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UPS and Natural Gas Generator Power Backup
All of our servers are protected by high-end Liebert UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) battery power backups, able to sustain our network for much longer than is needed for our natural gas generators to become activated. Our generators utilize a constant supply of natural gas and, as such, are able to supply power indefinitely in the event of an extended power outage, although this is extremely unlikely particularly due to our reliable power supply from a public sector utility.
Virtually all competing services either do not have power backup generators or use generators with a fixed fuel supply (gas, diesel, etc.), causing your website to go down during an extended power outage.
Ethernet Power Controllers
If a server is not responding properly, the typical procedure is to determine what has occurred to bring it to that state. However, if the server software is no longer responding whatsoever, this procedure is typically not feasible and will result in more than acceptable downtime. In this case, a reboot is required. The preferred method for rebooting a server is a standard "soft" Windows Shutdown. However, if the server is completely non-responsive, a physical power restart is required. To minimize downtime, operations staff should be able to remotely reboot a server, any time, day or night.
LFC Hosting's Ethernet power controllers provide LFC with the unique ability to automatically monitor power status and remotely reboot servers, further increasing reliability and uptime through: - As the central power control point, our Nagios-based advanced Network Monitoring System automatically monitors, logs, reports, notifies, adjusts and controls the power status of all servers. Nagios can also reboot servers itself in the event of serious errors that cannot be resolved on the software end, bringing them back up in a quicker manner than competing services that rely on "on-call" staff to restart malfunctioning servers.
- LFC's operations staff has the ability to reboot servers instantly anytime and from anywhere, even if they are not at a computer.
- Scripted (by design) reboots for load balancing enable a redundant server to easily turn off a malfunctioning peer in the same pool (ie. providing the same service), allowing it to take over completely until the malfunctioning server comes back up again. Scripted reboots also serve as temporary fixes for known conditions.
These advanced devices are much more reliable and scalable than similar devices used by competing services that communicate over telephone and power lines. These less reliable devices require extremely "clean" lines to communicate properly, while computer fans cause a significant amount of "noise" on power lines and therefore interfere with their ability to communicate correctly. Furthermore, their communication cannot pass through UPSes (Uninterruptible Power Supplies) or isolated circuits, one of several serious scalability bottlenecks.
LFC's rack-mountable power controllers communicate over standard Ethernet, and possess built-in web servers, allowing for easy integration with our centralized Nagios monitoring system.
Moreover, multiple Ethernet power controllers can be tied together using Hyperlinks, allowing for easy centralized management as the data center grows, and they feature redundant power supplies for increased reliability.
Lastly, LFC's Colocation customers can also remotely manage the power to their own servers, and easily reboot them in the event that they become inaccessible.
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