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Network Information
Our state of the art data center is located in
Greenwood Village, Colorado.
Data Center Features:
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Redundant Connections to several Tier 1
providers
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Multiple redundant power back-up
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HVAC, Separate cooling zones with over 60 tons
of cooling
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Multiple Levels of Security
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Multiple levels of Fire suppression
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FM-200 gas-based fire suppression system
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Multiple redundant Power back-up
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Continuous, uninterruptible power supply
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Environmental Monitoring Systems maintain
constant temperature and humidity
Routers and Equipment
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Hewlett-Packard Gigabit Ethernet Switches
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Routers have multiple connections to our
backbone
Connectivity:
Currently there is a full 2000 mbps (2GiG-E
connections) supplying our Data Center.
In OC fiber line terms that’s close to 3- OC-12
lines and 1- OC-3 line.
The use of non-blocking gigabit devices throughout
the network ensures regional latency of a few milliseconds or less,
suitable for the most demanding delay-sensitive traffic.
Use of redundant fiber rings ensures network
reliability and availability.
The data center has connections to many different
Internet backbones including Qwest, AT&T, Level3, Genuity, Time
Warner and Yipes.
By connecting to multiple tier 1 backbones, the data
can be distributed through many sources.
This architectural design also means that the
network connections are not dependent upon an single Internet
backbone.
Thus when problems occur, traffic rerouting is
automatic, thereby ensuring the integrity of the network and
continued access for our high-speed servers.
This takes the term “multi-homing” to a whole
new level.
Presently bandwidth utilization is 5% during peak
traffic times.
Therefore, the network is very flexible. If
one of the backbone connections experiences problems, the traffic
can simply be rerouted over other paths, thereby ensuring that users
receive fast access times to sites hosted on our network.
In addition, the network runs Border Gate Protocol
(BGP4). BGP is used at a provider with more than one access point to
the Internet. It helps create a truly redundant network. In fact, in
an ideal situation, a lease line failure should result in the BGP
routing session to close on the bad leased line and the router on a
working circuit should then begin to accept the additional traffic.
In other words, traffic from a down circuit is redistributed across
other circuits, thereby maintaining network integrity.
Providers that are multi-homed and correctly setup
can actually be more reliable than a single backbone provider
because they have multiple paths to multiple providers.
Internal Connectivity
A provider's local area network is not often enough
being seen as a point of latency.
The two main sources of latency for a full-time
Internet connection are the user's local area network and the
Internet provider's local area network. Ether switches and high-end
Juniper routers anchor the local network.
This top-of-the-line network hardware ensures that
data requests get to their destination and back out of the network
as fast as possible.
We use ether switches instead of hubs because of
their speed and their security capabilities.
Whereas only one computer plugged into a hub can
talk at one time, all the machines connected to a switch can talk at
the same time.
This means more data can travel through a switch and
each server acts as its own node on the network.
Furthermore, since each server is its own node
on the network, it is difficult for hackers to trace data packets
with sensitive information (i.e. passwords) to a particular server.
Servers on the network do not share a single path
(T3). Instead, the servers are connected into a high-speed Ethernet
switch. This switch is connected to the core router at the data
center.
From the core router, data is sent back to the end
user across the fastest available path.
Whereas statically routing traffic over one path
creates a single point of failure, this distributed architecture
ensures that users can access data extremely quickly and have
multiple paths both into and out of our network.
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