We recently completed a requirement for a UK-based company that required a single VLAN between three locations in New York City including their New York office that is located in an older building in SOHO. The challenge in this case was providing access at all three locations using Metro-Ethernet and the ability to provide Dedicated Internet Access at all locations. We are able to provide this client with Ethernet-over-Fiber (25Mbps) at 25 Broadway (Telehouse), 32 Avenue of the Americas (AMC, CRG-West), and Ethernet-over-Copper at their office in SOHO on a single VLAN with Metro-Ethernet between all locations. To read more about our clients and their positive experiences you can go to our Testimonials page. If you would like more information or a quote for a similiar set-up please contact me at woody@globalcoloquote.com or 917-710-5226.

On Wednesday, May 19th at 10:00am ET, the House Ways and Means Committee will hold a hearing to discuss tax proposals related to legalizing and regulating the Internet gambling industry in the United States. The proceedings will be held in Room 1100 of the Longworth House Office Building. Check out the details of the Ways and Means Committee hearing._ Over the last several years, gaming sites have become a daily activity for office workers, stay-at-home-Moms, and likely it is the number one clicked url in a bookmark folder. All gaming sites are based outside of the United States however 240M gamers are US citizens. The US is not stopping gambling but if they regulate it they can control problem gamblers. Most beneficial is the econmic factor- it will create jobs and there is an obvious tax revenue advantage. Also, off-shore operators are not mandated to have safeguards in place. If the Committee finds that it is in their best interest to legalize Internet gambling it will be very beneficial to the datacenters in the United States that can support the IT requirements of running these sites. The most likely beneficiaries of this movement will be established IT Providers, hardware vendors, and IT Consultants.

Yes! You now have an option for hourly backup for MS-SQL. IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) allows you to perform online backups and restores of Microsoft SQL Server Databases hourly. Now in addition to daily and weekly backups you have hourly backups available without having to create a flat file. TSM allows reduction of recovery time for your Database to just a few minutes after your Data is compromised. You can have point in time restores within an hour of your lost Database and this is available with any provider using the Tivoli Storage Manager Software and it is available today. Please contact us for a free consultation or if you would like to give it a try. We can load the Client for you or provide you the link to do it yourself.

Today marks the date of Toronto's First Green Data Center at 20 Pullman Court, Toronto ON (www.20PullmanCourt.com ). We provide co-location, managed-hosting, self-managed hosting, IP Services, and DoS Protection at this location and it is sure to be a big success! There have been limited choices in terms of managed hosting and dedicated hosting providers in Canada, not to mention the requests we get for Green Datacenters in North America. This facility offers a COOL ROOF that reduces the sun's reflection and heat and will feature a redundant cooling system using both a local well for primary water supply and a connection to the city’s water system as a backup. This carrier neutral facility offers the following features:

• 41,000 sq.ft
• On-site Parking
• Loading Dock
• Customer Lounge
• Custom Cages

We are proud to announce our new service and website NEW YORK ETHERNET. We now offer Layer-2 for organizations that would like to connect (2 or more) datacenters or an office and datacenter- all at Layer-2. We also offer Layer-3 to organizations that need 5 Mbps to 1 Gbps of full-duplex Internet Access to their office or remote location. Our Layer-3 Metro-Ethernet comes with two options- (1) Metro-E over Copper with speeds from 5Mbps to 45Mbps. This service is a good alternative to business-grade DSL, Bonded T1's, and DS3's at at fraction of the costs. The second option (2) is Metro-E over Fiber for clients that require 10Mbps to 1Gbps over fiber. The beauty of this service is that we can create separate vlans for voice traffic so you get a dedicated segment of your connection for VoIP and Data applications. Typically, it takes only few hours for a quote and 15-business days (or less) for service. Please contact me if you would like more information. I can be reached at 917-710-5226 or woody@new-york-ethernet.com. 

