Blacknight Internet Solutions' hosting network was designed with high availability, fault tolerance and security in mind.

We pride ourselves on the fact that our network has achieved 100% production uptime, with provision for scheduled maintenance, since it went live.

At the core of the network we have 4 border routers, connecting us to multiple Tier 1 ISPs. If one or more providers experience congestionor downtime, traffic can be rerouted through other network providers until the issue is resolved.

Multiple providers, including Eircom, Esat BT, ESB Telecoms and NTL terminate their fibre-optic cable in the data centre, while Digiweb,Leap Broadband and Netsource provide wireless connectivity. This allows us to provide connectivity to customers who have their own bandwidth and/or provider requirements.


Security
To Blacknight, network security is paramount. We keep our systems constantly updated, our staff monitor security notifications closely, and we have installed a Cisco Pix enterprise level firewall in front of all our systems.

The Cisco Pix also incorporates a hardware accelerated VPN module,allowing for VPN tunnels with minimal overhead. A number of our customers use the VPN service to establish secure and seamless connections to 3rd parties.

Physical access to the data centre is restricted, while public access is strictly forbidden.

Individuals are only permitted access by prior arrangement and when accompanied by a member of staff, and all visitors are required to sign an access log and provide proper identification upon entry.

All entrances and common areas are monitored with closed-circuit cameras.


Monitoring
We use Up.time tm to monitor all critical network services eg. mail and dns,which provides instant notifications to designated staff by email and sms.

Up.time allows us to perform quick root-cause analysis on any monitored system in the event of any failure.

A full report can be generated for any system for a given timeframe,displaying a detailed graphical analysis of how resources such as memory, CPU, disk and network are being consumed for that timeframe.