Starting in 1998 we developed a range of communications services for small business. We started with email hosting and website hosting and in 2004 Hosted Voice over IP (VoIP) launched as a business telephony product, 2008 launched a broadband service, providing solid line and direct connection to Gradwell network on which to run Internet Telephony services.

December 2008 saw Gradwell named as Best Business Internet Telephony Provider by the Internet Telephony Service Providers Association.

• Experience of IT Telecommunications an advantage
• Experience of telephone sales an advantage
• Competent in written communication skills
• Good verbal communication skills
• Ability to work on own initiative
• Consistent target achiever
• Has drive/determination/desire/discipline

The salary being offered is £13,000 to £16,500 (based on experience) basic with uncapped commission, OTE in excess of 26k

Application Details:
For more information, please view our website at http://www.gradwell.com or contact Bernie Harman (bernie.harman@gradwell.com, 01225 800 800).

Please apply via email to bernie.harman@gradwell.com, or post to: Gradwell, 26 Cheltenham St, Bath, BA2 3EX.

Our offices are located on the Lower Bristol Road in Bath, a 10 min walk from the train station, next to the Green Park Tavern.

We are continually expanding our sales team, so if you are interested in working with us, please get in contact.

Gradwell is helping Rutland Telecom by porting the phone numbers from BT, and converting them into VoIP phone calls which are then delivered down a dedicated fibre link into the local area.

“Speeds of up to 40Mbps (80x faster than most Lyddington residents are getting now) and greater reliability should be expected. The technology is known as VDSL. We will also be offering symmetrical SDSL services. Future-proofing comes with the possibility that lines can be bonded to achieve higher speeds or services could be delivered via Fibre to the Home (FTTH) as is increasingly the case in Japan, Norway USA etc.

Lyddington will be the first place in the UK to receive Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) coupled with unbundled symmetrical services.

Lyddington is in something of a mobile-reception black hole so we are keen to improve this by offering Quality of Service for VoIP and mobile calls over our network in the near future. Residents will be able to get excellent mobile network coverage from our router in their home.”

For more information please see http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/may/03/digital-britain-rural-communities-broadband and http://www.rutlandtelecom.co.uk/lyddington/index.html

Permanent Web Developers – Two Positions

Gradwell is an award-winning provider of Internet communications services. We work with UK based SMEs delivering a range of unique Internet telephony, broadband, website hosting and email management services.

We are bucking the current economic trend and developing our developing our fast growing and exciting business. We as part of our rapid growth we are creating two new Web Development roles for PHP web-app developers. We’d like you to help us.

We are the current holders of the ITSPA Best UK Business Telephony award (2008). We also won a number of awards in 2004 and 2005 in various DTI schemes including “Best use of Broadband” for our VoIP product and “Best Teleworking Company” and “Best Online Customer Service” for both of which we were highly commended.

About The Role

We have two vacancies for full-time web developers, starting in June 2009, as part of our Engineering Team (currently 6 people).

The roles will focus on developing control panels using PHP (mainly using the Symfony framework) and MySQL through working on projects to develop our products, internal customer service systems and debugging and diagnosing problems with our existing code base working with our customer service teams.

You will need to have a good familiarity with computer networks, broadband, Linux based systems and to be a confident programmer using PHP and MySQL. Experience with Asterisk and other VoIP services will be a plus.

You will be enthusiastic about new technology, eager to learn, and will hold a degree in Computer Science or equivalent.

Prior experience of the ISP and Telecoms Sectors will be highly beneficial as our core business is selling outsourced telecoms, email and web hosting services to IT consultants, designers, media agencies and other small and medium sized businesses.

Salary is up to 20,000 pa, including generous benefits after a 3 month probationary period which includes Pension, Healthcare, Broadband and a VoIP phone/line.

Our team of 30 is located in the beautiful city of Bath, this role is full time (37.5 hours a week, flexible), office based (26 Cheltenham St, Bath, BA2 3EX ) and you must have permission to work in the UK.

We will accept CVs from agencies subject to fixed finder’s fee of £1000.00. We have already completed our recruitment consultant selection process for this year.

Application Details

Please view our website for more background information at http://www.gradwell.com and contact Stuart Herbert, Head of Engineering, for an informal discussion (http://twitter.com/stuherbert, stuart.herbert@gradwell.com, 01225 800 897).

Please apply by sending a covering letter, details of current salary and your CV via email to Stuart Herbert.

This position is now closed.

