Infrastructure

Our high availability infrastructure is designed and configured with many layers of redundancy and a highly customized architecture to prevent any interruption to your ability to access your email from anywhere at any time.

Feature
High Speed Internet Access
A multi-homed network with DS3 to OC12 connections through AT&T, Qwest, Sprint, Time Warner, UUNET, and WilTel provides fast, reliable connectivity.
Conditioned, Redundant Power
Redundant N+1 UPS power supplies and an on-site diesel generator that can run indefinitely. Individual servers also use redundant, hot swappable power supplies.
Standard Linux Technology Basis
We use: RedHat Enterprise Linux, Apache, MySQL, sendmail, Panda IMAP (mix folders), Procmail, and PGP. WebMail and other specialized software running on top of the infrastructure are proprietary, developed by LuxSci.
Redundant Disk Subsystems
We use redundant disk subsystems (Hot Swappable SAS RAID 5 or 10) to protect your data against the possibility of disk failure. In the case of disk hardware failure, your servers will keep running as usual and we can replace the affected disks with zero downtime and zero data loss.
Intrusion Detection Systems
Multi-Stage Email Delivery
LuxSci uses multiple levels of email servers to protect you from mass-emailing viruses and worms and to off-load the effort of spam, virus, and custom email filtering. Unlike many hosts, the email server used for email access and sending is NOT the same as those used for inbound email processing!

See also:

• LuxSci's State-of-the-Art Data Center
• DNS at LuxSci -- Not your "Daddy's" DNS!

High Availability Premium Environment

Our "Premium Environment" is used for premium shared accounts and Premium Private Cloud Servers. This environment provides additional high availability (HA) infrastructure elements:

Feature
High Availability Redundant Hardware Firewalls
Multiple high capacity hardware firewalls configured redundantly so that if any one should fail, the others will automatically take over.
High Availability Redundant Hardware Load Balancers
Multiple high capacity hardware load balancers configured redundantly so that if any one should fail, the others will automatically take over.
High Availability Redundant Network Switching
All network switching is setup using redundant, bonded network interfaces and switches, so that if a network card or cable or switch fails, the network traffic flow to and from the servers will not be affected.
High Availability Central Data Storage
All server data is stored in a centralized storage array that includes: Multiple hot spare drives Small RAID 5 and RAID 10 arrays High overall IO capacity and storage space Redundant processor boards Redundant power Redundant, independent connections to every server This gives large amounts of high capacity, fast disk space. It enables quick recovery from any disk failure and minimizes that chance of multi-disk failure. It also provides high availability through redundant data pathways and processors through the system to the servers.
High Availability Servers
Private Cloud Servers and Premium Shared Servers (as well as other components of our system) are run on VMWare virtual machines running vMotion. This allows the virtual servers to recover instantly from hardware failure on the underlying hypervisor servers. E.g. failure of RAM, CPU, or other inherently non-redundant server components could crash an underlying hypervisor .... but the servers using will be quickly and automatically moved to other hypervisors while the problem one is repaired. This minimizes and mitigates any downtime due to hardware failure.

Redundant Inbound Email Infrastructure

At LuxSci, redundancy is the key to successful email delivery. Our inbound email servers, which are separate from your email storage servers, are set up in a redundant failover configuration so that your mail is always delivered quickly and correctly even if a server fails or becomes unavailable for any reason. In the unlikely event that your email storage server becomes temporarily unavailable, backup spools will automatically queue your mail and retry delivery to ensure that no mail gets dropped or lost and that it gets delivered as fast as possible.

LuxSci uses multiple levels of email servers to protect you from the impact of email floods due to mass-emailing viruses and worms and to off-load the effort of spam, virus, and custom email filtering.

Server Health Monitoring

LuxSci employs extensive server monitoring to ensure the health and reliability of all shared and dedicated servers. This includes:

• Constant remote monitoring of all service ports on all servers to detect service or connectivity issues.
• A custom server health monitoring suite runs on every machine and constantly scans for a vast array of different kinds of problems -- configuration, abuse, etc. -- and either mitigates the problems itself or alerts support so that steps can be taken to ensure that the problem has minimal or no impact on our users.

Email Blacklist Avoidance

While any email server at any provider can be blacklisted easily and without notice, LuxSci's acceptable use policy and monitoring make the blacklisting of LuxSci's email servers a rare event. In the event that a server does get blacklisted, LuxSci has the ability to quickly (within minutes of identifying the issue) re-route email from the affected server around the blocks so that email can be delivered while LuxSci works with the company managing the black list to remove our servers.*

*Applies to customers using our premium (non-bulk) SMTP services, not to our High Volume Outbound Emailing service.