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How Digiweb’s Customers Survived a Magnitude 7.1 Earthquake Without One Second of Down Time

Digiweb provides web hosting services for a range of New Zealand companies; a number of which run websites that are mission critical to their businesses or provide critical information and services for others. When Christchurch was struck by a magnitude 7.1 earthquake in September 2010, you would have expected that any data centre close to the quake would at the very least have suffered an outage. However, this was not the case for Digiweb. It has worked with Ingram Micro to develop a unique data centre environment that has significantly reduced the business risk for itself and its customers.

Background

Digiweb was established in 1997 as a family-owned, single-site, web hosting company. Good growth over the years resulted in it attracting attention from a then UK-domiciled pair of businessmen looking for an ICTbased opportunity in New Zealand. When Robert Rolls and Adrian Grant bought Digiweb in 2009 it was already a solid little business but there was definitely room for development.

"Quite early on we experienced a two-day outage and decided there was too much risk having a single data centre based in Christchurch. This was the catalyst for discarding the way things had always been done and critically reviewing the people, processes and infrastructure involved," explains Adrian Grant. "We needed to improve our product set while we protected the business for ourselves and our customers."

Solution

Digiweb elected to work with Ingram Micro to protect its business by building a more robust infrastructure. It had used Ingram Micro intermittently for supply up until that point but Ingram Micro won the business by offering exceptional tech support and being the most proactive in its approach with local Solutions Infrastructure Consultant Jeff Maslen. One of the first things Adrian Grant and his team did was to build a new fabric by reducing the number of vendors in the supply chain. "We previously had multiple suppliers for single components in the data centre which was not only unsupportable but counterproductive. Rationalising things back to dedicated suppliers made good sense." Ingram Micro's ability to provide an independent approach to vendor selection proved to be highly valuable.

The decision was then made that, to truly ensure the continuity of business, Digiweb needed to own two data centres in Christchurch but present them as one to the market. DC1 and DC2 in Christchurch are 10 kilometres apart, with two fibre cables linking them in a ring at 10Gbps because the standard 1Gbps results in an unacceptable level of geographic latency.

The company had bought a large SAN some years ago so it didn't make financial sense to buy another. Ingram Micro introduced Digiweb to HP's P4500, a modest but very smart SAN that was also very affordable. Digiweb took advantage of the fact that it also scales incredibly well so it only needed to purchase the capacity that was currently required, adding new nodes as and when they were needed.

Together with Ingram Micro, Digiweb also settled on IBM's BladeCenter H with HS22 Blades and 10Gb Virtual Fabric converged connectivity for both network and storage traffic. IBM's BladeCenter H unique chassis design offers no single point of failure and has two DC power domains for complete 'main frame class' resiliency. This was a major tick in the box for Digiweb and has proven to be rock solid in the face of uncertain power delivery post earthquake.

Outcome

Previously Digiweb offered a dedicated server per customer which, while it offered no conflict or geographical redundancy, was very much a finite resource with the usual risks associated with outages. Most companies would get around this by building a second data centre in Auckland or Wellington but to provide an acceptable level of latency over distance, you need a huge amount of bandwidth, which adds considerable expense and risk for both the data centre owner and user. What Digiweb can now offer is very affordable geographic redundancy, with its own dedicated data fibre link at 10Gb/s, with real-time synchronous SAN data replication between two data centres, irrespective of where the server is located. It is both an affordable and tech savvy solution that in effect stretches clustered storage across multiple sites.

"Aside from human error or a direct hit from an act of God on both sites it is very much ring fencing the risk," explains Adrian Grant. "The data centres operate with separate power supplies from separate sub-stations with separate ISP routes. You would be exceptionally unlucky to take out two sites 10km apart and so long as one site is operating, the data in both centres is secure."

Digiweb did lose a SAN node in the subsequent magnitude 6.3 quake in February 2011 but it was back on line within hours and from an operational perspective everything continued to run seamlessly. Companies hosting critical services infrastructure were ported to Auckland as a precaution and Digiweb has brought forward the replication of its single DC3 site in Albany to copy its Christchurch environment. This gives Digiweb the ability to offer full services in Auckland or clients can choose to split the hosting between Auckland and Christchurch. Digiweb also maintains another data centre, DC4, in Ireland.

Technical specifications

IBM BladeCenter HS22V blade servers
BNT 10Gb Virtual Fabric Switch Module
HP P4500 SAS SAN solution with 26TB available capacity
HP P4300 MDL SAS SAN solution with 32TB available capacity

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