Industrial-Grade Equipment for the Ultimate Performance and Reliability

Sitewarehouse recognizes that down time is not an option for our servers. That's why we invest heavily in hardware and facilities that ensure our clients are up and running on the web 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Sitewarehouse's Network Operations Center (NOC) features raised flooring. This enables a constant flow of conditioned air and helps to maintain uniform room temperature at all times. In addition, raised flooring reduces static and ensures a professional, computer grade environment for our servers.

The facility 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. A detailed record of employee and visitor entry is maintained at all times.

Uninterruptible Power System

To guard against local power failures, we have 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

Sitewarehouse's NOC has two Liebert ten ton industrial air conditioners, which condition our computer rooms and operations center. Our computer room is kept at an optimal temperature of 65 degrees fahrenheit.

Custom Web Servers

Sitewarehouse's 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 Sitewarehouse's 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 Sitewarehouse servers are constructed from high-grade aluminum, and rest in shock mounted drive cages, which adds to the durability of the hardware. Sitewarehouse's drives proudly feature the lowest failure rate in the industry. (And yes, we do pay more for the reliability)

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 Sitewarehouse NOC located in Baltimore, Maryland and another in Reston Virginia, are 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) is our primary provider of bandwidth.

Qwest comes into MAE East 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 Sitewarehouse NOC. Our Qwest connection enables Sitewarehouse to offer 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, Sitewarehouse does not need to link to the Internet though an OC3 or T3 Telecom circuit. Instead, independent cables run inside our building directly from the Sitewarehouse 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. Whatever your bandwidth needs may be, Sitewarehouse has the scalability to meet them.

Network Redundancy

Sitewarehouse uses intelligent end-user routing software called Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), between GC, Qwest 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 NOCs 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, IBM Advantis and others. These private peering arrangements allow Sitewarehouse 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.

Network Reliability

Industry analysis reveals that 70% of downtime over ten hours with any ISP is caused by telephone circuit failure. Since our NOC is in the same buildings as Global Center, Exodus, GlobalOne, Qwest and GTE, circuit failure is virtually eliminated because there is no phone circuit between us and our providers. Instead, there is a direct connection between our Cisco 7500 routers and theirs.

Sitewarehouse's providers also have peering connections with other major Tier 1 providers, which allows traffic to be switched to alternate backbones should the need arise.

Raw Performance Equals Low Latency/High Throughput

Too often providers operate their networks at three to four times responsible capacity. As a result, their corresponding transfer times reach over 300ms. Sitewarehouse's network daily average is 6.5% of its capacity, with midday peak spikes reaching only 15.5% capacity.

Firewalls

A firewall is a security device that secures the server from possible attacks. It is placed between the server and the Internet to moderate and document requests for data access according to a predefined set of security policies. Every one of our servers comes equipped with a firewall, which is built and managed by our in-house security engineers. Our data center staff is managed by a network security engineer with over 15 years of experience in telecommunications cryptography. In addition to the individual firewall, our entire network is secured through a circuit level firewall, providing one more level of security for mission-critical data.

Automated Security Monitoring

To ensure the integrity of our customers' web sites, we proactively monitor system processes on each server as well as across our entire network. These monitoring programs are designed to halt and report all intrusions to the system and provide our customers with the peace of mind they need to conduct secure business transactions from our servers.