The Fubra Blog
First Mac Mini BGP routers on world's largest Internet exchange
We think this could be a world’s first: Forget Cisco or Juniper, yesterday we hooked up two Mac Mini boxes running Quagga in to the London INternet eXchange (LINX) to act as BGP border routers for the Fubra Network.
LINX handles 95% of total UK Internet traffic, and as their newest members we had to come up with a clever solution to keep costs low and speeds high. Utilitising just 3U of rackspace, we were able to install 2 low latency HP gigabit switches and a pair of 1.83 GHz Mac Minis with 2 GB Ram, giving us fully redundant connections to the largest Internet Exchange Point in the world.
Fubra loads up on RACK
Things are getting a bit busy now on the Fubra network which was part of the reason for our LINX membership that we announced last week. With all the traffic we are getting it will be great to pay less to get our data onto the ISP’s networks our users come from but it left us thinking what about the extra servers we are going to need.
As anyone running a lot of web servers knows well the old model of pricing based on space is now mostly out the window and now the major consideration in data centres we look at is power. We are fairly power hungry customer already as you might expect with the site of our network so we have been doing a lot of research and development work to try and reduce our power costs which are growing with us.
Up until recently we had focused on the software and platform solution side of things. By virtulising our hardware demand we have been able to get the best out of our current servers and turn machines that we are not using off and on via our network. This has made a huge difference for us but our hardware when on still sucks a lot of power. We needed a hardware partner that was as obsessed about hardware saving power as we were about optimising our code to be more efficient.
Well we found them, Rackable Systems, and we have just made a huge investment in two new racks of servers. They have lots of advantages over the current batches of 1U servers we are using at the moment but the most exciting part is that they can pack a load more servers into the same space and because the servers run on DC power which is converted from AC only once at the top of the rack and the cooling is very cleverly designed. So we will be saving power and therefore money as well as saving space and therefore more money.
It’s pretty wonderful news because it means we will be able to deliver the services we are working on at a lower cost and so I am very excited about taking delivery of the racks.
I think they may have a new customer for life because the latest product ‘a data centre in a container’, just released called Concentro, is definitely what we are aiming for as we grow.
Fubra is now a LINX member
We are pleased to announce today that we have been preliminarily accepted as a member of the London InterNet Exchange which means that we will be placing our networking equipment right at the heart of the UK intenet in Telehouse North building docklands and this means we pay less money to deliver web and voice content straight to end users from our web sites and those of our clients.
It also means their customers will get to see our web sites faster and will experience lower latency times when accessing content on our network.
By joining we are contibuting to the IWF (Internet Watch Foundation) and LINX acts as lobbying group to help influence decisions on the direction of the development of Internet technology and policy.
We are pleased that we have been accepted into LINX and look forward to working with other members to ensure both our customers and theirs benefit.
Ripe Allocation 87.124/15
We have now been allocated a /15 subnet from RIPE in line with our ongoing expansion of telecommunication and hosting services.
inetnum: 87.124.0.0 - 87.125.255.255 netname: UK-FUBRA-20050808 descr: Fubra Limited country: GB org: ORG-FL12-RIPE admin-c: BREN1-RIPE tech-c: NIGE-RIPE status: ALLOCATED PA mnt-by: RIPE-NCC-HM-MNT mnt-lower: FUBRA-MNT mnt-routes: FUBRA-MNT mnt-domains: FUBRA-MNT source: RIPE # Filtered
ADSL2+ trials in the UK
Now that Fubra Limited has obtained RIPE membership, we are a step closer to become a full ISP and can now confirm that we are investigating the possibility of trialing an ADSL2+ service in the Farnborough and Aldershot areas.
Anyone who lives in those areas and would be interested in signing up to this pilot ADSL2+ service should contact paul@fubra.com.