Know who you are dealing with...
The head behind Virtastic, Carsten, has been freelance Systems Administrator (Linux) since 1999. His first contract was with the biggest gaming portal and game server provider in Germany (later bought by Axel Springer, Germany's most important publishing company). In 2003 he founded a service-focused ISP company, which planned and implemented managed servers and small clusters for SMB, based on Linux, FreeBSD, and other Open Source products. Germany's major DVD and movie portal became his customer soon after.
His company and the one of a business partner were later transformed into one company, where Carsten became Technical Director and share holder. He was setting his own focus on maintaining and extending the customer base by providing outstanding quality and technical support himself -- quite successfully.
In the end of 2007, the company was responsible for a triple-digit amount of managed servers, was maintaining more than 20k domain names, selling SSL certificates, had a big number of repeat-customers for hands-on services like Linux/BSD Systems Administration and incident-responses. The company hardly ever advertised. Word of mouth was the key success factor. The company consisted of Carsten, another Director, and a few employees. The company is still existing and growing.
In January 2008 Carsten resigned as Director and relocated from Germany to London to take on new challenges. First, he worked with London's biggest B2B-only luxury real estate portal in order to get their infrastructure ready for further expansion to the European market. His responsibilites included increasing reliability, restructuring parts of the network, and removing single points of failure.
Later that year, he was hired by an educational TV channel in London, who needed their infrastructure re-designed entirely. Big parts have been virtualised to allow for quick expansion and high flexibility. Moreover, Carsten introduced reliable source code and software release management, and a solid OpenVPN implementation. Last but not least he built a virtualised replica of the production infrastructure to allow for best possible QA prior to software releases.
Since 1999, Carsten has stayed in touch with many of his customers and suppliers, which Virtastic will benefit from. Even while having been employed for two years in London in order to get settled, he has still maintained servers, planned and implemented infrastructure for previous and new customers. In late 2009 Carsten decided to form Virtastic Limited in London, taking benefit from his vast experience and valuable contacts in both Germany and the UK. Virtastic's first big challenge was the implementation of on-the-fly video subtitling for the TV channel he was last working with, while introducing the heavily stress-tested and robust vCluster to customers, who hopefully spread the word. :-)
Carsten has had the opportunity for Virtastic to make a real difference to a couple of businesses since early 2010, amongst them companies who deliver real-time video manipulation, global publishing companies, and a couple of other businesses in different market sectors.
If Carsten isn't looking for further service improvements, his spare time revolves around his wife, meeting friends, and making ambitious future plans. Carsten likes to play Snooker, although he doesn't play well, and chess, which he is slightly better at. :-)
Every now and then, he shares a few of his encounters or some bits and pieces of his experience, writing blogs and tutorials, or tweeting. Feel free to link or follow, if you are interested in getting to know Carsten and/or his company better.
