The New Unified Network

After the very successful network maintenance last night, we now have a single unified network. There is no more performance or standard network, it is just the Steadfast Networks network. Overall, this has greatly decreased the complexity of our network and gives us more flexibility overall. Already, this change has increased our internal network capacity and greatly improved our resiliency to DDoS and similar attacks.

Now that we have a single network, we are establishing a single group of carriers, to provide the same high level of service our performance network customers have come to expect. Over the past year we have been greatly expanding our own peering relationships, and once Comcast peering is added in the next couple days, we will be peering off nearly 50% of our traffic, greatly reducing our demand on full Internet transit. Since the demand for full transit is greatly reduced, we will be reducing the total number of carriers, though we will still be utilizing top quality providers and still primarily based on the two Tier 1's we have stuck with since the beginning, Level(3) and Savvis. Level(3) and Savvis will be supplemented by nLayer, who gets us Global Crossing routes, and TeliaSonera and all network traffic will still be optimized by our InterNAP FCP.

As for a timeline, the network are already unified, nLayer and TeliaSonera 10 GigE lines are up and running and our various GigE's to private and public peers will be complete when our connection with Comcast is fully configured, which should be today or tomorrow. All that is left then is adding our Level(3) 10 GigE, upgrading our Savvis circuit to a 10 GigE circuit, and finishing configuration changes on the InterNAP FCP, as it still hasn't caught up from all the changes last night. We are hoping to have all of these things completed by this time next month.