Sphere: powerful all-rounders

Building on the foundations of our original Sphere server, we now deliver and support a range of modern server products and internet telephony systems for small offices, workgroups, data hosting (cloud solutions), videographics designers and (post) production teams.

MicroSphere is the latest addition to our range. It uses the same underlying Sphere system that's been proven and continuously developed for almost ten years now, but makes it available at an entirely new price point (£995 SRP) - head to head with "competitor" solutions that started off as cheap desktop computers. Would you trust all your important data to something like that? We wouldn't!

SuperSphere has been around for a few years now. It's optimised for large, fast storage. Up to 36 storage hard disks, arranged in RAID6 or RAID50 configurations to your specification, together with a RAID mirrored independent operating system disk set up and SSD write caching, and we can deliver well over 100TB storage capacity. Then we add in all our standard OfficeSphere features, and make the whole system available to other machines via a combination of 2 x 10Gbe ethernet and 2 x 1Gbe network interfaces.

Couple SuperSphere with high capacity managed switch(es), use superfast 10Gbe connections to your specialist graphics/video workstations and normal gigabit networking to the rest of your studio/office, and up to 16 processor cores will shift vast amounts of data - fast! More than fast enough to share today's high resolution video assets - straight out of the box. No complex setup, no mega-expensive SAN, just wire it up and work.

With every Sphere server and our fixed price annual support contract (first year included in purchase price), you get all the help you'll need, patches and updates remotely applied to your system (with no downtime), and a security backup of its configuration etc. on our systems. So should we ever need to restore, you get your system back, fast. And there are no other licencing costs, no extra per user charges at all, either this year or thereafter.

Why should servers look boring? At the end of 2005 we took RocketSphere to MacExpo in London.

Conceived to be proudly shown off in your office but with similar (or better) specs than most conventional servers it offered funky, alternative, looks.

Designed to run virtually silently you didn't need a cupboard full of hot, noisy kit any more! Yes, that aerial is a built-in wifi base station! Kudos to Graham England for his design.

With its RAID disk array, and multiple CPU cores it was an awesome 5Tb office server. That's not that bad a spec even today!

Sphere Servers Ltd. has been producing server solutions for the past nine years. Our first server, which we simply called "Sphere", reflected previous experience with the Cobalt Qube. Cobalt can claim the credit for first putting a simple web interface on top of a complex linux server, making the operation of these systems easy for everyone, not just rocket scientists! So we went one better and gave this ease-of-use not only to one administrator, but to every user of our servers.