Blog - Voxel dot Net, Inc.

Zachary Smith Talks up the Managed Internet Route Optimizer TM (MIRO), an Expanded Network, and New Hardware

Fri, 25 May 2012 08:49:00 -0400

Q&A With Zachary Smith on the Managed Internet Route OptimizerTM (MIRO), an Expanded Network, and New HardwareIn this, the first edition of our "Friday Geek" series, Zac Smith talks about the technological impact of Voxel's recent acquisition Internap and why the marriage is a fortuitous one for both companies' customers - and for the team at Voxel. (For one, the newlyweds got to experience the geek equivalent of registering for fancy china - they went shopping for the next generation of servers.)

Q: The Managed Internet Route OptimizerTM (MIRO) platform is a product that sets Internap, and now Voxel, apart from its competitors. Can you tell us why it's so special?

A: The MIRO platform is one of Internap's secret sauces. It constantly monitors the entire Internet for the best route between any and all locations. And then it adjusts dynamically using some pretty advanced code so that the end user gets the absolute best delivery experience.

We're really excited to see how Voxel's approach to network services, which has been about building web scale and large pipes for delivery can be improved by leveraging the MIROsant platform.

Q: The combination with Internap means Voxel's customers now have access to six data centers around the world. Why is that significant?

A: One of the things Voxel was never able to do was to provide all the data center services or acquire all the data center assets we wanted to. For any hosting company, data centers are your lifeblood. They need to be strategically located at core Internet points, and they have to stay online all the time - twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. Internap is an expert at building Internet infrastructure all the way down to its data centers, and we now have premier sites in Santa Clara, Dallas, New York, Atlanta, Singapore, Amsterdam, where we're able to leverage our platform.

Q: Why does it matter where a server is located? Why Amsterdam, Singapore, Santa Clara, New York, Atlanta, and Dallas?

A: There are key points throughout the Internet where people exchange traffic. These points are critical. They're where all the networks meet. They're where everyone wants to put their data centers and wants to put their servers. And the great thing about Voxel and Internap's new combination is that we're really covering all the hot spots. We're pretty excited to be offering our entire platform from cloud servers on demand to our dedicated servers to managed hosting and content delivery in [around] the world. You've got the West Coast, center, and East Coast of the U.S., plus Europe and Asia, pretty much covered.

Q: Have you visited any of the data centers? What are they like?

A: The great thing about these data centers is they look really cool. When you go and visit an Internap data center, you're immediately impressed by the security services around it. You've got to go through the many gates, the sign-in sheets, the whole shebang - but once you get inside, you see what's being guarded. You see the P-NAP, and you see where all these networks are connecting and delivering tens of gigabytes of traffic across the Internet, as well as just the overall quality and build of the Internap facility. There's a huge amount of pride in these places. And we're really excited to be a premier tenant.

Q: How has the combination with Internap given you free reign to indulge your inner geek?

A: Here at Voxel, we really like servers. We play with them every day. We read everything from Slashdot to Tom's Hardware to try and suss out the next generation model to get to our customers. Essentially, we're a little bit nerdy about servers.

One of the great things about being acquired by Internap is it gave us a mandate to go out and build a large amount of infrastructure for the increased demand. The cool thing about that is: We get to buy a lot of servers. So we were able to pick and choose the absolute latest platforms, new chipsets from the different providers, memory configurations, and the latest in hard drive technology whether that was SSDs or flash memory. It's going to be very cool to bring these cutting-edge platforms to our customers at a really incredible price point.

Deploying Cloud and Dedicated Servers in Internap's Santa Clara, California Data Center

Tue, 08 May 2012 23:52:00 -0400

Here at Voxel, we’ve always wanted a California datacenter -- something close to the Silicon Valley tech hub where so many of our startup and web 2.0 customers live, work and sell. But as a New York-based infrastructure company, with only 50 employees and a lot going on, we were never able to cost-justify deploying enough gear and staffing enough smart guys and gals in California to make the jump. All that changed a few months ago when we became part of the Internap team -- suddenly a West Coast hosting facility was an eminent reality. Internap has a company owned, top tier data center in the heart of Santa Clara, CA and a good portion of the cloud engineering and managed hosting support teams work out of the office space.

