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Tuesday, 18 November 2008 12:22 |
We’d like to take a moment to draw some attention to our Renewable Energy Offset Program. This voluntary initiative lets our customers contribute a small monthly cost to ensures their colocation installation runs on renewable energy. Waveform Technology matches all customer contributions.
We started this program a few months ago as a way to give more options to our customers. We were interested in increasing the percentage of renewable energy used in our Michigan Data Center, but we also knew the costs would be higher. Unwilling to force new costs onto our customers, we developed the Renewable Energy Offset Program, which allows interested customers to get involved.
The costs of joining ensure that your servers are powered by renewable energy from DTE’s Green Current’s program. Green Currents generates power through wind turbines and biomass waste. The cost to the customer, however, only covers the power used by the equipment. Waveform Technology matches all customer investment, so heat rejection also uses renewable energy.
For more information about Waveform Technology’s Renewable Energy Offset Program please visit this page. |
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Thursday, 06 November 2008 12:20 |
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Waveform temporarily removed Level (3) from our peering pool today due to a Detroit outage in their network. Customer traffic was still able to route through XO and Cogent and there were no service interruptions.
It looks like Level (3) experienced a fiber cut in their Detroit Chicago link. Their network failed over correctly onto a protect path; however, this link was unable to handle the increase in bandwidth, causing some packet loss. For these reasons, Waveform took proactive measures to move traffic off Level (3) and onto our remaining two upstreams.
Level (3) has now stabilized their network, and we’ve reestablished our peering arrangement with them.
Events like this are why Waveform’s network is multihomed locally in Detroit. It makes us agile in the face of upstream network outages and we’re able to ensure our customers remain online. We also are unaffected by carrier disputes, like the one Cogent and Sprint are currently in the middle of. If you're a Waveform customer and are still experiencing problems on Level (3) routes, please inform us. If you're not a customer, and need protection from even tier 1 carrier outages, please contact us today to learn how Waveform Technology can help your business. |
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Friday, 24 October 2008 13:03 |
Power quality is probably one of the most important factors that can affect equipment reliability in a datacenter. Poor power quality can adversely affect customer equipment as well as network infrastructure equipment and can be the basis for downtime or service degradation.
Waveform Technology takes power quality issues very seriously. We work closely with DTE Energy, our local commercial power utility and the MPSC, the Michigan Public Service Commission, to ensure that incoming utility power is within specifications.
The power to our building is fed primarily underground, from the DTE/ITC Chestnut Substation, one of the largest substations in the DTE Central System. This substation itself is fed from multiple Transmission level circuits, and can withstand multiple levels of emergency contingency without failure.
"You can't optimize what you can't measure." This is why Waveform Technology employs multiple Dranetz disturbance analyzers and power quality monitors on both the incoming utility power, and the outputs from our internal UPS units. We keep logs of wave shapes, high frequency noise, power harmonics as well as voltage, current, and power factor.
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Thursday, 16 October 2008 16:00 |
One of the tools we at Waveform commonly use is fixedorbit.com. This site is a great free resource for anyone interested in either the Internet as a whole, or specifically a particular network.
Fixed Orbit gives a unique overview of the Internet by showing the relationships of the particular networks within it. It’s similar to a roadmap, in that you see which networks are connected to each other (or peer with each other).
This is particularly important when looking for a data center provider. Some data centers only have one upstream, and this will show up as only one peer on Fixed Orbit. Beware of data centers like this, as they cannot remain online in the event of a carrier interruption. Reliable data centers will always have multiple upstreams for reliability.
You can find Waveform Technology on Fixed Orbit by searching for our Autonomous System Number (ASN): AS25767 |
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