Post
by Scott » Tue Nov 12, 2002 9:31 pm
Are you implying that my moms communication method is in someway flawed! Although I find it somewhat comical, I must take exception with your idea that she would be other than pleased with you adopting it.
It does provide for many people to be exposed to a variety of messages thus keeping a wider group of people informed. Although efficiency is sacraficed.
Absent this forum, her methods at communications have been the glue that has kept us all informed. I would never have heard about John Duckets wedding had Kakie not told you to tell my mom who told Jill to tell me.
Thus as we transition to the forum, we must not forget that should it fail, we will have to go back to Margie's method!
Rest assured the forum's servers are very reliable. Here are the specs:
The server facility (NOC) is equipped with a Raytheon fire suppression system, designed to immediately extinguish fire and protect equipment and personnel. The command center is controlled via automatic doors to further secure and protect the equipment.
Finally, the NOC is located in a secure, monitored, class A building with a minimum number of approved personnel allowed access to highly sensitive areas and equipment.
Uninterruptible Power System
To guard against local power failures, the NOC has two industrial-grade, three phase Liebert UPS systems. These act as back-up batteries, maintaining uninterrupted power in case of surges or power outages. With these backup systems in place, we can keep our network up and running indefinitely without relying on external power.
Industrial-Grade Air Conditioners
The NOC has two Liebert ten ton industrial air conditioners, which condition our computer rooms and operations center. The computer room is kept at an optimal temperature of 65 degrees fahrenheit.
Custom Web Servers
The web servers are custom-built industrial machines designed for a 24/7 web serving environment. All servers are equipped with dual redundant 450-watt power supplies, hot swap Seagate Baracuda/Cheetah drives and force-filtered cooling systems. In addition, our NOC is equipped with an inventory of identically configured, burned-in standby servers.
Force Filtered Cooling
All of the custom web servers are equipped with a positive pressure filtered-air system. Four large fans pull filtered air into each server's protective case and the components within are cooled by fans which circulate this purified air. This constant introduction of clean air into the case creates a positive pressure environment ensuring dust and particles remain outside of the server.
Hot Swap Seagate Drives
The drives and drive bays of all our servers are constructed from high-grade aluminum, and rest in shock mounted drive cages, which adds to the durability of the hardware. The drives proudly feature the lowest failure rate in the industry.
Redundant Hot Swap Power Supplies
Each server employs dual-redundant hot swap power supplies. If a power supply were to fail, the server would continue running with power from the alternate supply. Meanwhile, alarms would alert a technician, who would quickly restore redundancy. In the meantime, servers and client sites would experience no downtime.
Standby Servers
We keep spare servers on-line of all CPU configurations. If a server were to experience a hardware failure, we would turn a key, grab the handle on the drive, pull it out, and insert it into an identical standby CPU. We would then reboot the second machine and the server would be up and running again in a matter of minutes.
Connected to Three Backbones
The NOC is OnNet with GlobalCenter (GC), Qwest Communications and GTE through three separate bandwidth-on-demand connections.
GC, a Tier 1 provider whose 13,000-mile fiber optic network and Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) technology provide an enormous 460 gigabytes per second (Gbps) of capacity worldwide, has an Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) fiber node.
Qwest comes in with an OC-12 line and plans to upgrade their connection to an OC-48 in the near future. They also have an ATM fiber node floors below the NOC. Our Qwest connection enables additional redundancy and better routes to Europe, Latin America and Asia. With our carriers, our router has up to 150,000 possible routes to send each packet of traffic.
Genuity, a division of GTE, is our third Tier One Internet backbone. Genuity provides excellent network performance as a result of their high-speed peering arrangements with other Tier One Internet backbone providers. The GTE global network delivers customers directly onto the Internet via a high-speed connection to its private, super-capacity backbone, including 17,000 miles of fiber and OC192 capacity. It is comprised of more than 800 U.S. local access points and approximately 1,500 international local access points in more than 150 countries.
Furthermore, because of these unique connections, we do not need to link to the Internet though an OC3 or T3 Telecom circuit. Instead, independent cables run inside the NOC to all three carriers points of presence. These lines can handle the bandwidth of a T3 or an OC3 with DWDM. Plus, they handle several times the bandwidth of an OC3.
Network Redundancy
We have intelligent end-user routing software called Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), between Qwest, GC and GTE, who use the same protocol. BGP identifies which path is the most efficient for each data packet and then routes the packet to its destination on the fastest path. This increases the speed at which web pages sent from our NOC arrive at their destination.
Studies have shown that the most common reason for downtime is circuit failure on Tier 1 provider backbones, the major data highways. To guard against this potential problem, we have three Tier-1 providers. If one experiences problems, we can route traffic down the other one. Furthermore, because we are OnNet with GlobalCenter, Qwest and GTE, we share their digital distribution architecture, which includes private peering network connections to major Internet carriers such as MCI, Sprint, UUNET, EUNET, AT&T, AOL, Best, Erols, @Home, IBM Advantis and others. These private peering arrangements allow the NOC to exchange packets of data with every major backbone carrier in a one-to-one environment quickly and efficiently.
In addition, GC has high-speed links to eight public exchanges including both MAE East and West and several NAPS. Through these public exchanges, customers have the ability to reach their site, no matter from where they are coming on the Internet.
[img]http://www.kraftfam.com/images/typing_to_the_beat.gif[/img] ...what you read is not a test I'm typing to the beat... [img]http://www.kraftfam.com/images/moving_snake.gif[/img]