The Fubra Blog
Howto: Setup a Mac Mini as a BGP Router
Thinking Differently… An update on our Mac Mini Routers at LINX
We have been quiet for a while on the subject of the mac minis we installed into LINX at Telehouse several months ago…
You may remember the previous article, basically we are using a pair of Mac Mini computers to connect our hosting platform to the LINX Internet exchange in London.
Installing our new Rackable racks
We sent Mark and Nigel (our server gurus) on another mission yesterday: To install one of our new Rackable racks into the Bunker data centre in Kent.
The Bunker is an ex-cold war nuclear bunker that has been converted into a state of the art co-location facility. It’s also one of the three data centres we currently use along with IXEurope Heathrow, and TeleHouse North.
The actual data centre floor is situated 30 metres below ground level, and so the first challenge was to get rack down there by lowering it on a crane lift. Since the rack was so heavy, they had to remove all 38 dual xeon servers and take them down seperately.
Mark was impressed with the overall ease of assembly of the Rackable rack, saying “Stripping down, rebuilding and cabling a rack of 38 servers would normally take at least a full day, if not more. We managed to get from loading bay to power-up in less than 6 hours, including a complete network rewire of the system, 126 patch cables in total.”
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.
Secure FTP it's about time!
I have always been quite annoyed at the web standards FTP is among the worst of them and whilst SSH has had it’s fair share of bad news it is sensible that all web traffic should be secured where possible.
When Paul showed me WinSCP as a great alternative to FTP I was well chuffed mainly because we haven’t really been able to get to our servers via FTP as hardly any run FTP servers but also because I can use my SSH key to authenticate rather than remembering passwords which I almost never use because they are so hard to remember.
The people behind this project should be proud it is definitely one of my favorite apps.