Our Network

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Without a resilient and secure network, the most advanced web applications, server infrastructures and virtualised environments are constantly at risk. From inception, our network has been designed with one purpose in mind: no single point of failure - guaranteeing 100% uptime for our hosting customers.

At the heart of iomart hosting's network infrastructure lies our five UK data centres - located in London, Maidenhead, Glasgow, Nottingham and Leicester. Each data centre is built to exacting standards - guaranteeing resilience and uptime.

Connecting our data centres is a 1 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) fibre ring which provides resiliency and diversity to minimise the impact of a single transit failure. All of our networking exchange hardware is housed in on site dedicated cabinets. Each data centre network hub houses a Cisco Catalyst 7600-series modular switch, dual power supplies and a range of 7600-series fabric-enabled line cards to support both fibre and copper gigabit connections, and 1 Gigabit connections for customers and the fibre ring. Ensuring more of the intra-site switching traffic is transferred from customers without even reaching the switch 40 Gbps backplanes.

All routing equipment is best of breed CISCO. Multiple Tier 1 transit providers including Cogent, Global Crossing and Level 3, provide redundant links and equipment to avoid downtime.

Automatic systems constantly monitor our entire network, transit links and servers. In the event of any problem, our data centre NOC teams are on site 24 hours a day. iomart hosting holds on-site spares for critical equipment which powers our network to assist us in ensuring that we maintain our 100% uptime guarantee.

Traffic

Our network switches over 500 Mbps of traffic at peak times and has 1Gbps of inter-site capacity available at any time. Each of the switches has a 40 Gbps backplane fabric giving an even greater capacity for intra-site switching.

Managed hosting customers have the ability to connect to iomart's network in more than one location to increase their own service resiliency. Our managed hosting customers can pass traffic between their own ports and can even request private VLANs.