News & events

29/01/10

Combell opens its third data centre with extremely high availability thanks to a unique multi-data centre concept

For business critical applications or websites, the slightest failure can be a disaster. That is why Combell offers its customers a unique “high availability” architecture that remains functional even in case of multiple failures. The newest option is an installation shared over two different data centres, which is additionally transparent to the public.

Combell keeps pushing the boundaries in terms of reliability. “In order to be able to offer even more business critical hosted solutions, we keep investing in high quality hardware, a fault-tolerant architecture and a unique multi-data centre concept”, says Combell CTO Benjamin Jacobs.
“This approach opens a whole new world of solutions, which allows us to offer extremely high SLA guarantees, possibly combined with virtualisation technologies”.

Combell implemented this new network in April this year and split its network in two by connecting the new site in Zaventem (InterXion) to the existing site in Diegem (LCL). The last 4 months, we tested everything thoroughly, achieving very positive results. This also allowed us to prove that in case of failures, both in terms of electrical power and connectivity, the solution always remained 100% available to the public.
 
Focus on quality and energy efficiency
In addition to the still current plans to build its own data centre in Ghent, Combell, the largest independent hoster in Belgium, invested in a new heavily secured data centre space at InterXion, in Zaventem, that was set up as the third data centre besides the already existing two locations in Diegem and Vilvoorde. InterXion meets very high standards in terms of access security, current supply, cooling and network connectivity. As a consequence, their vision of a high quality infrastructure fits perfectly with Combell’s vision.

Not only is quality guaranteed, the ecological aspect is also taken into account. Besides the efforts that the InterXion data centre already made in terms of energy efficiency, Combell went a step further.

“Thanks to an intensive engineering that Combell had implemented, we now achieved an even lower Power Usage Effectiveness ratio (PUE). We did this among others by significantly investing in the complete separation of warm and cold air (Cold Aisle Containment systems) and by choosing energy efficient hardware. In addition, we also invested in a data centre engineering team that is exclusively specialised in data centre capacity management.”
 
BGP, the egg of Columbus
Combell’s multi-data centre approach is currently unique in Belgium.
“Since we manage our edge routers ourselves, we use the BGP technology in order to guarantee the availability of the Combell network between the data centres. The great difference with the traditional multi-data centre approach is that we use BGP technology in order to guarantee a higher uptime, contrary to solutions that use the Domain Name System (DNS) to switch between two data centres. In fact, you can regard this as an installation shared over 2 locations that behaves as a single logical network.

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) allows to keep the internal complexity hidden from the public. Minor or major modifications are effective immediately, contrary to the traditional DNS method. Sometimes, it can take up to a few minutes to several hours for the DNS modifications to be spread all over the world. With Combell’s solution, each modification is effective immediately.”

Dark fibre
In order for this innovating technology to be possible, Combell has its own dark fibre connection with a capacity of 2 x 10 Gigabit between both data centres. This connection is a fully redundant loop that allows both data centres to be interconnected via two geographical paths.

“Even if one of both paths fails (e.g. due to road works), both data centres remain interconnected. Both paths also have different physical entrances to the data centres”.

Combined with virtualisation, servers can be moved in no time between both locations, without the public noticing anything. That offers a wide range of possibilities, e.g. to switch transparently in case of a serious failure.

Now, we are in an even better position to offer a solution to our customers who have extremely business critical applications”, concludes Benjamin Jacobs.

Click here for more information on the press release about the unique multi-data centre concept

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