Solar Energy Host houses it’s servers in North Americas only public 100% solar powered data center. No greenhouse gases are produced to power these servers. The solar panel system that powers this data center will eliminate the production of:

• 19,890 lbs of Carbon Dioxide (CO2/GHG) per year
• 5.9 lbs of Nitrous Oxide (NOX/smog) per year
• 0.45 lbs of Sulfur Dioxide (SO4/acid rain) per year

The data center, located in Romoland, California just 120 miles East of Los Angeles is fully secured and monitored 24 hours a day 7 days a week. It is equipped with a backup generator that runs on propane gas. Propane gas is cleaner burning than diesel, which is found at most other hosting companies. The generator is for emergency use only and is tested weekly. The servers are also connected to the conventional energy grid that serves as a second back-up system and has never been called upon.

DC power from the solar panel feed is stored in battery banks. A large APC UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) system also provides power backup and conditions the power supply protecting equipment from voltage fluctuations and spikes.

Cisco Powered Network

Fully redundant Cisco powered network with multi homed connectivity to the Internet backbone: no single point of failure; multiple redundant Cisco 7200 series routers, Cisco PIX firewalls and Cisco switches.

The high availability network infrastructure is fully redundant with automated failover and full BGP (border gateway protocol) routing across three Internet service links (two wired and one very high speed wireless).

State of the Art Server Platform

The data centre operates VMware virtual server technology powered by multi-processor IBM xSeries servers with large amounts of onboard memory (RAM) and multi-terabyte RAID protected Fibre Channel SANs (storage area networks) from NetApp.

VMware VMotion brings a whole new level of redundancy to our server setup. If a physical server is struggling under the load or in the unlikely event of major hardware failure, VMware virtual servers hosted by the failing/failed physical server will automatically be switched to run on a different physical host. This is made possible by virtue of the servers being virtual and having all the server information stored away from the physical host in the SAN storage arrays.

The SAN also brings additional benefits: Multiple snapshots are taken of each virtual server stored on the SAN throughout the day. This enables server restoration to an earlier time almost instantaneously if needed. These snapshots are created by the SAN hardware and are completely independent of the servers.

Server Diagram

Below is a network diagram showing how the data centre network is laid out.

There are three separate Internet backbones running BGP, which route all traffic coming in and out of network via the shortest possible path. BGP also allows complete redundancy, if one or two Internet backbone links goes down, the other(s) will continue to handle the traffic.

The three separate Internet connections then connect to two redundant Cisco 7200 series routers, which use HSRP (Hot Spare Router Protocol) allowing one to take over the other during a failure. From there, each one goes to separate trunked switches, which allows one to go down and the other will take over.

Two separate Cisco PIX firewalls operated by the data centre block all but needed ports and monitor each other, so if one goes down the other takes over. Out from the firewalls the traffic goes to another set of separate trunked switches, which can failover from one to the other if one fails.

At this point the servers connect to these switches as follows: Each server has two dual port NICs (network interface cards). NIC 1 Ethernet port 1 is teamed for failover with NIC 2 Ethernet port 1. And NIC 1 Ethernet port 2 is teamed for failover with NIC 2 Ethernet port 2. Then NIC 1 Ethernet port 1 and NIC 2 Ethernet port 2 are connected to Switch A-M, and NIC 1 Ethernet port 2 and NIC 2 Ethernet port 1 are connected to Switch B-M. Each of these two port separate NIC card teams are then teamed together for complete redundancy.

All servers are clustered together and each server has two separate SAN HBA (host bus adapter) cards that give the server redundant conductivity to the SAN. The SAN is a high-speed sub-network of shared storage devices. These storage devices are machines that contain nothing but RAID hard disks for storing data. The SAN's architecture works in a way that makes all storage devices available to all of the clustered servers. Because the data does not reside directly on any of the clustered servers, any server can go down and the other servers in the cluster will take over and balance the load.

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