Sycamore Solutions Ltd.

High Level Hosting Architecture:

Sycamore’s hosting solution is co-located at the Qwest Cyber Center in Burbank, California. The solution offers Application, WWW, FTP, Telephony, etc. hosting using the deployment of fully redundant and secure telephony and network architecture.

Connection to the internet is over redundant dedicated links over a Tier One Internet service provider’s OC-192 SONET IP. Redundant Routers and Firewalls protect the network from malicious attacks from the internet.

The Network, Network gear, Servers, Telephony circuits and boards, Storage Appliances are monitored and managed by our experienced staff via redundant data circuits back to our off-shore 24x7 Network Operation Center using a suite of applications including:

	Sycamore’s OA&M utilities
	Network Node Manager
	Internet Services
	Cisco’s What’s Up Gold

Sycamore ensures that its Servers and equipment are located in a state-of-art Central Office grade building with climate control, backup power, secure access, dual entrance facilities, and earthquake bracing. The current Sycamore build is located in the upstairs hosting facility that sits above the Qwest Burbank CO, providing Sycamore with the flexibility of a 24x7 hosting facility, as well as a 24x7 Central Office on the first floor.

Sycamore’s network architecture specifically addresses the following types of potential outages:

	Application/Telephony Server Failure
	Telephony Capacity Limits, or Circuit/Switch Failure
	WWW, FTP and Data Base or Media Server Failure
	Network Failure with N+1 Design
	Monitoring and Alarms

WWW, FTP, Application & Telephony Server Details:

Each Server in the network is built by HP for high availability and redundancy. Currently, the servers are all HP Proliant DL360’s, with single or dual processors with varying capacities of memory ranging from 512KB to 4GB based on requirements. Each server has dual Network Interface Cards configured in a bound mode providing not only redundancy but also 200MBits of data bandwidth. Each server also has hot swappable hard drives.

The WWW and FTP servers can be load balanced based on requirements for either automatic or manual failure. Clustering services can be offered if a higher level of redundancy and failure is occurred.

The existing Database servers are setup with real-time replication to provide no data loss and very little down time if any. Clustering services can be offered if a higher level of redundancy and data safety is required.

IP & Telephony Network Failure with N+1 Design:

Sycamore uses the Qwest OC-192 SONET backbone for IP network connectivity. This backbone provides Sycamore the guarantee of a 70-millisecond round trip time for IP packets anywhere on the network. The current build uses redundant and fault-tolerant 100Mbps Ethernet connections that route to redundant network gear, and onto the Qwest OC-192 SONET backbone.

The Telephony Architecture places 2xDS-1 circuits into each Telephony Server, which terminates into Dialogic CSP boards. This architecture allows for broad distribution of calls, over a network that maintains no less than 150% of capacity requirements.

The decision to use the Qwest Burbank Cyber Center was based upon a number of reasons, ranging from:

	Power: Supply is drawn from two separate grids, with full capacity battery back up, and five generators.
	IP Backbone: The Burbank facility was built, as a TerraPOP with an onsite DMS250 and collocation facilities for other Telco’s to build connectivity POPs. The Qwest OC-192 IP, PSTN, and ATM networks built on SONET have multiple rings with diverse paths running into and out of this facility. With the OC-192 SONET rings now closed, there is not any single point of failure in this IP connection.

Inside the Sycamore build out all appliances are deployed in the N+1 architecture. From redundant 100Mbps IP feeds, through redundant routers, firewalls, switches, and multiplexers, the design follows the same fault-tolerant design as is used in Telco grade facilities.