Karthick’s Web Hosting Blog

I am very happy to announce that Net Logistics very recently became SWsoft’s first Platinum-level partner in Australia. We make very extensive use of two of their technologies: Virtuozzo, which empowers our VPS platforms, and Plesk, which is used on our Windows-based platforms, as well as on some of our VPSes and Dedicated servers.

Moving up to the next level, i.e. an “Elite” partner may take a bit longer. There are actually only three companies who hold that designation in the entire world. The “Elite” partner status is actually invite only (from the CEO of SW-Soft), and requires the partners minimum spend to be $50,000 USD per month!

We have now expanded our Sydney presence to Global Switch, one of the most secure and advanced datacenter facilities in Australia and perhaps the southern hemisphere.

The first roll-out in Global Switch involved installing twenty DELL Dual Core servers and three switches (core switch, and two dist. switches for the first cabinet) which we’ve done rather efficiently. The core switch connects to our first Sydney location (AAPT, Glebe) via a fibre interconnect (provided by PIPE Networks), and will connect up to 20 cabinets together.

The overhead cabling structure and dedicated patching cabinet makes it very easy to interconnect two or more cabinets. In AAPT, all ethernet cabling is done under the raised flooring. It can take anywhere from four weeks to eight weeks for AAPT to interconnect two cabinets (which is quite slow IMHO).

Here are a few pictures…

30 servers (10 to go to AAPT, 20 to Global Switch):

10 servers installed at AAPT:

Global Switch:

Boxes:

Servers Installed:

Wiring:

We’re using Hallam cabinets at both AAPT and Global Switch, and at both places, the back rails on the cabinets were too far for the ends of the rails to clip on.

There were screws securing the back rails of the cabinet, and it seemed simple - use a screw driver to loosen them and move the rails. We tried it, and the screws didn’t budge. All we managed to do was shear off the metal on the screw head.

Pictures:

This one is a bit dark, but you can see the outline of the cabinet.

We ended up drilling the heads off the screws (roughly 6 hours of work all up, including trying various methods). We asked Hallam to fix the cabinet at Global Switch so that we could fit the DELL Rails. Brenden from Hallam did the job in about an hour, and the secret is simple, but no one knew it! (Including the Alcatel guys at AAPT who install the Cabinets).

I would like to thank the guys at Hallam (Paul, Tark, Duncan, and especially Brenden), who have helped us a lot with configuring the cabinets at Global Switch to the way we need it.

The trick?

1) Instead of trying to loosen the screw, loosen the nut! It’s that simple!

2) Order cabinets that have Slotted Intermediates’ with knobs for easy adjustment of vertical rails =)

Hello everyone;

It has been an extremely exciting time over the last couple of weeks, as we have recently expanded our Velocity network into Sydney. The datacenter chosen for the Velocity network is AAPT Glebe. We initially tried to obtain rack space in AAPT Haymarket (which is the other side of Broadway), however they were full at the time, and we had to choose Glebe.

Hardware

The hardware we have decided to use for this datacenter is DELL (since this is what we are now using in Brisbane), from Pentium 4 through to Dual Xeons. Here is a photo of the first batch of servers we have installed roughly two weeks ago. Since then, we have a steady flow of DELL 2850 (Dual Xeons w/ 8 GB RAM - Net Logistics’ shared hosting servers) and DELL 850 (Pentium 4 - for dedicated server clients) being installed.

The majority of web hosts do not get the opportunity to maintain their own equipment in a datacenter. I feel very lucky that I am given such an opportunity, in a city where datacenter space (and bandwidth) is a premium. Most of the servers were a breeze to install. All we had to do is take them out of the box, put it in the rack, plug in power and network, configure some BIOS settings, and it was good to go.

Network

The network currently consists of AAPT and PIPE. Agile will be added very soon and the router will be upgraded to Cisco 7206 VXR at the same time (ETA; Early January 06). When we first plugged in AAPT, it didn’t work! Even the light on the switch was completely off. We had quickly learned that this was due to MAC-Address caching - once the cache was cleared on AAPT’s side, it started working again.

The AAPT network speed is very impressive. The following is from ADSL (iiNet) in Sydney:

[karthick@karthick ~]$ ping -c 4 202.60.80.9
PING 202.60.80.9 (202.60.80.9) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 202.60.80.9: icmp_seq=0 ttl=54 time=13.8 ms
64 bytes from 202.60.80.9: icmp_seq=1 ttl=54 time=13.6 ms
64 bytes from 202.60.80.9: icmp_seq=2 ttl=54 time=13.3 ms
64 bytes from 202.60.80.9: icmp_seq=3 ttl=54 time=14.0 ms
--- 202.60.80.9 ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% packet loss, time 3001ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 13.380/13.750/14.091/0.297 ms, pipe 2

This is quite good, considering that the first hop to the external network is 12ms itself. I am able to get 7-8ms on Telstra cable. I believe iiNet leave interleaving ON and this may be causing the couple of extra milliseconds in latency.

As far as throughput goes, again, the performance is outstanding. From Agile CBR to Sydney:

122mb.bin 100% 121MB 3.8MB/s 00:31

That’s 3.8 Megabytes per second! Just over 30 Mbps. A traceroute shows it is going to AAPT and not PIPE.

Web Hosting

In terms of actual packages for the new Sydney datacenter, we decided to simply make it an option on the Velocity, Kinetic, and Momentum packages. When people sign up, they are now presented with the option of the datacenter:

Game Servers

With a location such as Sydney, it was hard to not think of offering Game Servers for Australian players. Sydney is perfectly located between Queensland and Victoria, which means the majority of Australians will get sub 20ms latencies to our Sydney servers.