About Mission Road

The Internap Santa Clara facility is located strategically in the heart of Silicon Valley, a few shorts miles away from the original “super” datacenters. This hyper-connected silicon valley datacenter building has been built to the highest standards of availability and safety by an Internap “DC Ops” team that is truly second to none. The facility boasts:

Utility power via 2 discrete electrical grids and substations (PSE&G and Silicon Valley Power)
3 x 1.5 Megawatt Caterpillar generators, 4 x Liebert 750kVa UPS systems and true A/B power redundancy
2 x 1100 ton cooling towers and redundant, N+1 condensed water cooling systems
36,000 square feet of raised datacenter floor space

Overall, the Voxel team couldn’t ask for a better place to rack and stack a few thousand servers and power our cloud and on-demand dedicated server offerings.

The Internap Crew

When you work in data centers all day long like I do, you really start to appreciate the people who build and maintain these huge, always-on, “never-can-fail” facilities. It takes a special breed of engineer to spend a majority of their waking hours inside a temperature controlled box of power circuits, fiber connections and whirling fans -- and like it! But I can tell you from experience that it makes all the difference in the world when you, as a customer, show up to install your equipment.

Lucky for me, the Internap Santa Clara team is a truly dedicated group of professional site operators -- the facility is immaculate, the pride in each installed cabinet, cross connect or power receptacle is clear, and the Voxel crew always had extra hands on deck from the data center site crew to help us deploy our West Coast dedicated server and cloud hosting installation. A special shout out to Matt Brown and his DC ops crew in Santa Clara for all of their help -- it looks nice to see you standing next to so many Voxel servers!

Why Geography Matters

A great advantage of having hosting and cloud services around the world, is that we can situate a customer’s hosting installation strategic to their core audience or user group or even data partner (think, financial services for trading apps or latency sensitive applications). With the addition of Santa Clara and Dallas to our existing sites in New York, Amsterdam and Singapore, Voxel provides one of the best hosting footprints available in the marketplace. What’s unique about the Voxel offering is that you can spin up dedicated or cloud hosting environments in all of these global hosting facilities using our desktop tool or online configurator and get the same server specs, performance baselines and pricing model, regardless of location.

A few quick and dirty tests show that hosting in Voxel’s Santa Clara center (powered by Voxel’s peering rich IP backbone and Internap’s Managed Intelligent Route Optimizer™ (MIRO) technology) offers excellent ping times to Internet destinations not only in the Western US, but all the way over to Asia and Australia:

110ms to Tokyo (sony.co.jp)
145ms to Australia (australia.gov.au)
180ms to Singapore (starhub.com)
70ms to New York (nyse.com)
40ms to Texas (texas.gov)
20ms to Seattle (washington.gov)
4.5ms to San Francisco (berkeley.edu

And with California being the top Internet using state in the US (which is itself, the top Internet using country in the world) it's good to be so close to so many eyeballs.

New Locations, New Servers, New Configurator

Tue, 01 May 2012 09:09:00 -0400

5 Global Locations Now Online

It’s an exciting time for the guys and gals over at here Voxel. In the past 90 days, we’ve accomplished more infrastructure building than we ever had the chance to do before joining forces with Internap. It feels like only yesterday that we were talking about how cool it’d be to open up a hosting center in Texas -- sure enough, a few months later we’re off to the races and selling some awesome new configurations of our instant and customized servers in the Lone Star state (and a few other locations to boot!).

As of last week, you can now order Voxel’s VoxSERVER dedicated servers and VoxCLOUD virtual compute instances in 5 global locations:

New York, NY
Dallas, TX
Santa Clara, CA
Amsterdam, NL
Singapore, SG

With these locations, Voxel now covers the globe with a consistent set of infrastructure offerings -- available via either monthly or hourly pricing plans -- and a global, top-notch hosting support team to back them up.

Now with Internap’s Performance IP™ Technology

Voxel has always been a believer in the power of the network -- in that an incredible hosting environment is only as good as the network that it’s built upon. That is why we’ve invested millions over the years building one of the largest Tier-2 backbone and peering networks in the hosting industry. With these new locations, we’ve upped the ante on that by successfully integrating Internap’s Managed Internet Route Optimizer™ (MIRO) technology (the secret sauce behind their Performance IP™ product) into the Voxel network. The results are awesome -- faster paths than ever along with 2 x Gigabit uplinks per server, 100% burstable connections and Voxel’s industry leading SLA.

