and all-around troubleshooter with e-commerce, healthcare, financial, and security software companies. He has worked at ATG in Cambridge MA as an Automation Engineer and more recently at Spindrift BV, an ATG implementation consultancy based in the UK and The Netherlands. With Spindrift, Stephen oversaw the customer support system and development environment infrastructure for Site Builder, a page rendering framework built on top of ATG’s Business Control Center. In addition, he provided QA and deployment consulting services to numerous Spindrift clients including Tesco Plc, Bol.com, Shop Direct Group, Fruugo, Philips Nederland and Technische Unie.

Director of Systems Engineering

Keith is an open source systems engineer from the greater Boston area. His focal points are systems administration, virtualization, configuration management, automation, storage, networking, provisioning and all things GNU/Linux. Keith has extensive experience in the design, implementation and support of IT systems infrastructure in environments ranging from small web systems to large scale compute clusters and everything in between. By focusing on building and maintaining robust system infrastructure, Keith helps Spark::red to provide stability, security and automation to its clients.

You can find more information about Keith’s work on his tech blog at http://backdrift.org

Sys Admin

Ben is a Linux systems administrator with experience managing a large-scale infrastructure, most recently at a prominent competitor to Amazon EC2.  Designing and deploying systems that are both scalable and usable, Ben is focused on open source and GNU/Linux based solutions and has significant experience managing the physical infrastructure behind “the cloud”. Ben brings to Spark::red a deep understanding of server internals and strength in troubleshooting though many layers of the stack.