Redundancy, Redundancy, Redundancy...
The Cost of Downtime
Most businesses today rely heavily on their computer and database systems for daily operations and revenue generation. In many cases, the cost of downtime is so high that if a critical system failed, a business might cease to function, lose customers, sacrifice goodwill in the market, ruin their reputation and brand, or spawn unneeded negative publicity. Clearly, the more business-critical a system is, the more effort required to ensure the uptime of the system.
Our highly experienced system administrators can configure highly-available and highly-scalable systems on the linux platform.
What is High-Availability?
A highly-available service is generally setup in a hot-backup or primary-secondary configuration whereby a failure in the primary system triggers an automatic failover to the secondary system. Once the failure has been resolved, the system is failed back to primary. The configuration is supposed to ensure that there is always a server available to operate the service. However, without virtualization and a highly-scalable configuration as well, roughly half of the computing power stays idle at any given time.
What is High-Scalability?
Scalability used to mean vertical scalability, where servers operating a service would have complete redundancy within the chassis - multiple CPU's, power supplies, disk drives, etc., and these servers are usually NEBS-compliant are still popular today. Horizontal scalability scales computing power linearly by adding incremental and lower-cost commodity hardware, whereby multiple servers are load-balanced to operate a service.
Business Critical Services
- Email (POP3, SMTP)
- Apache (HTTP)
- Domain Name Service (DNS)
- File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
- Secure Shell (SSH)
Software Resources
Contact us for a custom proposal.
|