New Configurations!

One of the cooler aspects of building a new hosting center from scratch is that you can get the “latest and greatest”. For the gadget guys over here at Voxel, that’s pretty much like having Christmas come early -- trying out new server motherboards, checking out the latest chipsets and benchmarking new memory configurations is all part of the fun. In the end, we have started with two new server lines, in 1U and 2U configurations, that leverage the latest Intel chipsets:

Dual Processor Configurations are built on the Intel E5-2600 series, LGA2011 chipset configuration

Up to 256GB of ECC DDR3 RAM
8 x SATA, SAS or SSD Hard Drives OR 24 x SAS Hard Drives
Hardware LSI RAID or SAS Controller Support
Dual Power Supply for full power redundancy (A/B Power)

Single Processor Configurations are built on the Intel E3-1200 series, LGA1155 chipset configuration

Up to 32GB of ECC DDR3 RAM
4 x SATA, SAS or SSD Hard Drives
Hardware LSI RAID or SAS Controller Support
Single Power Supply

We’ll be adding more configs in the coming months and looking forward to bringing even more flexible and powerful servers to our customers.

On Sale Now

These machines are on sale now through our brand new web-based configurator and start at $179/mo. We encourage you to kick the tires, price out some of our new machines and give us any feedback via live chat or to sales@voxel.net. We’ll be running some specials in the coming weeks, so make sure to follow us on twitter via @voxeldotnet or keep subscribed to our blog!

Attention Windows Users - Recent RDP is Critical to Patch

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 13:53:32 -0400

A recent security vulnerability announcement has caused quite a stir at Voxel dot Net this week and poses as a serious threat to our Windows Server users.

Microsoft has recently announced that they’ve patched a high risk exploit in their Remote Desktop protocol (MS12-020) that affects all major server versions deployed on Voxel servers this week. The vulnerability in the Remote Desktop protocol allows remote code to be executed that can be used to infect the machine with malware, worms, and compromise the overall security of the system.

"This type of vulnerability is where no user intervention or user action is required and an attacker can just send some specially crafted packets or requests, and because of which he or she can take complete control of the target machine.”., Amol Sarwate, director of Qualy's vulnerability research lab, said in an interview with Ars Technica.

This bug affects all versions of Windows XP and higher, including Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. Some Chinese websites have shown some proof-of-concept code that tries to exploit the bug. As of right now, the system will simply crash, however, Microsoft and security researchers warned that it expects malicious hackers to exploit the flaw within 30 days, and that the critical vulnerability could be exploited to spread a worm automatically between unpatched computers.

We at Voxel urge our Windows customers to patch their systems through Windows Update as soon as possible. Once exploited, the system and it's data could lose its integrity and will be difficult to recover.

Should you have any questions, or require any assistance, please do not neglect to contact our 24 x 7 support team by emailing us at support@voxel.net.

Apache Releases 2.4 -- Stable NGINX competitor finally here?

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 07:39:00 -0500

Yesterday, the Apache Foundation let loose it's first major release of the apache web server since 2.2 was put out in 2005. I think it's pretty fair to say that the Internet has changed a bit since 2005 -- and it was time for a major refresh of the world's most popular http server. You can see Apache's announcement here.

At Voxel, we support, tune and scale some of the web's largest Internet sites. In doing so, we've found an increasing need to replace or augment Apache's HTTP with a web or proxy server more purpose-built for speed of delivery of simple HTTP connections. We've often implemented NGINX or Varnish to service end-user HTTP connections and relegated Apache to backend functions or more generic workloads. These alternative HTTP servers bring with them a host of features around caching and proxy management that Apache hasn't, until now, been able to support.

Apache has been known as the "gold standard" in stability and compatability in web servers since I started in the web hosting world in 2001 -- but the demands of increased traffic, faster end user experience and more complex web pages have pushed the envelope of what Apache could do compared to newer entrants in the market. In fact, as of January 2012, NGINX overtook IIS as the #2 web server for active sites on the Internet - clocking in at about 10% of active websites. With that said, Apache is still king, commanding an impressive 65% of all active sites and looking through the new feature list, I'm pretty excited to see Apache gain ground on some of the most wanted additional bells and whistles for performance.

We'll be testing out this latest build of Apache in our lab and looking for inclusion in the Voxel Server Environment (VSE) OS build. We'll keep you posted.