Every day, servers are attacked. A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is one in which a multitude of compromised systems attack a single target, thereby causing denial of service for users of the targeted system. The flood of incoming messages to the target system essentially forces it to shut down, thereby denying service to the system to legitimate users. How can you protect your organization against such an attack. Under a large scale attack, your firewall is not going to be able to handle the amount of traffic forced at it. You need a Transit vendor with a large network presence in multiple cities. This means that incoming DDOS attacks arrive through different upstreams and peering connections. In each city, customers are placed behind a firewall and are able to set up their own policies and rules for their incoming traffic. This setup is similar to what many other ISPs do. During regular traffic levels or a low-scale DDOS, there is no real difference between a distributed setup and a normal isp-level shared firewall. But when a sustained DDOS larger than a pre-determined amount occurs, your vendor's network operation center (NOC) is notified. Once they have determined that the attack is sustained, you have the option of going into distributed mode. Once you are in distributed mode, the vendor takes the attacked subnet of IPs and redirects it to the firewall closes to the ingress point of the attack. This distributes the attack so that it is now spread out over the capacity of the entire network instead of targeted towards a single city location.

After the DDOS traffic hits a firewall, it is inspected and dropped if necessary. The legitimate 'scrubbed' traffic is then GRE tunneled back to the city where your servers reside, where it carries on to your network. Your online presence can function normally through most high-level DDOS attacks that would have otherwise crippled your network. The following information is what I need to set-up protection asap when the attack is occuring. Basically, all traffic good and malicious is routed to our routers, where we filter and determine if the traffic is legitimate. All malacious traffic is dropped during one of our many filtering layers, the rest is sent to you from one of our proxy servers. In essence, your web server only communicates with our servers and is hidden from the general internet.

• Step 1. Obtain a clean IP from your network provider/ISP, preferably one on  different network segment. This new IP Address will be known as your "origin server IP". Configure the fresh/new IP onto your server.
• Step 2. Let us know via email what your new origin IP is so we can setup the configuration on our side.
• Step 3. If you require SSL on this server, email us the cert and private key in .PEM format. This should be in plain text and may be copied and pasted and included in the "step-2" email.
• Step 4. If you have a firewall or other ACL's in your network please ensure that you allow those IP blocks access to your servers and I will need to forward you our IP Blocks so they will have access.
• Step 5. We will send you and IP Address. Make a DNS change to point your domain(s) to the IP Address we sent you. Ensure your TTL  is set to 5 minutes or less.
• Step 6. Remove the old IP Address from the server.

At this stage your traffic will start finding it's way to us where we will apply the required filters and send your server the legitimate traffic. One of our engineers will be in communication with you throughtout this process, to ensure everything is functioning as expected.

That's it. All things considered, the whole process should take about an hour.

Every day we read more about Cloud Computing and the benefits of using Cloud Computing. You have surely heard IBM and Microsoft touting the service. One the leading, or should I say "better known" orgainzations offering Cloud Computing is Amazon's Web Services . Though they tend to focus on the low-end of the market, they are probably the best known. A recent survey by the IT Industry Council (ITIC) found that 85% of companies will not implement either a public or private cloud in 2009 because of fears that service providers may not be able to adequately secure sensitive data. With that said, there are some seemingly obvious advantages to using Cloud Computing like - hardware (server,etc) savings, software (licenses) savings, management and internal resource savings, etc. You would need a consulting company to do the analysis that would take an individual months to evaluate. Well, no worries. McKinsey & Co has done all the work for us and the report is very interesting. The most common thought is "if I don't have to buy any more servers I will save money." Wrong! Your application will need to be re-designed to run in a Cloud environment, tested, re-worked, and stress-tested again. That takes time and labor. In addition to redesign there is managing another vendor relationship, additonal software licenses, data transfer, re-IP, and then there's the provider's longevity. What if they go under? Even a well-executed Disater Recovery strategy will have some issues and even minor challenges will disrupt data flow. The cost to run an application in a Cloud environment would cost double what the same application would cost in a co-location environment! Not only will you not save money, as most Cloud proponents exclaim, but you will lose money. Either way, it will be 3-5 years before anyone other than SMBs begin moving towards Cloud Computing. For more information about this report you can check out The UPtime Institutes review at UptimeInstitue.com. You will need to register but there is a lot of great information there. Or I can be reached at woody@globalcoloquote.com or 917-710-5226.

