Hosting

All our e-tourism solutions are hosted on New Mind’s state of the art clustered web servers located within the UK Grid data centre in the Manchester Science Park.

The hosting solution offers maximum redundancy on each of the four technology levels (firewall, load balancing, web server and SQL server) and provides the highest levels of uptime and availability.

UK Grid has teamed up with some of the biggest carrier 1 providers in the country to offer unparralled network connectivity and bandwidth options, thus ensuring high-speed access to the DMS and web sites at all times.

Hosting Network specifications

The full specification of the UK grid hosting solution can be found here:

http://www.ukgrid.net/pdf/UKG_Network_Diagram.pdf

Hosting Capacity

Network bandwidth to our hosting solutions is burstable. The network hardware we use is capable of handing 20 times the current level.

The web servers are load balanced. Incoming traffic is distributed between the servers to optimize performance. The way the network is designed means we are able to add more web servers to the load-balanced environment if demanded by massively increased traffic.

Hosting Maintenance and Support

The maintenance and upkeep of the servers is totally covered by our hosting charge and New Mind has put together a Server Team that is directly responsible for this. Outside of normal office hours, a mobile number is available to contact the member of the Server Team who is on call at that time, to address any technical problems that are being encountered. In addition to this, the UK Grid data centre is manned 24/7 365 days a year to enable issues to be resolved efficiently.

Security

The environment is protected by a high specification firewall that allows thousands of concurrent connections and is configured to restrict inbound and outbound communications, securing the network from exogenous attacks.

Security of access is controlled:

• to servers and networks by physical location in the data centre
• to the servers in the datacentre by authorised accounts to the Infrastructure Team.  Non standard port numbers on used to access servers remotely.  Access to the servers is from outside of our office is controlled through the New Mind office VPN (providing dual authentication).
• to individual DMS accounts authorised by a user id and password which is under the control of New Mind

Stringent firewall rules are in place to ensure that only necessary web traffic is allowed through. Antivirus software is installed across all of our servers and all files are checked upon entering out systems.  Any infected files are held in a secure quarantine and email notifications are sent to the infrastructure team.  The antivirus software is updated regularly with the latest virus definitions.

Back-Up

It is the responsibility of New Mind’s infrastructure Team to ensure that the data held on the servers is backed up on a daily basis and a number of different backups strategies are employed to do this.  New Mind runs test restore operations every month on all its cycle of backups to ensure they are working correctly.

Disaster Recovery

The New Mind Support Team will liaise with vendors to arrange for the data to be restored within 24 hours of a request being made. If the request is made over a weekend then the data will be restored within 24 hours of 9am Monday morning.

Data will be restored to the most recent backup available.  In the event of either of our data centres being unable to operate we would restore the databases from the online backup centre and setup the applications in an alternative data centre. 

Escrow

New Mind has lodged the source code and data for the DMS with NCC for escrow purposes and also been through a full install and system build process with them.