Systems Architecture: How to get the most out of your hardware

Traditional managed hosting providers can provide you with the hardware, but INetU goes a step further by giving your business access to expert system architecture consultants.

• Our senior-level systems administrators are there for you when setting up a high availability systems architecture, and when planning for disaster recovery.
  
  
• We have the knowledge and experience necessary to answer questions such as how many web servers you should place behind a load balancer to meet your business goals, or what hardware should go into a database cluster to make it a fully redundant systems architecture.
  
  
• Our systems architecture consultants can optimize the performance of your server configuration to make sure that it can meet your business objectives and provide the scalability to grow as your business grows.

From your initial consultation with a Solutions Consultant through the continued growth of your organization, every step of the way our experts guide you through developing an appropriate, cost-effective system architecture.

How to set up a cluster

Setting up a cluster is the one of the best options to ensure high availability of an application, typically a database. INetU's systems architecture services can help configure a cluster so that your users can always have reliable access to important applications.

The right clustering solution for your organization depends on a number of factors:

• What platform is your application running on?
• Is there access to a shared data source?
• Do you want all server nodes handling content simultaneously?

One option is to create an active/passive cluster configuration that does not have a shared data source. In these configurations, one server—the active server—acts as a single resource; the other servers act as warm standbys, or passive servers. If the active server stops responding, an available passive server will failover and become the active server.

Other options can make use of a single shared disk array. A number of node servers are configured to monitor one another. The cluster is then enabled with a virtual IP address, which is used to access the application. With this cluster there are two settings:

• Active/Passive: One node acts entirely as the application resource. If this node fails, a different node becomes active.
  
  
• Active/Active: Traffic from the virtual IP address is routed amongst all available active nodes in the systems architecture. If a node fails, traffic is no longer sent to it.

How to make your systems architecture scalable

Adding scalability to your systems architecture means that extra servers or additional hardware power can be added on-demand without downtime. Some methods to add scalability to your site include:

• moving database and application servers into a cluster, or
• configuring a load balancer to distribute traffic among multiple servers in the same layer of your infrastructure.

In both cases an additional server can be configured and added when needed without having to take your site offline, increasing the capacity of your site. It may even give your systems architecture a performance boost!

With years of experience helping our clients with capacity-planning and creating a scalable systems architecture, INetU is ready to handle the needs your organization. But don't take our word for it; read about how we helped ClasificadosOnline.com, or Microsoft, succeed over their capacity challenges.

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