Datex Intelligent Data Center Services Heralding A New Era in Advanced Internet Operations Technology Background The Internet was originally built as a collection of small networks. First the Universities connected their networks together, then connected with the big telecommunication companies, and then others. As more and more networks began connecting, these NAPs as they're commonly called (network access points) became the points through which Internet traffic was routed. There are several major and hundreds and hundreds of minor NAPs through which Internet traffic may be routed. The network architecture of the Internet, by design, is essentially dumb. Nodes are connected to nodes. Each node and NAP by itself is essentially "dumb" -- essentially handoff points, however the chaos created by the combination of the dumb nodes makes the Internet essentially invulnerable to failing. Denial of service attacks against backbone carriers, human errors at the nodes, misconfigurations, etc.. all occur on a daily basis, however the Internet as we know it remains functioning. This chaotic foundation of the Internet has essentially freed the Internet from single points of failure. It's this chaos that Datex is replicating and adding "intelligence" to a layer above the Internet  - at the Data Center level. The old way of outsourcing data center services As the Internet began to commercialize back in 1994, companies found that outsourcing their Internet Infrastructure was the way to go. It relieved them of technical headaches to manage a 24/7 Internet operations, they lacked the internal expertise to manage sites that were heavily trafficked, they could not keep recruiting the top technical talent necessary to maintain secure Internet presences, and more. Thus sprang the emergence of companies like Exodus Communications - the major facilities companies who specialized in housing servers. A big problem emerged for Companies who colocated their Operations at these facilities however. Rather than take advantage of the Internet's chaotic (and 100% reliable) nature, companies like Exodus themselves became points of failure for Internet Operations. Housing your Internet Infrastructure in one facility, on a single network, or with a single facilities player exposes your Infrastructure to a high degree of vulnerability. The diagram above shows what happens in traditionally outsourced Internet Operations. Your Internet Operations is sitting on the "chaotic" Internet - which is highly invulnerable to failure. However by colocating Internet Operations at a facilities player, like Frontier Communications (Globalcenter) you have again inserted a high degree of risk (the vulnerability of a single point of failure) into your Internet Operations. If the Frontier network were hit with a denial of service attack or some human error leaves routers misconfigured at the facilities, your servers can become unreachable to your customers. It is estimated today that even very good facilities like Frontier's or Exodus' go "down" or unreachable for an average of 30 minutes per day due to common, everyday occurrences like network maintenance,   restarting routers, human errors, etc.. Case in point: AboveNet's Outage The highly publicized outage at AboveNet in February 2000 is case in point. AboveNet's claims of offering a bullet-proof 100% available web presence were thwarted. AboveNet's network was the target of a hacker who flooded their network with incoming traffic (a denial of service attack). The result was that while AboveNet went through common restoration and troubleshooting procedures, all of AboveNet and their customers were offline for 3-4 hours. This included all of their locations on the west coast, east coast, etc.. This spurred many of AboveNet's customers who depend on an always available Internet presence to look for ways in which they could spread their Internet Infrastructures across multiple networks, data centers, and facilities to add redundancy and Insurance against having this type of occurrence lead to lost sales ever again. The ideal solution The ideal Internet Infrastructure for companies with mission critical Internet Operations is one that is deployed in a chaotic fashion across all nodes on the Internet with instant replicas of their content (both static and dynamic) at all locations. This would give that company ubiquitous presence and essentially guarantee them 100% uptime. No single hack attack or denial of service attack on a network would put a halt to their business. Many hosts today offer geographic clustering services to attempt to replicate this chaos, however even clustering is lacking because 1) it does not provide for the instant replication of your static and dynamic content 2) it does not monitor the performance of services on your server, such as checking to see whether your database transactions are being completed, whether your Vignette or Broadvision applications are running properly, etc. To achieve true optimization of Internet Operations, a company must monitor the  performance levels to the servers (internet traffic), the applications that reside on those servers (making sure transactions to Oracle or DB2 databases are being logged for example), and the servers themselves are functioning maximally (high uptime, no disk errors, port conditions, etc.) and be able to proactively provision traffic to the most optimally performing server in the Company's Internet Infrastructure. Datex Intelligent Infrastructure Technology This is where Datex enters the picture. Datex inserts intelligence into Internet Infrastructures using its proprietary technology that has been developed over the course of several years. Datex has found that to achieve 100% uptime, companies need their "presence" spread across a number of networks and facilities and geographic locations, and those extra presences should be "hot" backups of the content that's at the main location. Datex's technology allows companies to decide whether to use those alternate locations as active servers, or passive servers waiting for calamity at the main data centers. Datex's technology automatically monitors the Internet Infrastructure from the perspective of the end-user to ensure that all services and applications are running optimally and that latency times for web surfers are minimal. Datex essentially combines the "chaotic" nature of the Internet with its Intelligent Data Center technology to ensure maximum reliability, hot swappable standby "Insurance Servers" and maximum end-user performance for hosted infrastructures. If your Company offers Service Level Agreements to your end-users, if you cannot afford any downtime, and cannot afford to miss transactions, then you need Datex's Intelligent Infrastructure Technology. Best of all, our technology can be used in conjunction with your current Internet Infrastructure. Contact a Datex sales engineer to see how our high availability solutions can help your Internet Infrastructure - and help you keep disaster from striking.