The Gestalt hosting facilities located in Hickory, North Carolina, consist of two physically separate buildings interconnected via our private 622Mb synchronous optical fiber ring (SONET.)  We designed, installed, and terminated the fiber, which consists of two cables, a 256 fiber multimode, and a 96 fiber singlemode. Sprint Communications is delivering all of our telecommunications services locally via the SONET. One pair of multimode fibers will support approximately 200Mbps, and one pair of the singlemode will support in excess of 1Gbps data transfer between the Network Operations Centers, or NOCs.

NOC-1 is the primary facility and NOC-2, the secondary.  We provide redundancy within both facilities, of course, but we designed NOC-2 as an entire backup facility in the event NOC-1 were to go down, or vice versa.  Our team's collective experience in enterprise class distributed systems architecture dictated that we over-engineer the NOCs to minimize potential downtime that could otherwise result from power failure, equipment overheating, fire, or loss of internet connectivity due to accidental cuts, hacking, or otherwise. Both NOCs have conditioned power with UPS, and propane generator backup, facility alarm systems, robust HVAC systems with heat sensors and alarms, firewall security systems, and redundant internet backbone connections.  Both are designed to allow for a catastrohic failure such as the complete destruction of one building with complete and instantaneous failover to the other.

The redundant network paths consist of dual fractional DS-3's, one terminating at KMC Communications in Hickory, NC, and the other at SprintLink in Relay, MD. 

The Local Area network is heterogeneous in nature as it is designed with best-of-breed hardware.  It is pure switched 100Mb (full and half duplex) Ethernet between all end nodes and the WAN router.  We have also employed a completely autonomous 10Mbps switched Ethernet network dedicated to backups so that this critical data would not be hindered or forced to compete with production or communication traffic.

The entire network is SNMP manageable down to the Ethernet port level. All routers, switches, uninterruptable power supplies, etc., can be managed remotely if necessary.

For security reasons, our Firewall architectures will not be discussed here, but extreme measures have been taken to protect all corporate databases.  Again, our collective wisdom in real world enterprise networking is evident in our security strategies, but we will never become complacent in this area.