We are developing our developing our fast growing and exciting business. We’d like you to help us. Gradwell is an award-winning provider of Internet communications services. We work with UK based SMEs delivering a range of unique Internet telephony, broadband, website hosting and email management services.

New Business Manager £60K OTE + benefits

We are bucking the current economic trend and as part of our rapid growth we are creating a new role as: New-Business Manager.

You’ll be a key player, responsible for: day-to-day management of our New-Business Team, finding new sales from our direct customer base, managing all aspects of the direct customer recruitment process – including prospect marketing and lead generation.

You’ll be an enthusiastic, dynamic and experienced business development professional, with an understanding of pipeline management systems/reporting, sales management techniques and marketing fundamentals. You’re also likely to have managed a sales team to both meet and exceed targets. And you won’t mind making the tea from time to time.

If you feel you’re up to the job, please complete the form below to download an information pack. We want to know why you’re right for the job; your current remuneration; and don’t forget to attach your CV.

We’re located in the beautiful city of Bath, this role is office based and you must have permission to work in the UK.

CVs from agencies accepted subject to fixed finder’s fee of £1000.00

Please complete the form to be emailed our applicant information pack:

Gradwell, the leading and award-winning one-stop internet business provider for the UK’s SME sector, announced today it has launched the “Spoken through Spinvox” Voice-2-Text service for its Hosted PBX Platform.

“We will show how you can ‘read’ your voicemail messages via text or email,” explained Peter Gradwell, MD of the Bath-based company which, in December 2008, won an award from ITSPA (Internet Service Providers Association) for Best Business VoIP.

“The Voice-2-Text service helps businesses convert their voicemail audio into text, to be delivered by SMS text message or by email – whichever format the customer chooses,” he added.

Voice-2-Text, a bespoke innovation by Gradwell, utilises the Spinvox Voice Message Conversion System (VMCS) and:

• Enables ‘on the move’ or remote employees to keep in touch with any voicemail message received on their office phone with ease
• Allows voicemail messages to be easily prioritised, forwarded and/or archived – no longer stuck in the voicemail inbox.

“With this innovative service we are stealing a march on our competitors,” commented Peter. “Spoken through Spinvox Voice -2-Text will benefit users significantly and shows that we are really motoring forward in advancing UK Business VoIP” added Peter.

“We’re pleased to work with Gradwell to offer their customers a truly unified communications service, helping British businesses save time and money” says Christina Domecq, CEO and Co-founder, SpinVox.

Gradwell, the leading and award-winning one-stop internet business provider for the UK’s SME sector, announced today it will be demonstrating its leading-edge update of Microsoft’s Office Communication Server (OCS) 2007.

“We will show how OCS provides UM, Voice Communications and tight integration of telephony with existing Exchange, Outlook and Microsoft CRM environments, as a bolt-on product,” said Peter Gradwell, MD of Gradwell.

“Our version can increase the efficiency of businesses communications.”

“The demo will comprise a fully-working Microsoft OCS platform integrated with Gradwell SIP Trunking and Hosted PBX products,” he added.

The service will be demonstrated on Gradwell’s stand 148 at London Olympia’s UC 2009, 11 and 12 March.

“The release in 2007 by Microsoft was a huge step forward. But now, with further progress elsewhere, in my view it requires updating - it has become a cumbersome beast,” commented Peter.

“Until now, it has not talked easily to a standard VoIP platform.”

Unlike other IP-PBX systems, OCS is not self-contained. So customers can use it either as a Voicemail service (eg: linked using a SIP trunk to the normal Gradwell PBX) or used with telephones (both software “Microsoft communicator” and Polycom hardware phones) directly attached to OCS, as a simple PBX.

SIP trunks can be used to link it with a full PBX, to gain fully-featured control over call routing.

Gradwell has built a Hosted PBX solution used by thousands of UK SME customers: they benefit from not having to negotiate a costly onsite PBX, and benefit from zero-cost calls between sites.

Plus they have access to extensions in multiple locations, inbound numbers with different area codes and powerful voicemail, voice menu, hunt groups, call queuing.

“So in a nutshell we have built a hosted OCS gateway, which can be deployed for any customer to permit interconnection with a normal SIP network: we can demonstrate phone calls, voicemail and the presence functionality of the OCS system,” said Peter.

We are the current holders of the ITSPA Best UK Business Telephony award.  We also won a number of awards in 2004 and 2005 in various DTI schemes including “Best use of Broadband” for our VoIP product and “Best Teleworking Company” and “Best Online Customer Service” for both of which we were highly commended.