Update on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 1:31PM by Host

For a basic understanding of "cloud-computing" you can check out this article http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/11/04/cloud.computing.hunt/index.html.

If you can get answers from your IT Staff to these 13 questions, you will save yourself a lot of time and maybe a few dollars. The questions are:

• Does your company have the IT staff / resources to remotely administer a server or managed hosting environment?
• What would this system we are discussing be used for? What is the application?
• What type of system architecture do you have in mind (web/app/db server; load balancing; private network)?
• What are your security requirements?
• What is the peak number of concurrent sessions that you anticipate for this system?
• What are your anticipated peak throughput requirements?
• What is the anticipated monthly transfer usage?
• What applications will you install on each server?
• What operating system would you need on each server?
• What are your requirements for CPU, RAM & HD (capacity & RAID configuration) for each server?
• Do you require backups on each server? Daily or Weekly?
• What is your timeline for implementing and moving forward?
• What is your budget for this project?

Last week, one of my clients had multiple DDOS attacks, such as Syn-flood, UDP network attacks, and HTTP get floods at rates of 90K to 700K packets per second. DDos and http get attacks was so large that it shut down their web-servers which resulted in a complete network outage for several days. Once we were notified of the problem, the facility manager, Mike Mazzei and our Engineer, Payam TarverdyanChychi, initiated our DDos Shield service to mitigate their traffic. Our DDos Shield utilizes the latest bleeding edge technology devices which is made up of multiple vendors.

Our DDos Shield uses high end ASIC boards to process/analyze the packetswhich decreases latency when new devises are introduced into the mesh.This allows the security devices to scrub the packets to determine goodvs bad packets based not only on signatures but also behavioral aspectsand sourced based filtering. In a severe attack (over 200KPPS ordepending on how large the traffic rate is) our DDoS Shield will workwith our Cisco/Juniper Routers to distribute traffic over several of our upstream providers to allow multiple ingress points for the attack and as such reduces the changes of saturating any given transit or transport. Once the distributed mode has been activated, all traffic will beautomatically routed within the peer1 backbone and sent to designated locations designed to handle attacks upwards of 10 Million packets/second up to 5gigs/sce. This number will drastically increase in the weeks to come.

This customer operates a social networking site that was enabled during these attacks. Once on our DDoS Shield service he was back up after initiating the service. If you would like more information regarding our DDoS Shield or any of our services you can contact me at woody@globalcoloquote or 917-710-5226.

Virtualization allows for multiple virtual servers (known as Virtual Machines) to run on a single physical server simultaneously. Our vendors provide virtualization services based on VMwares ESX Server platform, exclusively on a single-tenant model, where the ESX server is dedicated to a given client. Windows and Red Hat Linux are both supported as ‘guest’ operating systems. Virtualization’s most obvious benefit is consolidation of servers, but its less obvious benefits are what make it a truly revolutionary technology for the datacenter: by abstracting the server from the hardware it runs on, Virtual Machines (VMs) become truly portable, allowing them to move from physical server to physical server without reconfiguration, which facilitates rapid provisioning and recovery.

If you would like to know more about virtualization or managed hosting you can contact me directly at woody@globalcoloquote.com or 917-710-5226.

I spend a large portion of my day speaking with potential (and existing) clients about our services and pricing components. The pricing components for a CDN are not complex. Basically, it is all based on transfer. The higher the monthly commitment (transfer), the better the rate. The monthly commitment starts at 250GB and goes up to 300TB+ and typically the set-up fee is free unless the client has 10+ Domains and even then it's minimal. There are a few schools of thought about justifying a CDN and most agree that performance is the underlying reason for using a CDN. Using a CDN to increase performance will directly increase the revenue stream. One of my clients addressed this issue in his blog. Steve writes "I’m betting that since the site is that much faster Google will increase the position of our site pages in its SERPs within a month and we’ll see a real return on our CDN investment at that point." It's a basic strategy for a basic concept- increase traffic, increase revenue! It's true that not all sites are geared towards increasing ad revenue based on page views but the same rule applies to any site or business. This I know- Increasing performance of your site will increase traffic, period!

