The Steadfast Networks Blog

Our POP in New York City is now open for business!

We have now opened a POP in New York City, inside Switch and Data on the 15th floor of 111 8th, with fiber available to TelX. Currently, the POP is established to expand our peering footprint, we're currently actively peering at both PAIX New York and NYIIX, and to provide Internet transit services in the New York metro area.

For the future, we are planning to open backup, colocation and dedicated server services in the New York metro area. We will likely begin offering backup services and colocation services, shared colocation and full cabinets, in July and then dedicated server services would follow in August or September. Due to the higher costs in New York, for both space and power, our rates for colocation space and servers will be a little higher there.

If you have any questions about our new services in the New York area please contact our sales department.

We now have full support for IPv6 for our dedicated server, Internet transit, and colocation customers. Our IPv6 network utilizes connectivity from nLayer, Hurricane Electric, and Atlantic Metro Communications along with our own local peering agreements. To test out our IPv6 network you can use our looking glass or access our web site, support site, and mirror server which are all IPv6 capable.

All dedicated server and colocation customers would be eligible to receive a /56 (2^72 IPs) in order to assign a /64 (2^64 IPs) per device. Colocation customers would be assigned the entire /56 at no charge, while dedicated server customers would get a /56 allocated on our side and then be assigned a /64 to each device as requested. For dedicated server customers, there would be a one-time $20 fee for each /64 to cover the time needed to setup and configure the IPv6 address space. Colocation and Internet transit customers doing their own switching/routing would be eligible to receive a /48 (2^80 IPs). To request your IPv6 address block, just contact our IPs department by emailing ips@steadfast.net or by using the IP Allocation department in the ticket system.

Note: We can offer IPv6 only VLANs for dedicated server, colocation, or Internet transit customers. We can offer reduced pricing over these VLANs to help encourage the overall use of IPv6. Just contact our sales department for details.

Lately we've been working hard on getting IPv6 setup network-wide. Getting IPv6 is really more complicated to get setup on the policy and procedure side than it is technically, as technically it isn't all that difficult. The plan will be to allocate a /56 per dedicated hosting/small colocation customers with the plan to be to give each individual server a /64 (the same number of IPs as the entire IPv4 block squared). Larger colocation customers, will be allocated their own /48 for them to distribute as they wish.

Now, this may seem wasteful, but the idea with IPv6 is to reduce the size of routing tables, to make routing easier, etc. by making the first allocation to someone all they will ever need. There should never be a need for an additional/secondary allocation, keeping overall router configurations simple.

For connectivity, we already have IPv6 transit from Hurricane Electric, NLayer, and Atlantic Metro. We also have IPv6 peering with several other networks through the Equinix Exchange and ChIX. We do not have an official release date yet for the IPv6 product, but we hope it does not take much longer. The plan is to initially release it as a "beta" product with no SLA, but that beta period should last no longer than 2-3 months, assuming everything goes smoothly.

Today we have gotten our GigE circuit to the Equinix Exchange live and are currently in the process of adding our first peers through that exchange. We are already peered through the Chicago Internet Exchange, but we feel the Equinix Exchange will give us access to a larger number of networks, thus improving our overall network connectivity. Right now, the Equinix Exchange in Chicago has over 100 members and we should be able to establish a relationship quickly with about 1/3 of those networks, while others will take longer term negotiations, etc. Overall, this link will continually improve our network quality as additional members join and establish peering relationships with us.

If you would like to peer with us via the Equinix Exchange in Chicago, please email noc@steadfast.net.

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.