Network Capacity Upgrades
Third Fiber Path Improves Redundancy and Speed. New business VPN services available.
St. George, Utah – (April 23, 2010) – InfoWest today announced the completion of a number of major upgrades to its network capacity. The upgrades more than double InfoWest’s bandwidth to the internet and provide a third redundant fiber path out of the area. Additionally, InfoWest core network upgrades will now allow InfoWest to offer carrier-class virtual private networking services to area businesses.
Another First in Southern Utah
Over five years ago, InfoWest became the first Internet provider in southern Utah to utilize dual, redundant fiber-optic paths to the Internet. The dual paths helped them avoid outages when fiber was cut twice in central Utah. Today, a third fiber-optic connection more than doubles their capacity, and adds another layer of resiliency to their network. The new fiber connects to a regional network hub in Salt Lake City from which InfoWest interconnects with top-tier Internet providers. The connection also allows them to better serve businesses that have locations in both northern and southern Utah.
Today InfoWest has one fiber optic internet feed to Southern California and two feeds across diverse geographic paths to separate locations in Northern Utah. Plans are in the works for additional capacity upgrades in the near future.
“We look forward to increased demand for Internet services in this area, and this expanded ‘pipe’ to the Internet will help us stay ahead of the game,” said InfoWest Vice President, Randy Cosby. “We are looking past today’s slow economy so we can be ready to provide reliable, next-generation services tomorrow.”
Core Network Upgrades Expand Business Services
Upgrades to InfoWest’s core fiber-optic network in Washington and Iron counties, as well as their new northern Utah point of presence, allow them to offer full virtual private networks for clients between multiple locations. Using the latest MPLS (Multi-Protocol Layer Switching) technology, InfoWest can inexpensively interconnect multiple office locations, as well as provide increased quality of service for voice, video and internet. InfoWest uses MPLS internally to ensure performance and reliability on their local fiber network. That network feeds wireless towers and fiber-optic internet connections that serve thousands of business and residential customers in the region.
More upgrades are on the way. Plans are in the works to increase the speed of their local core fiber network by 1000%, and additional regional fiber paths are being studied.
About InfoWest
Based in St. George, Utah, InfoWest was founded in 1994 to provide high speed Internet services in areas across the state of Utah. InfoWest offers internet services ranging from high speed T-1, DSL, wireless, fiber-optic access and telephone services for both business and residential clients. The company’s Web site is www.infowest.com.
Contact: Randy Cosby – (435) 674-0165 – rcosby@infowest.com
Network Notice: April 10 Fiber Switch Upgrade
We’ll be performing some maintenance and upgrades on Saturday April 10th @ 3:00am. This will affect customers in St. George, Hurricane and Toquerville on our licensed wireless. Also affected will be some unlicensed wireless customers East of the East Ridge in St. George as well as those served off of our Bloomington Hills tower. Estimated Downtime is 30 minutes.
Part of the upgrade will be installing a new fully-redundant, carrier-class layer3 switch with 10gigE capabilities on our St. George fiber ring and a new battery backup system.
E-Mail Server Upgrades
Posted by Cassidy in Email and Spam, Network Info on March 3, 2010
Today, we’re happy to announce that we’ve just turned up our latest batch of upgrades on our Mail Server Cluster.
As of now, all of the InfoWest inbound and outbound email requests are served by four separate servers. These servers are similar to that which we’ve turned up in the past (DNS, Webmail, etc), in which they’re behind a Load Balancer. If one machine were to die, need maintenance, or become unresponsive, the Load Balancer will automatically pull it out of the queue and requests will be directed towards the other three. Once it is operational again, our Load Balancer will run a few tests for a few minutes and determine if it’s ready to be dropped back into the queue with the others. This also means splitting the load amongst four gives our clients faster email access and response times. You may notice a significant increase in speed when searching your IMAP folders in your email client or via our Webmail.
Sending email through our mail servers, as well as checking via POP3/IMAP means you’re automatically benefiting from the additional redundancy of our front-end load balanced cluster. We’ve deployed two of these servers at our Dixie Drive Data facility, and the other two in our racks at the Tonaquint Datacenter. Should one site go offline, your email will still flow and be reachable.
We’ve also recently deployed redundant load balancer cards in our diversely located Cisco 6500 switches. In the event one of the Load Balancer cards needs maintenance or becomes unresponsive, the other will take over immediately for all requests. Zero downtime is the goal.
Finally, with the above upgrades, we’ve enabled ManageSieve access for all of our email accounts. We imagine 99.5% of our users won’t be using this advanced feature, but for some it’ll be a neat way to create some filters and vacation messages on your own which are stored in your mailbox.
One way to access the filters is through our Roundcube Webmail program. In Roundcube you’ll now find a “Filters” tab. Within this tab, you will be able to create custom rules on our mail server to be processed when messages arrive. For instance, “Automatically Reply with a custom message to all messages sent to sales@mydomain.com”, or “Automatically move all messages from me@mydomain.com to the ‘MessagesFromMe’ folder”. I end up using my sieve filters to pre-filter messages sent from or to specific addresses into appropriate labels mailboxes, rather than let my email client handle it when I download the messages. This lets me know that wherever I check my email (home, work, phone or webmail), I’ll know the messages are already pre-filtered for quicker viewing by me.
If you have a “ManageSieve” plugin installed or available in your email client (Thunderbird plugin available here, but the webmail roundcube option is much simpler for the inexperienced), then simply point your ManageSieve access to ‘mail.infowest.com’ port 2000 to start setting up your own sieve filters.
Again, not everybody will use the ManageSieve option, but it’s there for those that want the advanced access and control that comes with creating your own custom filters.
We have plenty more great upgrades in the pipeline.
Stay tuned!
Network Notice: Widespread Power Outages
There have been widespread power outages reported in Washington County. We’ve found these are due to Rocky Mountain Power repairs in progress, and should be repaired by 8pm tonight, Friday. At this point, our network is unaffected as we are on battery backup power.
We’ve invested several thousand dollars in the last couple months improving backup capacity and most sites can stay up from 8-24 hours without power. Critical main sites are backed up by generator and will stay up indefinitely.
WebMail Upgrades
Posted by Cassidy in Network Info on February 4, 2010
Over the past month we’ve been experiencing some slowness and timeouts with our webmail. We’ve been surprised with the number of users checking their email on our webmail server throughout the day!
No longer is this a problem!
This past week we’ve deployed two faster, larger servers behind our load balancer to increase capacity, speed and reliability in our webmail setup. Those using Roundcube or “DWmail” will automatically hit the server that has the less load, giving our customers greater speed when checking their webmail on the go.
As load continues to increase in the future, this new balanced solution allows us to add as many servers as we need to keep things running smoothly.
Watch out for some more speed improvements in email storage and retrieval in the near future.