Power: A fully redundant system offers a continuous power supply with multiple generators.

Environmental Monitoring Systems: Air conditioning; water detection; and humidity control.

Staffing
Technical staff will be on hand 24/7 at the Premier Data Centers, allowing you access to your servers at all times. Each facility has approximately 30 people on staff and there is always more than one person on site. A multi-million dollar Management System will also be in place at each Premier Data Center, allowing engineers to better monitor the facility, network and equipment from a control center. In Addition, Enetrics Communications is Monitoring the network remotely utilizing special technologically advanced interfaces.

Security
Includes 24/7 security guards at the front door and on the premises; biometric hand scan into a Man Trap for controlled entrance/exit; video cameras throughout the facility.

Connectivity

The Premier data centers have connections to many different Internet backbones including UUNet, Sprint, Cable and Wireless, CRL, Qwest, Exodus, Agis and Net Axs. We also have private and direct peering DS3's set up between our location and that of American Online and PSI-Net. In addition, the data center operates its own DS3 to Mae East to peer with many of the smaller Tier One providers as well as operating another DS3 to the ATM switch located there. By connecting to multiple backbones, data can be distributed through many sources.

This architectural design also means that we are not dependent upon any single Internet backbone. Thus when problems occur, we are able to reroute traffic automatically, thereby ensuring the integrity of our network and continued access for our high-speed dedicated server clients.

Furthermore, by routing traffic mainly across large Internet backbones instead of sending data through meet points (commonly referred to as NAPs), the data traffic from our network avoids these centers of high congestion. In effect, we have created a small-scale NAP by accessing large Internet backbones through private peering arrangements.

In fact, large Internet providers such as UUNet and Sprint no longer trade traffic across meet points either. They have instead setup private connections between their backbones. However, these private interconnects have also become full because of the amount of traffic that they exchange. Thus, a Sprint customer trying to access a server on UUNet's network would experience packet loss across the interconnecting DS-3. Problems have arisen because both companies feel the other is responsible for upgrading the circuit.

Our national backbone provider does not have these problems because it pays for usage. Thus, if the UUNet connection starts experiencing packet loss, the backbone team is responsible for upgrading the circuit. This point also reinforces the advantage of our network architecture. Because there are connections to the largest backbone providers, we utilize their backbones, where there is less data congestion. In addition, though these large backbones may have good networks, they may not provide high-speed hosting solutions because they have poor connectivity to other large backbones.

There is over 500 Mb of bandwidth available. Presently bandwidth utilization is 25% during peak traffic times. Therefore, our network is very flexible. If one of the backbones we connect to experiences problems, we can simply choose to re-route that traffic over other paths, thereby ensuring that users receive fast access times to sites hosted on our network. In addition, a Border Gate Protocol (BGP4) is in operation. BGP is used at a provider with more than one access point to the Internet. It helps create a truly redundant network. In fact, in an ideal situation, a lease line failure should result in the BGP routing session to close on the bad leased line and the router on a working circuit should then begin to accept the additional traffic.

In other words, traffic from a down circuit is re-distributed across other circuits, thereby maintaining network integrity. Providers that are multi-homed and correctly setup can actually be more reliable than a single backbone provider because they have multiple paths to multiple providers.

Internal Connectivity
A provider's local area network is not often enough being seen as a point of latency. The two main sources of latency for a full-time Internet connection are the user's local area network and the Internet provider's local area network. With networks anchored by Cisco 5500 Series etherswitches and high-end Cisco routers (like our Cisco 7513) you are ensured exceptional routing of data packets.

This top-of-the-line network hardware ensures that data requests get to their destination and back out of the network as fast as possible. We use etherswitches instead of hubs because of their speed and their security capabilities. Whereas only one computer plugged into a hub can talk at one time, all the machines connected to a switch can talk at the same time. This means more data can travel through a switch and each server acts as its own node on the network. Furthermore, since each servers is its own node on the network, it is difficult for hackers to trace data packets with sensitive information (i.e. passwords) to a particular physical server.

Servers on our network do not share a single path (T3). Instead, the servers are connected into a high-speed ethernetswitch. This switch is connected to the core router at the data center facility. From the core router, data is sent back to the end user across the fastest available path.

Whereas statically routing traffic over one path creates a single point of failure, this distributed architecture ensures that users can access data extremely quickly and have multiple paths both into and out of our network.

Network Monitoring

In addition to its multi-homed connections and high-speed backbone, each data center has 24/7 network monitoring. Our Network Operations Center OnLine (NOCOL) software monitors the ports on the servers to check if they are active. This software can monitor the web port (80), the Real Media port (7070) or any other port which our clients have designated as a mission-critical application running

When the designated port is unreachable, an e-mail is sent to every member of the technical staff. The Technical engineering staff goes into immediate action to correct the problem.

We also have technical personnel here 24/7 monitoring the servers. Our normal technical support hours are 8-5 Monday through Friday PST, however, the data centers and servers are never left unattended.

Take the Data Center Tour