Complete solution for building a resilient private cloud in small companies or branches

Often in small companies, and in large organizations, they don’t think about how critical downtime can be, say, for such important applications as 1C server, telephony server, etc. Any hardware and software, however, sooner or later can get in the way and then the work of the system administrator (and even entire IT departments) begins to boil. The management is very dissatisfied, it requires solving the problem here and now, and the administrator can only say - be patient, we are working on a solution to the problem. When analyzing the reasons, it may turn out that the management was warned about problems - we need a new server, the old one barely survives its age, we do not have full backups, a backup server, etc. And modern virtualization tools often do not offer a ready-made and simple fault-tolerant solution. It’s possible that a company already uses virtualization, but the critical servers and data are still not backed up and in case of a failure, the downtime of the information system can reach from several minutes to several hours. Also an important role in this process is played by the level of qualification of the system administrator. If we consider small enterprises, then usually the system administrator is one (and even that may be coming).However, there is still a solution!

DEPO Computers recently introduced the DEPO Cloud 200 solution , which allows even relatively small enterprises to get a high level of fault tolerance, while not wasting on expensive specialists. The main emphasis in the solution is on the ease of installation, configuration and support. DEPO Cloud 200 is two servers that operate as a failover cluster, with virtualization and high availability of virtual machines. As a solution for managing virtualization, Stratus Avance software is used, which does not require a highly qualified IT specialist for its implementation and maintenance:



All data on the servers are constantly synchronized in real time. The servers are in a hot reserve, therefore, if any problem with the availability of the main server is detected, the second server takes over its functions and this does not require any administrator involvement.

It is important to note that Avance does not require additional third-party software and the solution as a whole is more profitable than similar solutions for fault tolerance. Also, DEPO Cloud 200 does not use external storage systems and generally does not use expensive server components. The total cost is lower than analogues from other manufacturers by 10 - 30%, and also below the component composition by about 10%.

The solution itself integrates very closely with the hardware of the server, so that a possible hardware failure could also be predicted. Even the RAID controller of the server is controlled, so server maintenance is minimized. The control software constantly performs proactive monitoring of all kinds of indicators (there are about 150 in total) - from the mains voltage and temperature to the correction of errors in RAM. If the values ​​deviate from the norm, the software immediately responds to them, including By sending a report by e-mail to the administrator and reporting the problem to Stratus technical support.



When delivered with DEPO Cloud 200cluster configuration is performed not by the client, but by our specialists, although installing and configuring Avance is as simple as that - it takes no more than 20-30 minutes on both servers. The configuration and administration itself is carried out using the web interface.



The servers included in the solution may not necessarily be next to each other. They can be located at a distance of up to 5 km from each other, and the key requirement for such a remote server placement is a delay in the data network of no more than 10ms (it is enough to organize a network connection using ordinary 1Gb / s adapters or such as Intel X520 - but this already 10Gbps).



The virtualization platform itself is based on a deeply modernized Citrix XenServer. At the same time, virtually all operating systems of the Microsoft Windows line can be installed in virtual machines at the moment (though not older than W2k SP4, XP SP3). It is also acceptable to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.x, 5.x and CentOS 4.x, 5.x. Support for newer operating systems is planned, including Windows Sever 2012, RHEL 6.x, CentOS 6.x. Up to 16 virtual machines are currently supported, and the latest version of Avance supports up to 24 machines.

To summarize

The DEPO Cloud 200 solution is perfect for implementing virtualization in small companies or branches in cases where it is necessary to provide fault tolerance and high availability of services and applications without creating additional burden on IT professionals. At the same time, it is possible to supply a turnkey solution - with full installation and configuration for each specific customer.

In general, the solution can significantly reduce the costs of implementing virtualization and building a private cloud and is aimed at companies and branches with the number of jobs in the infrastructure from 25 to 50.

senko ,
Leading Product Manager DEPO Computers