I have been consulting organizations on co-location for almost 9 years now. Mostly in North America and primarily in the U.S. market. With Global Colo Quote, we currently have (17) datacenters and I have consulted and placed clients in all of them. Typically early on in the discussions, the topic of power comes up and it is always a challenge for clients to calculate their power requirements based on the type and size of equipment they are going to be utilizing. Obviously, if a client is bringing hardware in from another facility they can measure their draw in the existing cabinet. But what about the ones ordering new equipment for the first time or coming into co-location from a managed hosting environment? The two most common requests for power is 110v and 208v. There's a big difference in the two and not understanding the difference can be the difference of a few to several thousand dollars per month. Think of it this way- 110v is single-phase power and 208v is two-phase power. For example, a 20amp circuit at 110v is 20amps. A 20amp circuit at 208v is 40amps. At $25/amp for a circuit you could be paying $1,000 a month for one power circuit to power your blades, SAN, etc. As far as servers go, a standard 1U server averages around 2 amps per machine. If we are talking about a 1U server with a single processor pushing less than 1Mbps of bandwidth. The power requirements will go up with machines with more than one processor or pushing more than 1Mbps of bandwidth. Most servers require 110v of power, however the newer blade-type servers will require 220v of power.Most datacenters in the U.S. provide 20 amps of 110v power in each 42U Full Cabinet. Most new clients do not realize that if you are provided a 20 amp circuit in your cabinet you only have 18 amps usable power. Standard U.S. electrical codes restrict breakers to accept more than 20 amps and will typically trip when enough heat is generated on the breaker and that usually happens between 18-20 amps. I always recommend to clients that have mission critical requirements and are pushing near 18 amps to utilize an additional 20 amp circuit in their cabinet. With dual-power supplied servers today, it is also a great fit to have redundant power for the entire cabinet so if you do loose a power supply or trip your breaker you will still have power but unless you shut a machine or two down you are likely to have the same problem with the second 20 amp circuit. This type of configuration is referred to as "A" and "B" power whearas "A" is the primary feed and "B" is a secondary feed coming from a separate UPS for redundancy. I always recommend using a power monitoring PDU ( power distribution unit) to monitor power usage and allow the flexibility to remotley shut down devices as needed. For more information about power usage or questions about co-location or hosting, please contact me at woody@globalcoloquote.com or 917-710-5226.

Recently a friend, who is a photographer, asked me why would someone want to lease a server when they could go out and buy one and own it out right. My first reply was, good point, and second was, at least I now know that he knows what I do for a living. It's becoming a common question and frequent event for a Internet Infrastructure provider to see a migration from co-location to managed hosting. Why? Typically, an organization that co-locates in a datacenter is going out and purchasing hardware that will inevitably become obsolete in a year or so. And typically with a full (42U) cabinet, 20amps of power is not enough and in some cases may require 40 additional amps. With the cost of power increasing, a company can expect to pay between $20-25/amp and $700-850 per installation for a 20amp circuit at 110v. So when you consider that in a Managed Hosting environment that power is included in the monthly price ( so is bandwidth for that matter), and the latest processors, drives, and other components, then Managed Hosting looks like the obvious answer. No so quick! What if you need a high-end video card or need to add another appliance, like a google appliance? In those cases you would require co-location and of course there are other examples but bottom line is you need to look at both options and right now I’m seeing more leaning towards managed hosting than co-location.

Today there was some confusion from a client about RAID so I thought the least I could do is post defintions. It's difficult to explain without a real case scenario but at least the definitions explain how many drives you will require to provide redundancy or a version of redundancy.

RAID 0 (striping)

RAID 0 uses the read/write capabilities of two or more hard drives working in unison to maximize the storage performance of a computer system. Data in a RAID 0 volume is arranged into blocks that are interleaved among the disks so that reads and writes can be performed in parallel (see below diagram). This technique, known as "striping", is the fastest of all of the RAID levels, especially for reading and writing large sequential files. Real world tasks where RAID 0 can be of particular benefit include loading large files into image editing applications, saving large movie files in a video editing application, or creating CD or DVD images with a CD/DVD authoring package.

The hard drives in a RAID 0 volume are combined to form one volume which appears as a single virtual drive to the operating system. For example, two 400 GB hard drives in a RAID 0 array will appear as a single 800 GB hard drive to the operating system.