Three 12 month industrial placements for 2009/10

We have three vacancies for 12 month industrial placements, starting June 2009.

The industrial placement will focus on development projects using PHP (mainly the Symfony framework) and MySQL through working on projects to develop our products, internal customer service systems and become familar with debugging and diagnosing customer problems through working with the support team.

You will need to have a good familiarity with computer networks, broadband, linux based systems and be a confident programmer using PHP and MySQL. Experience with Asterisk and other VoIP services will be a plus.

You will be enthusiastic about new technology, eager to learn and currently studying towards a Computer Science degree (or equivalent).

Prior experience of the Internet, IT and Telecoms Sectors will be highly beneficial as our core business is selling outsourced telecoms, email and web hosting services to IT consultants, designers, media agencies and other small and medium sized technology based businesses.

Salary is likely to be circa 12,000 pa, including benefits (free broadband and a VoIP phone/line until the completion of your degree) for a 5 day week.

This is a full time position (37.5 hours, flexible), reporting to our Head of Engineering, based at our offices at 26 Cheltenham St, Bath, BA2 3EX.

We are a team of approximately 30 staff (6 developers), mostly between 20 and 30 years of age.

Application Details

For more information, please view our website at http://www.gradwell.com or contact Stuart Herbert (stuart.herbert@gradwell.net, 01225 800 897).

Please apply via email to Stuart Herbert, or post to: gradwell dot com Limited, 26 Cheltenham St, Bath, BA2 2EX.

Closing Date 30th April 2009.

These positions are now closed.

We invite you to come see these great services in action. While you’re there, feel free to discuss any of our products from our award-winning Hosted VoIP to our fast and reliable Business Broadband with our staff.

Unified Communications 2009
National Hall, Olympia, London
Wednesday 11th and Thursday 12th March

For more information about UC09, please visit www.ucexpo.co.uk.

Hope to see you there.

Kind regards,

Peter Gradwell

Needing to deliver important health services, Berkshire-based charity Ostomy Lifestyle’s advice to stoma surgery patients offered on its 0800 telephone lines must be dispensed with 100% efficiency.

The medical conditions that lead to stoma surgery affect people of any age, gender, profession or race. The charity was established in 2007, in response to the lack of accessible information about ostomy issues.

The charity seeks to empower people, enabling them to make informed choices and to communicate frankly about all aspects of the surgery. “We are working to raise awareness of ostomy topics among the medical profession and the general public,” explains the charity’s Neil Basil. “Having a stoma should not be a barrier to leading a full life.”

He and his 16 colleagues offer impartial advice, and aim to inspire callers that barriers can be overcome.

The charity produces a regular newsletter, information sheets, and a website.

Advice given on the telephone complements existing healthcare services, to reduce the challenges that patients have to confront head-on.

“Our support services must be accessible to people of all backgrounds – so using our telephone system is perfect for this,” says Neil Basil. Someone can call needing basic stoma care advice and have their problems solved quickly, without needing to visit a hospital or local GP.”

Analysis and history of Gradwell’s VoIP service:

“We were still establishing Ostomy Lifestyle in 2007, and moving into new premises - so were looking for a solution that would adapt and grow with us,” explains Neil Basil. Gradwell’s advice and ability to provide what the charity required was well-documented and explained.

“Most of our staff work at our office in Reading – but some of our volunteers and Trustees benefit from the flexibility that working from home offers. We are now more likely to conduct meetings over the telephone, taking advantage of teleconferencing facilities.”

Helpline staff spend their time responding to queries from callers, as well as researching bowel and bladder topics and conducting training courses for nurses, support groups, and medical industry companies.

“VoIP worked very well from the start for us, once basic glitches were resolved,” comments Neil Basil.

Calls to Gradwell’s support team have been entirely satisfactory, he added.

“VoIP has given us the flexibility we need; it allows us capacity and functionality that we would otherwise not achieve.

“VoIP is a very technical service - so it needs a fair bit of involvement from our own staff; but we are learning all the time and Gradwell’s support staff resolve any problems quickly.”

Please see www.ostomylifestyle.org

Starting from Monday 19th January, core Gradwell services (email, web hosting and VoIP) suffered from repeated outages.  Each outage lasted several hours at a time, and all customers were affected.

The team have now completed all planned work to improve the stability of our services, and are now monitoring the situation to determine whether any further emergency work is required.  I apologise for the disruption caused by these outages, and want to reassure our customers that this continues to be my top priority.

