AISO 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 green 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. We are
100% solar
powered and we don't pass the extra
costs associated with going greener to
our clients!
Plus AISO was
featured in Inc.
Magazines' Top 50 Green Companies and was the first public data center member of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC).
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), which we will be getting rid of soon with a new way to be 100% green powered. Look for more information coming soon on how we plan to replace our batteries with a more environmentally friendly alternative. 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.
Hint: Click the left
solar panel above for a live shot of the
left solar panel array.
We are the only
hosting company going beyond just clean energy
We have gone beyond
just making sure our electricity is
environmentally friendly,
click here
to see the many other ways that we are committed to helping
the environment.
Redundant Solar Powered Network
This is a basic network diagram of how our green data center network is laid out. We have three separate Internet backbones; the first backbone
goes through AT&T and is a wired
link. The second backbone goes
through Verizon and Time
Warner and is a
carrier grade wireless FCC
Licensed link capable of scaling
up to 400Mbps. The third
backbone goes through Time
Warner and XO Communications and is a 50Mbps wireless link that we are currently upgrading to a 400Mbps carrier grade wireless FCC Licensed link.
Each wireless dish uses a
different mount peak and ISP POP's/Nodes (Point Of Presence) to provide
redundancy in case of any
failures,
click here to see both wireless
dishes together. All of our
Internet backbones are 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 Switch A-M, and
Slot 1's second ethernet port
and Slot 2's first ethernet port
is connected to Switch B-M. Each
of these two port separate NIC
card teams are then teamed
together for complete
redundancy.
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Redundant Solar Powered Servers
All systems are AMD Opteron powered IBM clustered servers and each
server has two separate SAN cards that give the server
redundant conductivity to our NetApp SAN. Our Storage Area Network
(SAN) from NetApp, 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 cards,
redundant connections to the SAN
switches and redundant SAN
system.
We choose VMware to reduce our energy costs because VMware allows us to use less physical servers then the other competing products such as the popular Virtuozzo. Virtuozzo requires twice the amount of servers to run the same amount of VM's because it virtualizes the OS and not the hardware. For exmaple, if you wanted to have 2 windows servers and 2 linux servers that would require at least two (2) physical servers, one for windows and one for linux. Where as VMware would only require one (1) because it can run both windows and linux VM's on the same physical server. All of the servers are running within VMware's virtualization technology to reduce cooling and electrical requirements with a 40:1 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.
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