Solar Power Web Hosting > Solar Powered Network

Hosting A Cleaner Future
The data center is an environmentally conscious company who cares about our future and our environment. By generating electricity thru the use of solar panels we are able to produce the energy needed without polluting our environment. Our solar panels power both our data center and offices, not like other companies that use energy credits for their servers and/or office. We have invested in the fight to stop pollution and preserving our natural resources.

Power is generated using 120 solar panels located on two large sets of arrays (1), one on each side of our data center. The solar panel arrays face due south, which will generate the most possible amount of electricity. The power from the solar panels is DC, which is converted to AC through our sunny boy inverters (2). After it is converted using the inverters it is stored in our battery bank (3). It then leaves our battery bank and runs through out our data center and offices including the air conditioners (4). In case of an emergency we can get power from our generator but it is not necessary.

Lighting during the day is provided by the use of solar tubes, which bring in the outside light.

The actual solar powered setup is more involved, but this will give you the general idea of how it works.

Redundant Solar Powered Network
This is a basic network diagram of how the data center network is laid out. The data center has three separate Internet backbones running BGP (Border Gateway Protocol), which routes all traffic coming in and out of the network on the shortest possible path. BGP also allows complete redundancy, if one or two Internet backbone links goes down, the other will still handle the traffic. The three separate Internet connections then connect to two redundant Cisco 7200 VXR series routers, which use HSRP (Hot Spare Router Protocol) allowing one to take over the other during a failure. From there, each one goes to separate trunked switches, which allows one to go down and the other will take over. From there, two separate Cisco ASA 5500 series firewalls block all but needed ports and monitor each other, so if one goes down the other takes over. Out from the firewalls the traffic goes to another set of separate trunked switches, which can failover from one to the other if one fails.

At this point the servers connect to these switches in the following fashion. Each server has two dual port NIC cards, one dual port NIC card in each PCI-133 slot. Slot 1's NIC card, first ethernet port is teamed for failover with the first ethernet port on Slot 2's NIC card. And Slot 1's NIC card, second ethernet port is teamed for failover with the second ethernet port on Slot 2's NIC card. Then Slot 1's first ethernet port and Slot 2's second ethernet port is connected to a Cisco Catalyst 4500 series, Switch A-M, and Slot 1's second ethernet port and Slot 2's first ethernet port is connected to a Cisco Catalyst 4500 series, Switch B-M. Each of these two port separate NIC card teams are then teamed together for complete redundancy.



Redundant Solar Powered Servers
All servers are clustered together and each server has two separate SAN HBA cards that give the server redundant conductivity to the SAN. Our Storage Area Network (SAN) is a high-speed sub-network of shared storage devices. These storage devices are machines that contain nothing but RAID hard disks for storing data. The SAN's architecture works in a way that makes all storage devices available to all of the clustered servers. Because the data does not reside directly on any of the clustered servers, any server can go down and the other servers in the cluster will take over and balance the load. The diagram below shows you how each server is connected to the SAN via redundant SAN HBA cards, redundant connections to the SAN switches and redundant SAN system. All of the servers are running within VMWare's virtualization technology to reduce cooling and electrical requirements with a 30:1 ratio of virtual servers to physical servers. For more information on our server technology, click here to look at the dedicated server page, both our servers and the dedicated servers use the same redundant server infrastructure and virtualization technology.