In this blog post, my Technical Manager, Stuart and I want to explain to our customers what went wrong, and the changes we have made to put it right.

Ultimately, the root cause is technical equipment failure, but our design decisions have exacerbated the situation. We have received, and are grateful for, the large amount of customer feedback and have identified opportunities to improve our communication, operational process and the management of both our operations and customer support teams.

Some of these improvements have been implemented immediately, others will take a little longer. However, Gradwell is a well supported business, by customers, our staff (and even our bankers!) and there is no question that we cannot progress forward and work with customers to rectify circumstances as required and reconfirm our position as a leading provider of Internet Services to UK Small Business.

Stuart explains below in more detail what went wrong and how we’ve taken action to prevent it re-occurrence. We caused severe disruption to all, both customers and staff and we sincerely regret our failure to deliver excellent service in the last few weeks.

Yours sincerely

Peter Gradwell

Technical Overview

Gradwell relies heavily on server virtualisation, using the industry-leading VMWare ESX platform.  All of our services run on the ESX platform, and rely on virtualised storage running on dedicated networked storage servers.

On Monday 19th January, we began to experience multiple issues with two of our networked storage servers - a combination of faulty hardware and trying to work the networked storage servers too hard.  These simultaneous issues caused the networked storage servers to hang, which in turn caused all of the ESX servers to hang.  During each individual outage, we recovered services by resetting the networked storage servers and then resetting all of the ESX servers.  Regrettably, the process of rebooting all of these servers in the correct sequence took several hours to complete from start to finish, causing our services to be unavailable for extended periods of time.

Gradwell has addressed these issues by:

1. The faulty hardware has been either replaced or removed from service.
2. We have purchased and installed five additional HP storage servers partly to replace the failed hardware, partly to reduce the demands on the remaining storage servers, and partly to ensure better redundancy against future failures.

We apologise for the length of time it has taken to complete the work to address these issues.  This was due to the lead times for purchasing, testing and installing the new storage servers.

We apologise for the inconvenience caused by these outages, and want to reassure our customers that we will be continuing to improve to our infrastructure to ensure we do not have future outages like this.

If you’d like the full technical details of the faults and how they have been addressed, please read on for more details.

Gradwell Architecture prior to January 09

In December 2007, Gradwell made the strategic decision to migrate all products and services to run in a virtualised environment.  We chose VMWare ESX as the virtualisation platform, as it is the clear market leader and is backed by a multi-billion dollar US corporation. Until December 2008, this migration had proceeded successfully and given customers improved stability, performance and protection against hardware failure.

In a virtualised environment, physical servers run VMWare’s ESX software, and are known as hosts.  Each host in turn runs multiple virtual servers, known as guests or virtual machines. The guests aren’t stored on the disk drives inside the host servers; instead they are stored on dedicated networked storage servers.  This is best practice, and is intended to make it easier to get services back up and running when an individual host suffers a hardware failure.

Gradwell Architecture Circa January 2009

Gradwell’s environment in January relied on four network storage servers.  Every ESX host had access to all of the networked storage servers.  iSCSI-1, iSCSI-2 and th-vfile-1 are smaller units, and are connected to our core network via a single 1 Gigabit ethernet link.  iSCSI-3 is a much more substantial unit, and is connected to our core network via four 1 Gigabit ethernet  links.  All four network storage servers share their hard drives with the ESX hosts using the iSCSI network protocol.

As events have proven, this architecture was vulnerable to a number of issues.  Here’s a list of the issues that occurred, with details of how they have been addressed.

Issue 1: Network Storage Server “iSCSI-3″ Network Unbalancing

On Sunday 17th January, we performed substantial maintenance on our ESX platform, upgrading the majority of the HP DL380’s (the host servers) with four additional CPU cores and the latest firmware.  As each ESX host was powered back on, the majority of the ESX hosts started communicating with the “iSCSI-3″ Network Storage server down the same ethernet link, instead of traffic being balanced over all four network links.

The unbalancing was caused by a bug in VMWare that failed to persist the network multiple-path configuration.

This unbalanced network traffic eventually caused the disk controller in iSCSI-3 to time out, causing VMWare ESX to crash.  This unbalancing was corrected once it was uncovered.

Issue 2: Network Storage Server “iSCSI-2″ Failures

During the same maintenance on Sunday 17th January, a number of ESX hosts were unable to reconnect to iSCSI-2 after being rebooted.  We made the decision to transfer a number of guests onto iSCSI-3 to avoid further disruption to our services.  This left iSCSI-2 still in service, but running with reduced demand.

