MaximumASP Powers Data Center With Brocade IP Rather Than Cisco

Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. announced that MaximumASP, Microsoft’s 2009 Global Hosting Partner of the Year, is building on its near-decade-long deployment of Brocade IP and SAN networking solutions with the development of a third data center to support its network traffic growth and expanding customer base. The company credits Brocade with helping it maintain its ‘100 Percent Uptime Guarantee’ which has led to 95 percent customer retention since its inception in 2001.

MaximumASP is based in Louisville, Kentucky and was founded in 2000 as an outsourcing firm for Microsoft Windows-based hosting services. The company currently hosts more than 55,000 domains for customers in more than 100 countries. MaximumASP provides comprehensive network protection, automated server patching, and advanced server monitoring for more than 2,200 servers. With a strong focus on hosting solutions that combine advanced monitoring and management tools, MaximumASP has become a top choice for Microsoft developers seeking a robust hosting platform for mission-critical Web applications. MaximumASP customers are application developers, small to large Web development companies, and Fortune 500 companies with Web hosting needs. Many of these entities host and deliver software as a service to clients all over the world. MaximumASP is designated as a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner.

Requirements
The company serves thousands of customers with more than 55,000 domains in more than 100 countries around the world, and needed a highly reliable, high-performance data center networking solution with the ability to grow as their base expanded. First replacing Cisco and Dell switches in 2001, the Brocade gear has served them well ever since, with no unplanned downtime and having accommodated steady growth.

MaximumASP has a new product, MaxV, that uses HyperV on top of R2 in Windows. The company needed a fast, reliable network to provide live migration and instant scalability, with virtualization, to all of its customers.

Brocade Solution
MaximumASP has traditionally used Brocade BigIron Series switches at the core of its network. However, for its new data center the company will deploy Brocade NetIron XMR routers at the core with NetIron MLX routers at the access layer, and a variety of FastIron Models, ranging from FastIron Edge Series to FastIron LS Series, at the edge. They also take advantage of the Brocade ServerIron switches for application delivery and load balancing between multiple data centers. Maximum ASP maintains three separate SAN fabrics, a main fabric that touches all customers and two others for virtualization, all of which run on Brocade SAN switches.

Business Benefits
With every piece of technology deployed in its hosting environment touching the customer, and uninterrupted uptime being the company’s key promise to its customers, the reliability of the Brocade products is the main benefit. The simplicity and infrequency of the Brocade upgrade path was another reason the company chose Brocade. The company has also found that Brocade solutions are extremely energy efficient, resulting in lower costs to operate.

Flexibility
“We have a lot of customers in different segments, so it’s everything from shared hosting to virtual dedicated and co-lo. So there are a lot of different needs,” said Dominic Foster, CTO, MaximumASP. “With Brocade, we can use them for anything from fiber, to iSCSI implementations, to 10Gbps network gear. We’ve used them for a long time, and they’ve never let us down. Also, they are constantly innovating, so it’s not stagnant. We know there is going to be better gear coming out every year.”

Vs. Competition
“We use Brocade instead of Cisco because the gear does everything we need it to do, and it is wire-speed,” said Matt Griffin, storage architect and product manager, MaximumASP. “The hosting business is a general business, we have thousands of customers and each one has a business of his own so we can’t leverage big, expansive applications that are built into the hardware for every customer. There’s no point in paying for them and taking the performance hit.”

Green
“Brocade is great from a green standpoint,” said Dominic Foster, CTO, MaximumASP. “We’re extremely interested in how we can save the Earth but, just as importantly, save money. Brocade solutions do a great job of that by reducing the heat and allowing equipment consolidation so we don’t have ‘sprawl’ throughout the facility. Our focus on green also benefits our customers because one of our largest costs is power.”

Need for Speed
“Our data center traffic is fairly linear,” said Dominic Foster, CTO, MaximumASP. “However, one of the great spikes that we are seeing is internal – server to server, server to SQL server, server to SAN – so for that reason, 10 Gbps and 10 Gbps density is hugely important to us. We want to leverage that network pipe as much as we can.”

ServerIron Application Delivery
“The ServerIron platform is something we use both for customers when they need a private load balancing solution, and it’s something we’ve implemented in one of our products, MaxESP, to load-balance the front end and make it highly available from top to bottom,” said Matt Griffin, storage architect and product manager, MaximumASP. “One of the things we like about the ServerIron is that it uses the same interface as our other Brocade switches, so we are able to use our existing knowledge across platforms.”