Since 2005, CentralPoint Systems has operated on solar-powered servers. Websites are integral to doing business -- and we believe that where we can tread more lightly on our environment and help our customers do so, too, we should try. We have currently selected AISO.net as our managed hosting facility for our hosted clients. AISO.net is a 100% solar hosting company serving customers large and small around the globe.
Description of the Web Hosting Features for CentralPoint Systems Dedicated Servers
Backup features are set up so data is fully protected. A feature is set up that runs on a clustered SAN (Storage Area Network) which takes snapshots of the CPS server every three hours. These snapshots are rotated and we keep one weeks worth. Snapshots are for emergency use only and allow us to fully restore a failed system and have it back online within a matter of minutes. The SAN has Fibre Channel disk drives and RAID dual parity (DP), which can protect data even from dual disk failures. If a disk drive fails it is automatically replaced in the RAID group with an online spare disk drive. RAID DP requires two disks for storing parity information, unlike standard RAID, which uses only one disk. By using this extra disk for parity, it provides better protection than traditional RAID implementations, which provide protection from only single disk failures
These web hosting/dedicated CPS server features are included:
Multiple SAN Connected Clustered Servers With Automatic Failover
Redundant Data All data is stored on our mirrored clustered redundant NAS servers. The NAS servers are fully redundant and have no single point of failure. All data is mirrored from one clustered NAS server to a second identical clustered NAS server to provide complete reliability and the highest available uptime in the industry.
Uptime The AISO.net network is fully redundant with no single point of failure. They have multiple redundant Cisco 7200 series routers. Connected to the Cisco routers are two fully redundant Cisco Pix firewalls. Each Cisco Pix firewall is connected to multiple Cisco switches for full redundancy. Each NAS server is connected to multiple switches for full redundancy. The SAN is built with Fibre Channel disk drives, redundant power supplies, fans, CPUs and network connections so the SAN will continue working if any component fails. Because the components are hot swappable they can also be repaired or replaced without having to schedule downtime. Each physical server has hot swappable redundant power supplies and fans, redundant network cards connected to multiple switches for full redundancy, diagnostic light path panel, DDR II ECC (Error-Correcting Code) memory and more. Plus both the physical servers and the SAN have auto notification so if something does fail, the hardware will e-mail AISO.net techs alerting them to which component failed and e-mail the manufacture expediting hardware repairs to dramatically reduce physical server down time. The e-mail sent to the manufacture alerts them to which component failed, automatically opening a hardware trouble ticket, the manufacturer giving us a call and them shipping out the new component for next day delivery.
This setup makes it so the CentralPoint Systems dedicated server has no single point of failure which means higher uptime.
Clustered Servers With Automatic Failover In additional to the CPS dedicated server, AISO.net provides our own co-located server. With VMware's VMotion technology, unique to VMware, the system will automatically move the running virtual machine (CPS dedicated server) from one physical server to another with no impact to end users (Zero Downtime), allowing maximum resource availability to your machine. Plus the CPS dedicated server will have NIC failover and load balancing between separate NIC cards enabling greater hardware availability, speed, and fault tolerance. AISO VMware systems continuously monitor all physical servers in the cluster and almost instantly without human intervention, restarts the CPS dedicated machine on a different physical server in the event of a server failure, so we are back online within minutes.
Server Monitoring All servers are monitored by multiple systems running Ipswich What’s Up Gold network monitoring software. This software will take evasive action in case it senses a problem. It will restart a failed service or can even reboot a computer. It will notify one of AISO's senior techs in case of any failure. Techs are also notified if one of the monitoring servers has failed. This allows AISO to be proactive and handle any potential issues prior to them happening.