No redundancy information is stored in a RAID 0 volume. This means that if one hard drive fails, all data on both drives is lost. This lack of redundancy is also reflected by the RAID level 0, which indicates no redundancy. RAID 0 is not recommended for use in servers or other environments where data redundancy is a primary goal.

RAID 1 (mirroring)

A RAID 1 array contains two hard drives where the data between the two is mirrored in real time. Because all of the data is duplicated, the operating system treats the usable space of a RAID 1 array as the maximum size of one hard drive in the array. For example, two 400 GB hard drives in a RAID 1 array will appear as a single 400 GB hard drive to the operating system.

The primary benefit of RAID 1 mirroring is that it provides good data reliability in the case of a single disk failure. When one disk drive fails, all data is immediately available on the other without any impact to the data integrity. In the case of a disk failure, the computer system will remain fully operational to ensure maximum productivity.

The performance of a RAID 1 array is greater than that of a single drive because data can be read from multiple disks - the original and the mirror - simultaneously. Disk writes do not realize the same benefit because data must first be written to one drive, then mirrored to the other.

RAID 5 (striping with parity)

A RAID 5 array contains three or more hard drives where the data is divided into manageable blocks called strips. Parity is a mathematical method for recreating data that was lost from a single drive, which increases fault-tolerance. The data and parity are striped across all the hard drives in the array. The parity is striped in a rotating sequence to reduce bottlenecks associated with the parity calculations.

The capacity of a RAID 5 array is the size of the smallest drive multiplied by one less than the number of drives in the array. The equivalent of only a single hard drive is used to store the parity information, allowing for fault-tolerance with less than the 50% capacity reduction of RAID 1. For example, three 400 GB hard drives in a RAID 5 array will appear as a single 800 GB hard drive to the operating system.

The primary benefits of RAID 5 include capacity and data protection. Because parity is used for data protection, up to 75% of the total drive capacity is usable. Further, any single drive can fail and it is possible to rebuild the data after replacing the failed hard drive with a new drive. However, the extra work of calculating the missing data will degrade the write performance to the RAID 5 volume while the volume is being rebuilt.

The read performance of a RAID 5 array is greater than that of a single drive because data can be read from multiple disks simultaneously. Disk writes do not realize the same benefit because parity must be calculated and written to all the drives.

RAID 10

A RAID 10 array uses four hard drives to create a combination of RAID levels 0 and 1 by forming a RAID 0 array from two RAID 1 arrays.

Since all of the data on the RAID 0 array is duplicated, the capacity of a RAID 10 array is the size of the RAID 0 array. For example, four 400 GB hard drives in a RAID 10 array will appear as a single 800 GB hard drive to the operating system.

The primary benefit of RAID 10 is that it combines the benefits of RAID 0 performance and RAID 1 fault-tolerance. It provides good data reliability in the case of a single drive failure. When one hard drive fails, all data is immediately available from the other half of the mirror without any impact to the data integrity. In the case of a disk failure, the computer system will remain fully operational to ensure maximum productivity. Data fault-tolerance can be restored by replacing the failed drive.

The performance of a RAID 10 array is greater than that of a single drive since data can be read from multiple disks simultaneously. Compared to a two-disk RAID 0, RAID 10 read performance is higher as data can be read from either half of the mirror, but write performance is slightly lower due to ensuring data is written out completely to the array.

I always get questions and concerns about loosing connectivity in a datacenter. Just like with power, it takes planning on the part of the client as well as the provider to plan for the day when it fails. Because, sooner or later, it will. Providers will honor their SLAs but to truly prepare for a loss of connectivity will require knowledge of BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) and being multihomed. Simply put, running BGP with two or more providers will allow you to have access to more providers so if one provider looses connectivity the other(s) can pick up the primary providers traffic. However, running BGP and knowledge of routing requires a level of skill and the investment in a router which will also take up room in the cabinet. Bottom line, if your organization requires 100% uptime you will sleep much better at night if you are multihomed.For more information about BGP or for contact information of a skilled engineer that understands BGP, please contact me at woody@globalcoloquote.com or 917-710-5226.