Infrastructure
The reliability and scalability of a managed service begin with its infrastructure architecture. Katharion's customers are supported by a high-performance, low-latency network and software architecture, beginning with the use of redundant, geographically distributed premiere datacenters.
Our facilities
Katharion's primary data center is located in a secure, underground datacenter in Los Angeles in a facility that was initially designed to be the hub of a national banking ATM network. Built at a cost of over $300 million, the facility was engineered for extremely high levels of security and reliability. It features:
- Redundant electrical power feeds from the municipal utility, backed by four 750 kilowatt Liebert UPS modules with 480 batteries to provide continuous uptime in the event of a transition to emergency generator power.
- Four 1100 kilowatt and one 1250 kilowatt Emerson diesel generators connected in tandem, with 90,000 gallons of fuel on-site – enough fuel to power the generators at full load for over a month without the need for refueling.
- Liebert HVAC units consisting of three 1000-ton and two 500-ton centrifugal chillers with four 1500-ton cooling tower cells, roughly quadruple the capacity necessary to cool the entire facility; all units are tied into the emergency generator and UPS system, allowing for cooling to automatically continue in the event of a power outage.
- 24x7 on-site manned security guards, supplemented by a biometric card key access system and video surveillance systems which cover all common areas and entrances as well as the data center, with video backed-up for up to six months.
- Redundant Gigabit Ethernet connectivity to first-tier Internet backbone providers including AT&T, Level3, MCI, Savvis, Sprint, Verio, and Verizon
Our hardware and software
Within the datacenter, Katharion’s local network and software architecture are similarly robust. Messages are routed through redundant load balancers, which automatically direct message traffic to one or more servers within a cluster based on the least busy server within that cluster. Neither the load balancers nor any server within the cluster is a single point of failure.
The software in use is scalable and proven. Katharion's systems are built upon a hardened version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, optimized for the particular demands of high-volume SMTP processing. Katharion uses a combination of other open source software, along with proprietary software components, that reflect extensive development efforts by the Katharion team.
Network Redundancy
Katharion’s primary data center, located on the west coast, is augmented by an autonomous, redundant second facility on the east coast. This distributed architecture provides a highly reliable and scalable network platform for Katharion’s service.
Next: Read about Katharion’s next-generation technology for detecting junk email.