Over the following week, we moved all guests off of iSCSI-2, so that we could reset iSCSI-2 to clear the glitch and update its software to the same version used on iSCSI-3.  iSCSI-2 was then brought back into service by Saturday 24th Jan, and guests were moved back onto iSCSI-2 to relieve the load on iSCSI-3.

That proved to be a mistake, as iSCSI-2 then hung on several occasions, causing VMWare ESX to crash.  The decision was taken to move all guests off of iSCSI-2 once more, but because of its unreliability that move took over a week to achieve.

Once empty, iSCSI-2 was taken out of service, and disconnected from our VMWare ESX cluster.

Issue 3: Network Storage Server “iSCSI-3″ Failures

iSCSI-2 was brought back into service because we believed at the time that iSCSI-3 was still being overloaded, which was causing it to hang and therefore causing VMWare ESX to crash.  This turned out to be an incorrect deduction on our part.  The real culprit turned out to be a faulty disk drive in iSCSI-3.

Early on, we had noticed that one of the disk drives in iSCSI-3 was reporting errors, and had started the process to remove the faulty disk drive from the RAID array so that it could be replaced.  Unfortunately, this process never completed, and it was iSCSI-3’s attempts to read data from the faulty drive that repeatedly caused iSCSI-3 to hang, which also made it difficult for us to diagnose the fault correctly.

The failed hard drive was physically removed from iSCSI-3, and the RAID array was then successfully rebuilt.

Issue 4: ESX Cluster Vulnerability

Although individual failures of iSCSI-2 and iSCSI-3 caused problems in their own right, we discovered the hard way that the entire ESX cluster was vulnerable to secondary problems.  Whenever iSCSI-2 or iSCSI-3 hung, all of the VMWare ESX hosts that they were connected to became unstable and had to be rebooted.  Once the host was recovered, we then had the laborious task of starting up all of the virtual machines that had been running on the host.  This recovery process took several hours each time, greatly prolonging the  outages for our customers.

We addressed this in four ways:

1. Instead of every ESX host being connected to all of our storage, we reconfigured the hosts so that (with a couple of exceptions) they only connected to some of our storage.  This way, a failure in either iSCSI-2 or iSCSI-3 would no longer crash all of our ESX hosts, and we’d be able to restore service quicker.
2. We purchased a number of HP servers and turned them into additional storage servers, so that we could take the faulty iSCSI-2 out of service and reduce the demand on iSCSI-3.
3. Instead of using iSCSI on the new storage servers, we switched to using NFS instead.  Our research indicated that NFS would prove more reliable than iSCSI, and our testing proved that the new storage servers would perform better using NFS.
4. In the past, we’ve split the guests for our services (broadband, email, web hosting, voip) evenly across the four storage units.  The problems in January proved that this approach magnifies the impact of any one issue, which was not what we intended at the time.  We’ve taken the new storage servers, and used them as dedicated storage for specific services - services that are clustered to be more resilient.  If any one of these storage server fails, the impact will be isolated to a subset of our services, and should not be customer-visible.

Gradwell Architecture mid-February 2009

With all of these changes made, Gradwell’s architecture has evolved to look like this:

iSCSI-1, iSCSI-3 and th-vfile-1 remain as general-purpose storage for our ESX cluster.  Later in the year, we will introduce more dedicated storage to ensure improved resilience against future hardware failure.

th-vfile-2 and th-vfile-3 have been dedicated to providing storage for our email queues.  Our email queues create a lot of disk i/o; moving them onto dedicated storage will ensure that they cannot overload any of our other storage devices.

th-vfile-5, th-vfile-6 and th-vfile-7 have been dedicated to providing storage for our web hosting service.  (Customer home directories remain on lon-file-3 and lon-file-4).  We have six PHP4 servers (two on each storage server) as well as six PHP5 servers (again, two on each storage server), sat behind six Squid proxies (two on each storage server).  If any one storage server fails, we should be able to maintain service using the other two.

Current Status

At the time of writing, we have completed all the work we believe is necessary to stabilise our services. We are monitoring the situation to determine whether or not any additional emergency work is required.  We won’t be giving the ‘all-clear’ until we have enjoyed at least two weeks of stability.

Future Work

We are determined to ensure that our customers do not suffer this level of instability in our services in future.  From a strategic point of view, we will move away from large lumps of general-purpose storage and continue to introduce smaller groups of storage that is dedicated for specific Gradwell services.  We’ll also continue to evolve our services to be more resilient to the failure of individual storage servers.