About: Infrastructure
Page last updated on 20 Jan. 2011
Leverage our high tech, high spec infrastructure from one or more of our data centre locations.
We own and operate our own equipment which we colocate with five highly reliable data centres. For our North American clients we offer service from our Chicago, IL data centre. The majority of our servers are located in 2 data centres in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, home of the largest Internet exchange in the world, AMS-IX. We also now have servers in Munich, Germany and Dublin, Ireland.
If you're looking to host your server in a particular country, we'll be happy to put together a custom quote for you.
Each data centre has been selected with security in mind. All of the facilities provide 24/7 manned security desks, recorded CCTV surveillance, proximity card-based access control, plus individually locked colocation cabinets. All this ensures excellent physical security for your data.
We also understand that the largest threat to your data is not a physical attack, but a virtual one. As our servers are all directly connected to the Internet, we have built every service from the ground up with high security in mind. This means using highly encrypted connections to manage the servers, using key-based authentication where possible, and using VPN and firewalls to restrict external access to sensitive services.
In addition to the above techniques, we have also developed our Chicago and Amsterdam 2 data centres with two distinct physical networks. One is the public (WAN) network, the other is a completely isolated private LAN. The only way to access this LAN from outside the data centre is via a secure VPN connection. While initially developed as a purely internal mechanism to securely manage our own equipment, we have since realised the added value this network could provide to our clients in securely managing their own servers. Many of our managed server clients now take advantage of this facility to lock down external access to their own servers.
*Our Amsterdam 1 data centre will be upgraded to offer the facility during 2011.
Our philosophy is to employ the simplest technologies possible in order to provide the service our clients require. Less complexity means less that can go wrong, and this philosophy has proven itself over the years with extremely high uptime and low equipment failure rates. Our servers all provide dual Gigabit Ethernet that provide high speed links to public and private IP networks, error correction memory modules, and hardware RAID storage. All hardware used is server grade, meaning it is designed to run at high utilisation on a 24/7 basis.
Anu servers have a three-year lifecycle, and we are constantly refreshing our server pools. As all our managed services are based on virtualised servers, this means your server will always be running on modern, fast, reliable hardware. And the best part? A hardware refresh will never require any intervention or software reinstalls.
We realised early on that ultra reliable networking with redundant physical cables, peers and transit providers was absolutely critical to providing the service our clients demand. Therefore we have employed the services of three high-end colocation facilities to provide us with a managed network infrastructure. This strategy has proven itself over many years, particularly at our Amsterdam 2 facility which has provided 100% uptime for the >2 years that we have had a presence there.
While uptime is critical, bandwidth is equally so. Our three data centres each provide full GbE (1000mbps) uplinks to the Internet, with options at Amsterdam 1 and 2 for 10GbE. The provider backbone at Amsterdam 2 runs at 20Gbps, enabling us to host even the most bandwidth intensive services.
