High Availability
HA Systems and Solutions
To fully understand the value of highly available systems and solutions, we should provide an understanding of what highly available means in today’s computing environment. Early on, highly available systems required the use of mirrored systems and clustering which doubled the hardware and implementation costs. In today’s computing environment, high availability can be achieved at a significantly lower cost. Depending upon a customer’s needs and their environment, solutions as simple is redundant array of inexpensive disks (RAID), grid computing, virtualization, and consolidated warm-site solutions can meet the needs of most customers while doing so at a minimal cost.
Additional High Availability solutions available at NACIO2 include Microsoft Clustering, Oracle Grid, and Linux Clustering.
Egenera
NACIO2 is currently reviewing and preparing for deployment of the Egenera based blade frame solution to provide dedicated blades and virtualized blades for customers. Egenera is based upon the VMware framework of server virtualization with built-in High Availability clusters and Distributed Resource Scheduling for resource load balancing. A key advantage to the Egenera solution for virtualized high availability is that the blade frame includes failover blades specifically dedicated as a resource in case of a full blade hardware failure. With highly available recovery times as little as 3 minutes on average without any human intervention, customers can rest assured that their systems will be up at all times.
Virtualization to achieve HA
NACIO2’s hardware offerings with Dedicated Managed Servers can be configured to provide VMWare virtualized datacenters and clusters to provide HA failover or Distributed Resource Scheduling solutions using ESX server solutions. Not only can NACIO2 support VMWare, but we can also provide support for Microsoft Virtual Server, and Windows 2008 Hyper-V virtualization.