Isotoma builds bespoke applications for Channel 4, Endemol, Mindshare and a roster of pharma and financial clients, all on a Debian and Ubuntu stack that hosting providers were once reluctant to support. RapidSwitch's Maidenhead team built the infrastructure around them.
Meet Isotoma
Founded in 2005 by Doug Winter and Andy Theyers, both veterans of operational roles at the BBC and EMI, Isotoma builds bespoke web, mobile and online applications for the enterprise community.
With 40 staff across offices in York and London, the consultancy works with clients ranging from Channel 4, Endemol and Mindshare to charities like Action Aid and Netbuddy, plus a heavy roster of pharmaceutical and financial sector customers.
What they needed
When Isotoma was getting started, the team wanted to standardise on the Debian operating system, a choice many hosting providers shied away from at the time, viewing it as non-commercial.
Isotoma needed a partner that understood Debian properly and could install and manage it at production scale, with the flexibility to keep evolving the platform as the consultancy's workloads grew.
How we built it
RapidSwitch's Maidenhead technical team was one of the few that understood Debian deeply enough to build and run it as the standard platform. Rather than slot Isotoma into an off-the-shelf hosting product, the team built out the bespoke infrastructure the consultancy needed and refined it as the workloads scaled.
Isotoma was also one of the first Maidenhead clients to deploy Solid State Disk, and RapidSwitch helped the team test Fusion-io for their largest applications. The relationship eventually moved on to Ubuntu, with some of Isotoma's servers now well beyond the scope of any normal hosting agreement.
“They absolutely understood what we wanted and were prepared to create the bespoke infrastructure that we needed.”
Where they are today
Isotoma now runs more than 80 servers in RapidSwitch's Maidenhead data centre, powering everything from simple websites to complex content management systems and applications for enterprise customers.
Andy points to one incident as emblematic of the relationship: when Isotoma needed to reboot their servers to roll out a new OpenSSL build, the Maidenhead team spotted that the new Debian kernel was incompatible with Isotoma's network cards, manually booted the machines into the previous kernel, brought them back up without a hitch, and offered a free PCI network card to anyone who needed one.
