Infrastructure

Our servers are set up in two datacenters: Level 3 in Brussels, Belgium and Grafix Internet in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Level 3 is one of the largest ip carriers on worldwide basis and guarantees a fast internet collection and a professional infrastructure with expansion guarantees for the future. Grafix Internet manages datacenters in Amsterdam and Rotterdam and offers an outstanding connectivity to European network carriers through their own dark fibre ring.

FirstServed rents a personal space where the FirstServed servers and hardware are installed.

Top security

The access to the data centres is completely secure. Aside the 24/7 security, each visitor owns has personal access code linked to a bio-metric palm scan. Apart from these high-technology access verifications there is permanent camera surveillance on a closed circuit. Your data is kept safe, without doubt!

Power guarantees

A crucial link in he maintenance of your server - next to the network infrastructure - is the permanent power supply. Two large diesel generators offer a switch to emergency power in less then a minute, in case of a power disturbance. These generators can keep the entire data centre up and running during 24 hours.

The data centre is equipped with three underground cable feeds to the main electric circuit. In case of power loss, two diesel generators start in less than one minute to ensure 100% power to the facility. Besides the power generators the facility also is equipped with professional UPS systems. Each rack has an A and B power circuit allowing dual power distribution to your server for redundancy. The generators are tested each month.

Fire security

The server rooms are equipped with V.I.E.W. (Very Intelligent Early Warning) fire detection systems above and below the raised floors. Smoke extraction is being triggered by fire alarms and the facility is split up in several sealed, independent compartments. Non-inflammable and low smoke zero-halogen materials were used during construction throughout the buildings where possible.

Climate control

In an environment with a lot of hardware, temperatures may rise. The active climate control keeps the environmental temperature between 20°C and 22°C, the perfect operational temperature for your server hardware.

Backup solutions

Each FirstServed Dedicated server uses RAID 1 or RAID 5 mirroring mode. This means that each hard disk in your server has an exact synchronized copy. If one of both disks would fail, you would still retain your data.
The Advanced Dedicated Servers also use an external hardware RAID controller card for an even higher degree of data recovery.

Aside from RAID 1, FirstServed also disposes of several RAID 5 systems in prodution. These are usually machines combining a heavy server load with a large amount of data storage.

Apart from this form of active storage, we also ise a SAN (Storage Area Network), connected to the FirstServed network by using Gigabit switches. The FirstServed SAN extends the total data storage capacity for active storage and passive backup to 12 Terabytes!

Addresses