Calpop Network Upgrade
During the past few months, we at Calpop.com have made significant upgrades to our internal network infrastructure. As the largest dedicated and colocated server hosting company in Los Angeles, we have been proud of our fast and stable network for years. Nonetheless, the Internet is growing at an enormous pace, and as such we constantly strive to increase the capacity and processing power demanded by today’s Internet. In order to remain the leader in dedicated and colocation hosting, we recently completed a major overhaul of our network. The following summarizes these changes:
Improved Connectivity
The Internet is constantly growing and becoming the mainstream vehicle for intercontinental connections. We are proactively re-evaluating our upstream backbone providers, promoting better routes through newer providers. Specifically, we’re now considering important applications on the Internet with stringent requirements such as VoIP when selecting providers. This is to ensure the highest performance to meet This is to improve network quality for new technologies such as VoIP.
Uplink Cables
We have also replaced all existing uplinks with new cabling. As well as added a second uplink to each cabinet for redundancy.
Leaf Switches
All cabinets are outfitted with dual gigabit connectivity. This not only provides redundancy in case of uplink failure but ensures that our customers are getting full bandwidth access without their performance being affected by customers sharing the switch. For customers with higher bandwidth or isolation requirements we offer custom-tailored solutions ensuring the highest performance possible.
VLANs
VLANs improves the flexibility, reliability, and overall security of the network. In a nutshell every customer is treated as a separate isolated network. No one may join the network without the customer’s express permission. Isolation begets security; ensuring no one can join and interfere with the network by performing well known man-in-the-middle attacks or causing network disturbances. Lastly VLANs provide significant flexibility allowing customers to scale their network; customers no longer need to renumber or move equipment when scaling up, as we allow access to their network from anywhere within their datacenter using their separate allotted IP address space.
Router
Our aging router has been replaced with a new MX Series Juniper router, allowing for more functionality and control over the network.
Improved Firewall Implementation
With our new vLAN infrastructure, we will be able to add our Managed Firewall Service to any switch port in the data center.
Distribution Switches
Out go our old Summit Extreme distribution switches. We are now using multiple Cisco and Juniper distribution switches to connect our fibre backbone connections to each Leaf Switch.
Redundancy!
Now that each Leaf Switch has two uplinks we setup a stack of Juniper EX Series Distribution switches to mirror our primary Cisco distribution switches. Both the Distribution switches are connected to redundant fibre connections from our backbone providers and each has dual power supplies. This will allow for a seamless switch over in the event that either one of our Distribution switches should fail.
IPv6
Preparations are underway with our backbone providers to implement IPv6 IP addresses.
CalPOP has over 50,000 square feet of world class data center space throughout Downtown Los Angeles, with back-up locations in Dallas and Las Vegas. CalPOP is headquartered at 600 W. 7th Street, Third Floor, Los Angeles, CA 90017. CalPOP is open 24/7/365 and we house thousands of dedicated and co-located servers at its multiple data centers in Downtown Los Angeles.
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