RackForce Blog
Archive for the 'Security' Category
July 3rd, 2008 [by Doug Alder]
This article compares the /source and resulting of traditional to the ultra-green powered gigaCENTER
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Number of Cars of Coal per day Required for a Hydroelectric powered 20Megawatt Data Center = 0
20MW is not an unusual amount of power for a datacenter in the 150,000 sq. ft. range. Coal produces approximately 100 times the amount of greenhouse gas than hydro does as this graph shows (shown as grams CO2 generated per KWh) .
Nearly all datacenters in North America get their , in fact approximately 70% of all the power in North America is generated from coal and other () producing sources, as the chart above shows. While accounts for 20% of the remainder, we all know the problems with radioactive waste disposal, and the potential for environmental harm, that it creates.
Even those that don’t use coal sourced power are still using older technology that gives them a PUE () rating of between 2 and 3 (PUE = Total Facility Power / IT Equipment Power.) In a world of growing this is a very real problem. is powered by hydroelectric energy, supplied from dams along the Columbia River. Using the latest technology and design, by engineers, gigaCENTER will have a of 1.38, a rating unheard of to date in the . Consider the following. Take a traditional datacenter with a PUE of 2.5 to 3 (not at all uncommon) that is powered by . Remember coal produces 100 times more greenhouse gas (GHG) than hydro does. Now take a hydro powered datacenter with a PUE of 1.38. If you place your business in the first datacenter you are contributing about 200 times the amount of GHG than if you put your business in the latter. gigaCENTER is the latter. Where do you want to put your business?
RackForce is now pre-selling colocation space in gigaCENTER so don’t miss out on this opportunity, phase 1 space is selling out fast. Contact Doug Alder (dalder at rackforce.com) Direct: 1-250-448-2203 or Jay Robinson (jrobinson at rackforce.com) 1-250-717-2340 ext 2303 on our gigaCENTER sales team now to get started.
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September 26th, 2007 [by Doug Alder]
If you own a business there are at least two plans you must complete if you want that business to be successful, and to last. The first is your business plan, which lays out your product(s), your expected market, your risks, and your projected costs and revenues. Without such a plan your chances of success are slim and your chances of attracting financing are none. The second plan you should have in place is a Business Continuity Plan (BCP).
A BCP is needed so that your business can recover and continue operations in the event of a disaster, be it natural or man made. Consider what happened on 9/11 when the twin towers went down. Those towers contained a lot of businesses in the financial services sector (banks, brokerages, insurance companies) and in some cases they were able to restart operations in a very short time because they had a well thought out plan. In other cases they simply went out of business or suffered a sever impact on their business because they didn’t because key people and data were lost and they had no plan in place for dealing with that.
- Floods
- Hurricanes
- Global Warming
- Water Shortage
- Pandemic
- Tornadoes
- Earthquakes
- Brownouts or Blackouts
- Sudden loss of key personnel
- Terrorism
- Loss of a key supplier
- Labor Disputes
All of the above and many more are factors that can severely affect your business’ ability to carry on.
Marsh Canada (company provides risk and insurance services, investment management and consulting services) recently did a survey of Fortune 1000 companies in regards top risk assessment and planning. The results are quite interesting as you can see in this graph
(click on image for a larger image)
Risk assessment for the purpose of business continuity must, as you see, take into account a lot of factors many of which are beyond your ability to control and many you probably haven’t considered.
One of the things you can control, however, is your IT recovery strategy. When Hurricane Katrina hit the gulf coast in August 2005 many companies were caught unprepared. Many had their electronic data stored locally and lost all of it. Other companies not located in the gulf region had their data backed up to servers in that region and they too suffered as the power went out and they could not back up their data anymore. Some are still trying to recover from that. Planning to manage all emergencies is essential for business continuity.
Here are a few links to help you with continuity planning:
- Gartner
- IBM (good discussion on using virtual servers to assist in DR planning and recovery)
- A guide to Business Continuity Planning
- Operational Security Standard – Business Continuity Planning (BCP) Program
One of the key factors for any Internet enabled business is how to safeguard its data. Key to that is a well thought out data backup plan. The first thing to remember in this strategy is to back up to a separate location and choose that location well. Wherever it is, it should be safe from natural disasters and, unfortunately these days, potential terrorist activity.Choose your data center well is a key operative concept. Where you place your backups, and your servers if you are outsourcing your infrastructure, is of critical importance. Is you data center subject to brownouts or blackouts? Does it sit in a hurricane zone? Is it located on the west coast inside the San Andreas fault zone? If you answered yes to any of those you should reconsider where you have your data located. When disaster strikes you need to be able to start your business again, if not seamlessly then as quickly as possible. You can’t wait on your data center to recover so that you can recover.
Also key is the type of backups you do. Do them often and choose a company that has an Enterprise class backup system, such as Tivoli Storage Manager from IBM, as anything else is playing dice with your company’s data. RackForce now offers Tivoli Storage Manager.
RackForce operates Tier 3 data centers in Kelowna BC, Canada that are secure from the natural disasters and their consequences as mentioned above. If you are interested in making this, and/or remotely hosted servers, part of your Business Continuity Plan please contact our sales staff and we will be glad to discuss your needs with you.
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April 10th, 2007 [by Doug Alder]
Most data centers are at a loss on how to deal with such attacks. Because these attacks are distributed it means they are coming from multiple IPs, that number depending on how many
RackForce instituted a state of the art DDoS protection system that has proven itself against multi Gigabit per second attacks (sorry details are for obvious reasons extremely confidential). The result? Great network uptime. (Click here for stats.) Here’s what one customer has to say about it:
After these DDoS attacks, we moved FDB to bomb-proof webhosting on Rackforce, who advertise that their system is impervious to DDoS attacks. Since moving FDB to Rackforce, we’ve been hit with DDoS attacks several more times- but we at FDB would never have known about them if Rackforce Support hadn’t clued us in. Rackforce are able to divert attack traffic and move the IP of our server with just a few mouseclicks, keeping us ‘on the air’ seamlessly since we signed on.
How much is that protection worth to your online operation? $5/mo, $25/mo, $100/mo? Well at RackForce we include that protection at no extra cost on all accounts. Now that’s value
While we certainly appreciate the compliment from our customer I would like to point out that no data center can ever claim to be “
Like any other malicious activity DDoS technology and strategies are constantly evolving and so prevention and mitigation techniques must evolve too. In the process of this “cat and mouse” game some attacks will temporarily make it through, so while RackForce’s solution is not a guarantee against successful DDoS attacks it is nevertheless a very strong defense, and one that applies to all our customers at no extra charge despite the cost of many thousands of dollars per month for us to provide this coverage. Why do we do it then? Well here are a few reasons:
- DDoS attacks use up our bandwidth and thus cost us money
- Athough RackForce does do its best to protect individual customers against DDoS attacks, or any attacks for that matter, the priority is in protecting the overall network and all the customers.
- We don’t like to see the bad guys win, ever, for any reason
RackForce is committed to giving its customers the best service for the price and we are continuously upgrading our network and our offerings to meet that commitment. Stay tuned.
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