Advanced Data Center
We invest in some of the best technology and equipment available. The result is a secure and reliable server environment.
The Network
Our network architecture is a complete Cisco product and is a Cisco Certified Network. We utilize fully redundant Cisco 7500 (redundant routers and redundant cards within the router) at the core and state of the art 3550 L3 switch / routers as border routers. To further maximize redundancy we utilize distributed 2924 XL EN switches to ensure that single chasis failure will have minimum downtime effects on our servers - unlike many of our competition who aggregate hundreds of servers in a single chasis based switch like the 6500 or 5500 which if it fails its cpu or power - it takes down many customers. This approach gives us maximum power failure protection and switch failure protection to distribute the load and risk.We also utilize VLANS to prevent customer IP space hijacking and conflicts. By keeping our network as flat as possible - we minimize route convergence and latency in the backbone and speed the packets to the best provider through BGP4 on the core.
We actively monitor our routers for key factors including temperature, cpu and memory utilization and monitor our connections for transit latency and uptime. We are notified immediately in the event of a process going out of tolerance or an outage through our automated systems which allows us to respond quickly with corrective action.
The Backbone
Our network is fully meshed and redundant with 6 major backbone providers. Our current network consists of a gigabit (1000mbit) to Abovenet, Allegiance, Aleron, Global Crossing, IBIS7, and Telia. By having providers with a larger burst capacity we're able to handle DoS attacks better than many of our competitors that have chosen many smaller pipes. This is because a DoS attack will many times concentrate itself on one inbound or outbound connection and can swamp it if it is only a 100 mbit or an oc3. We do not provision less than GIG circuits on the backbone any more. It also allows us plenty of room to fail back and forth from provider to provider without regards to where the traffic is going to prefer since any one of our links has far sufficient size to handle all of our traffic.