Protecting your business
Blacknight Internet Solutions' hosting network was designed with high availability, fault tolerance and security in mind. We pride ourselves on the fact that our network has achieved 100% production uptime, with provision for scheduled maintenance, since it went live.
At the core of the network we have 4 border routers, connecting us to multiple Tier 1 ISPs. If one or more providers experience congestionor downtime, traffic can be rerouted through other network providers until the issue is resolved.
Multiple providers, including Eircom, Esat BT, ESB Telecoms and NTL terminate their fibre-optic cable in the data centre, while Digiweb,Leap Broadband and Netsource provide wireless connectivity. This allows us to provide connectivity to customers who have their own bandwidth and/or provider requirements.
Environment
Blacknight's network is based in Ireland's leading Internet Data Centre in Dublin, to ensure the utmost reliability and security for our clients' data and servers. High performance, sensitive electronic equipment requires precise, reliable control of room temperature, humidity, and airflow. Blacknight employs fully redundant individual close control air conditioning units based on a chiller and dry cooler system.
The equipment is configured to monitor many variables and send alerts when entering the predetermined criteria ranges (e.g., high or low temperatures, high or low humidity, smoke detection, and mechanical problems)
Variables:
- 22 degrees Celsius (plus or minus 2 degrees C)
- Relative humidity 50% (plus or minus 10%)
- Air filtration to class EU5
Security
- Video surveillance cameras monitored by the security control room 24/7
- Security breach alarms
- 24-hour security personnel
- CCTV cameras mounted inside and outside of each ISC
- Data centres comprise a biometric security and/or Proximity card access systems with
mandatory pre-approved client lists and mandatory sign-in/sign-out procedures - Blacknight conforms to the PCI Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)
Connectivity & Bandwidth
We provide a multi-homed, managed Internet access service that provides the ultimate in availability,
performance, and scalability. We connect you directly to multiple backbone Internet Service Providers
through private transit connections.
The data centre facilities we use, can provide 100% network uptime by utilising to the fullest their
Carrier neutral status and diverse fibre ducting to empower our Blacknight Mesh network. This comes in 4
layers of redundancy, which are highlighted below.
- Layer 1 Multiple Tier-1 ISPs and Internet Exchange peering agreements
- Layer 2 Diverse local loop providers connect Blacknight Net to each ISP
- Layer 3 Fully Redundant BGP/OSPF enabled network
- Layer 4 Use of Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) to provide physically
redundant Fast Ethernet or Gigabit Ethernet connections from separate access layer
switches to our equipment cabinets
The Blacknight network mesh uses two or more local carriers at any one time to ensure that the network has no single point of failure, and insures that we are the best connected in any part of this country and or the World.
Current carriers include:
- Tiscali
- Level (3)
- Global Crossing
- Cogent
Current Peering includes:
- INEX LAN#1
- INEX LAN#2
- PackectExchange eXpress
The network runs on a completely redundant Cisco and Juniper Powered Network utilising BGP4 at the network edge and at the core and distribution levels. Open Shortest Path First Protocol (OSPF) and Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) are enabled, providing seamless connectivity in a fail-over situation.
Each server is allocated a bandwidth usage cap in GigaBytes. This is not shared in any way; the network runs at 1Gbit/s and is unthrottled. For example, 60GB is the equivalent of approx 190KBit/s constant over a 30-day period. We bill using 95th percentile billing, which allows us to bill each customer separately and gather very accurate data. Traffic over the agreed monthly quota is billable at 3.90 per GB, which is billed in arrears each month.
