Blueorange Networks Hosting

Blueorange Networks - Enterprise hosting for SME's and Growing ASPs.

Meeting Critical Business Requirements

·         Extremely high availability critical during working hours

·         High security design, with encryption of all data transmitted over the network and strong cryptographic authentication of users

·         No single point of failure, including not being reliant on a single network provider or data centre

·         Failovers must not lose data

·         Ability to recover from disasters

·         Fast, low latency connection for maximum perceived performance of the application

·         Accurate responses to status enquiries and issue tracking

·         Cost Effectiveness: Blueorange has won all 3 tenders in the past 3 years against Rackspace typically 50% of the cost of like-for-like service provision for very high end solutions.

 

Support, Service & Expertise Level

·         Team of Senior networking engineers with 50 years combined IT experience.

·         Number of servers to engineers is strictly limited to ensure that we don't need to use junior technicians

·         To reproduce this level of support & hosting requires:

o        Renting co-location within two separate data centres & purchasing of hardware

o        Connectivity provisioning from multiple Tier 1 internet service providers, to establish AS status

o        Get a networks contractor to set up and self-manage a full BGP infrastructure

o        Full time senior system's administration (min 3 engineers)

 

Experience: History & Clients

 

Processes

·         Industry standard capacity management, disaster recovery, monitoring and ticketing systems

·         Automated site-switching in prolonged total outage scenario (initiated manually)

·         Fully managed (never automated) data restoration to primary servers from failover

·         Simple, documented access to off-site data backups and Virtual Machine historical snapshots

·         Machine historical snapshots in unrecoverable disaster scenario

 

Network Specification

Blueorange Network's Primary 'Point of Presence' (POP) is at Interxion, London : best power and uptime record of all London Datacentres

BGP / MPLS Network : We are a Tier 2 ISP with dual, independent multihomed fibre connects into independent routers fed by multiple

Tier 1 providers including Packet Exchange's global 'Xpress' network, Level 3 and Tiscali.

2Gbits/sec bandwidth capacity (running at < 10% utilistation at peak times)

Dual CISCO BGP routers for full redundancy and 100% redundancy with Secondary London 'Backup & Failover' Datacentre

 

High Availability & Failover Design

Two physical servers in the primary data centre, running two application VMs, which can fail over between servers

Two front end VMs running performing strong cryptographic authentication, proxying the to the application servers after filtering out unauthenticated connections.

Continual application level replication to the second site, with manual failover if the primary data centre is lost. This is deliberately manual to remove the possibility of accidental failover.

Staging and development virtual machines at the second datacentre (no untested code is run on the production hardware)

 

Compute Specification for each High Availability Pair

Two Fully Virtualised 64bit Dual Core AMD CPU servers with 8Gb RAM Capacity at primary data centre & One Fully Virtualised 64bit Dual Core AMD CPU servers with 8Gb RAM Capacity at secondary data centre with Networked Sun Storage Array

Remote Lights out management console for all hardware & VMWare ESX Server with High Availability for Virtualisation; supports your Sun Solaris platform

High Efficiency, Low energy hardware with continual power management throughout: HP, Sun, Dell, Netgear, Cisco hardware

We are the first hosting infrastructure in the UK to trial and implement the new Sun Microsystems 7110 storage array system.