Enterprise-class Servers

Hosting security and stability is a vitally important issue for every business website. Your site must be available, protected against external threats and protected by an effective backup and disaster recovery system.

The DogHouse enterprise-class server system is a private cloud system built with quality IBM hardware. Cloud hosting enables us to dynamically respond to your server requirements while remaining cost effective and secure.

This state of the art server platform uses a VMware operating system which is superior to other hosting solutions because your site is hosted as if it were installed on a self-contained computer with its own set of programs and hardware resources.

The backbone of the DogHouse system is a Storage Area Network running on an IBM DS3500 storage array, with 6GB SAS for node interconnects because this network scales well and is more cost effective to run. The host nodes for the VMware cluster are all IBM enterprise-class servers.

Networking is enabled through a combination of Cisco switches and Fortinet firewalls and we have two of everything configured in failover mode, so should something fail, the other invisibly takes over.

Backup and recovery are particularly efficient on our system. For backups, we have two Iomega NAS units, one hosted locally, the other at a Disaster Recovery facility. This allows us to backup our entire server infrastructure using Veeam both locally, for regular backup and restoration purposes, and offsite in the event of a total catastrophe at the primary data centre. This means we can back up the entire servers, not just the files on them, and can get back up and running in hours instead of days or weeks.

DogHouse also offer additional security services at the hosting level, including host-based intrusion detection systems, security patch auditing, and firewall monitoring and auditing.