Mountain Media's Data Center to Get Major Upgrade

In a move designed to dramatically improve service to its Web hosting customers, Mountain Media will soon be expanding the infrastructure of its data center and relocating all its primary servers to the Time Warner Telecom facility in Albany, NY. Mountain Media, founded in 1998 and headquartered in Saratoga Springs, is a provider of integrated Web services, including design, eCommerce applications, payment processing, hosting, and marketing.

James Curley, CEO and co-founder, states, "This is a big move. With our growing base of enterprise-level hosting customers, we could no longer take a chance that service to them might be compromised by power outages or bottlenecks in our bandwidth. By relocating to Time Warner's facility, we greatly reduce the number of potential points of failure in the network. And with our increased capacity, we will be able to meet the IT demands of all our customers for the foreseeable future."

Migration of the company's data services to Time Warner is expected to be complete by April 1, 2004. The immediate benefits to customers include improved response times in serving up Web pages; faster, more reliable Web applications; increased security; less down time for websites; and a much smaller quantity of spam and computer viruses delivered to customers' email addresses.

Among the new hardware features provided by the facility are:

  • Diesel generator backup for uninterrupted electrical power in the event of an extended outage
  • Three diverse OC-48 backbones for better Internet connectivity
  • Redundant fire suppression systems
  • Redundant environment control systems
  • Failover firewalls to beef up the security of the network and further protect it from unauthorized access

According to Scott Fultz, the company's President, "With the addition of several new servers, customers will definitely notice significant performance benefits. In addition, we will be implementing some exciting new technologies to reduce email spam and thwart the proliferation of viruses."

As an example of these technologies, he cited the example of a new FreeBSD-based mail server cluster with multiprocessor server for filtering UCE (unsolicited commercial email) and viruses. An upgraded domain name system has been installed on servers running multiple RBLs (real-time blacklists) to stop UCE - i.e., spam - before it even gets into the mail queue. New multi-processor Web and SQL servers will feature failover and load-balanced configurations to significantly speed up transmission of website content to browsers. And the expanded network infrastructure will now easily support multiple co-located servers for customers who want to host their own websites without having to deal with the expense of maintaining their own hardware on-site.

Any questions regarding this upcoming expansion of services can be directed to Mountain Media at (518) 583-0300.