About our Network Infrastructure
Our network is designed for maximum speed and availability. Our attention to detail delivers a quality of service that is second to none.
Melbourne operates from two Manchester datacentres; Reynolds House being our primary facility, and Greenheys being our backup facility.
Network Infrastructure
Melbourne operates a fibre-optic metropolitan area network spanning four facilities in Manchester, connecting our two datacentre facilities to the internet.
We connect to four upstream bandwidth providers at three different facilities, giving us complete independence from the failure of any bandwidth provider or facility.
The below diagram shows our network connectivity between facilities and the upstream providers to which we connect.
Download a printable network diagram.
All critical hardware, such as routers and firewalls is duplicated, meaning that the failure of an individual piece of hardware will have little or minimal impact on the overall running of the network. We run BGP4 on our network meaning we can balance traffic between multiple upstream providers, dynamically changing routing based on the quality of routes received.
Monitoring
We take our network uptime and stability very seriously. As such, we have several levels of monitoring in-place to ensure that any issues are discovered at the earliest possible point.
We have structured our network such that any single component failure should not be service-compromising, giving us time to correctly repair or replace any failed parts.
Our network is monitored internally, which includes every single router, switch, firewall and server. Any outages are notified to us instantly by e-mail and SMS to our on-call engineer.
As a second line of checks, our key routers and services are monitored by an external monitoring server, from an external datacentre. We also monitor our internal monitoring server from here.
As a third line of monitoring, we monitor all edge routers through an external service, which checks from a total of five UK and world-wide locations. This gives us extra visibility that our own monitoring would not necessarily be able to achieve.
Our monitoring notifies us by both email and SMS.
For further peace of mind, we monitor saturation on links, with alerts being generated if critical links are acting unusually. This allows us to very quickly see any potential issues which may be arising, for example attacks, or compromised machines.
Customers can raise support tickets using our online site at http://support.melbourne.co.uk. High-priority tickets, when raised, page support engineers to respond day or night. Furthermore, all customers are given our emergency number, which can be used to contact us twenty-four hours a day should a service-affecting issue occur.
We also operate an off-network status site at http://www.melbournestatus.co.uk. This site allows customers to check our service status without needing to call us. Any known issues or maintenance work is posted onto this site.
About Melbourne
